Red Bull Theater’s Richard II kicks off with Michael Urie, clad only in boxer shorts, seated in a metal-framed box floating in black as he embarks on the famous Act V Pomfret Castle monologue in which Richard compares his prison to the world. The speech ends “Music do I hear?,” and sure enough, a disco beat brings on the king’s paramour and eventual assassin Aumerle (David Mattar Merten) for an ominous chorus of Eurythmics’ 1983 classic “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of These).” Long before John of Gaunt (Ron Canada) drops by toting whisky and cigars, we get it: Director-adapter Craig Baldwin is placing the action in a quasi-modern time frame to examine the monarch’s fall in flashback, and indeed Urie’s Richard skulks around on the sidelines throughout the action. This will not be your run-of-the-mill, staid, formal staging.
Of course, a modernized Richard is nothing new. And in recent years it’s become not just au courant, but de rigeur to treat Richard II as if he were Marlowe’s Edward II: that is, a gay (or bi) monarch whose obsession with his “favorites” leaves him vulnerable to overthrow by an emphatically hetero opponent, and never mind the howls of protest from scholars who reject that interpretation on historical and Shakespearean grounds. It’s only a mild shock these days to learn, for instance, that evidently a norm for royal councils is to strip down to one’s underpants and throw on a towel. (In fairness, Richard slips on a calf-length mink coat for a formal occasion.) We recognize that we are to ignore amplification-related battery packs bulging in Jockey shorts, and we aren’t to ask why the Queen (Lux Pascal) is so unbothered by her husband’s louche and touchy-feely male-only retinue.
O tempora, o mores. Yet I thoroughly appreciated a version, at the Stratford Festival of Canada two years ago, that went much further even than Red Bull at bringing a queer subtext to the surface. Director Jillian Keiley set the play in the waning days of the disco era, which were also the waxing days of the AIDS crisis; her Richard was an amalgam of Sylvester and Prince, holding court in a drag-and-glitter sort of Studio 1354. Clear lines were drawn between the life-affirming but hapless monarch, and the grim-faced, gray flannel Reaganites in for the kill. Purists were outraged, and there were contradictions, but the thing engaged and moved. Once Richard realized the knives were out for him, the scales dropped from his eyes, and the stature that seemingly had eluded him finally came to the fore. Here was a king, but far too late. It broke your heart.
[Read Melissa Rose Bernardo’s ★★★☆☆ review here.]
Where Baldwin’s approach misses the boat, it seems to me, is in its utter lack of stature. Richard’s sexuality aside, the process of losing his God-bestowed majesty must bring him into powerful and poetic conversation with his very identity. The tragedy of Richard II is that nothing becomes his reign more than the leaving of it, as he comes ruefully to the realization of even a mighty monarch’s tiny place in the universe.
Urie never aspires to majesty and hence never achieves it. He seizes any and every opportunity to play showoffy tricks with the language: suddenly riding up or down an octave, smirking and eye-rolling in classic camp fashion, waving his arms around in extravagant and often superfluous gesture. This Richard is a pouty sorehead manifestly unfit to rule anything, let alone England, and the unforced strength of Bolingbroke (Grantham Coleman, persuasive), who will shortly become King Henry IV, provides assurance that the nobles of England are backing the right horse. Shakespeare will see Richard’s deposition as the inciting event of a century’s worth of calamity including the Wars of the Roses, a curse to be lifted only with the ascent of the Tudors. But in the current telling, removing Richard can only be seen as a blessing for the realm, and he is brought to no epiphanies. To my way of thinking, he thereby renounces any claim on our attention.
With little of interest characterlogically or politically, the production is hit or miss: some annoying gimmicks here (Daniel Stewart Sherman slipping into cornpone as a Southern-fried General Scroop; a final tableau from Richard that’s full-out Norma Desmond), a few stunning visuals there (kudos to lighting designer Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, leaning into neon). A couple of performances honor the verse and suggest fully rounded people. Kathryn Meisle, always reliable, brings fire and urgency to the Duchess (usually the Duke) of York. Canada makes excellent account of Gaunt’s famous “this happy breed of men…This precious stone set in the silver sea” monologue, though most of the others fail to register at any juncture that a sceptered isle, this other Eden, hangs in the balance.
Urie has done fine, unmannered work before and will do so again. On the strength of his name, Richard II should have a positive impact on the fortunes of Red Bull, which boasts an impressive track record with the Jacobean canon in particular. If an eminent theater ensemble gets a boost from this ill-conceived offering, in the immortal words of Ms. Annie Lennox, who am I to disagree?
Richard II opened November 10, 2025, at the Astor Place Theatre and runs through December 14. Tickets and information: redbulltheater.com
