‘Camille’ shorn of its romance
In playwright Neil Bartlett’s mercantile adaptation of “La Dame aux Camelias” by Alexandre Dumas fils, Marguerite Gautier might as well replace the signature camellias in her hair with French francs.
Everything in this gristly play has a price tag – from Marguerite (Angela Reed), the Parisian courtesan, to all her friends and possessions and even the man she loves, the dewy Armand (Aubrey Deeker).
In keeping with the adaptation’s air of commerce, “Camille” begins in Marguerite’s apartment (which, in designer James Kronzer’s vision recalls the vaulted, commercial space of a bank or a railway station) after her death, as the vultures descend upon an auction of her personal effects and gossip avidly.
No traces of Romantic flourishes exist in Round House’s cheeky production, directed with a slick sense of greed by new Round House Artistic Director Blake Robison – no wisp of Greta Garbo’s doomed vulnerability from the 1936 movie “Camille,” no grandiose sense of tragedy found in Verdi’s opera “La Traviata.”