NOW: In the Wings on a World Stage

NOW: In the Wings on a World Stage, Jeremy Whelehan’s backstage documentary of the Bridge Project Company taking their production of Shakespeare's Richard III on a tour across the globe is little more than a glorified DVD extra--though there is no DVD of the show since it was not filmed for television and could only be seen live. The company, which included star Kevin Spacey and director Sam Mendes, gave over 200 performances in some of the greatest theaters in the world’s most scenic cities.  Whelehan’s footage attempts to capture this experience, but the film is mostly comprised of the fawning, self-congratulating, empty platitudes that actors are obliged to repeat endlessly when promoting a movie at a press junket. There is very little any actor--even an articulate one--can say in an interview that is insightful about the process of putting on a show. It is therefore up to the director of a documentary of this type to discover what’s special about the process and show it to us. Either Whelehan had very limited access to the proceedings, or he’s a lousy documentarian, or both. There were many potentially interesting and unusual aspects of this production: the cast was from divergent backgrounds with different levels of expertise, and the long tour took them away from their lives and loved ones and created a theatrical family for an abnormally extended period of time. It would also have been great to know if/how Richard III was viewed differently in each country and if/how the diverse theaters and locales subtly changed the performance. Alas, we get virtually none of this. The amount of actual content in this movie could have perhaps made a decent 40-minute documentary, or a satisfying feature could have been made by cutting half the redundant interviews and included much more footage of the play itself.