Theater: Wilted Camellias

The Lady of the Camellias. What prompted Franco Zeffirelli to “devise, design and direct” this revival of the dusty Dumas fils sob opera is a question the ancients would have put to Delphi. The question on opening night was whether the dry eyes outnumbered the open ones.

Zeffirelli is the sort of director who needs a director. He likes to rough up a finished work of art so that it resembles a raw slice of life. In his much overpraised staging of the Old Vic’s Romeo and Juliet, he injected brawling Renaissance vigor at the cost of turning a poetic tragedy into a documentary on 15th century juvenile delinquents. He tries to press The Lady of the Camellias between the pages of the Kinsey report, but the Dumas romance is too wilted for even hothouse sociology.

Playing Camille’s lover, John Stride indulges in so much whinnying, snorting and foot pawing that it is not clear whether he is suffering from the onset of amour or the opening of Aqueduct. As for Susan Strasberg, daughter of Actors Studio Artistic Director Lee Strasberg, it is surely a father’s duty to tell her. As the phthisical Marguerite Gautier, only a cough distinguishes her from the Chatty Cathy doll.