John Heilpern | The New York Observer

Anything Goes at Shakespeare in the Park!

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 12:49:30 -0400

I feel that I must reluctantly correct a serious error Oskar Eustis keeps making about his own theater.

The artistic director of the renowned Public Theater is known for his sometimes manic enthusiasm. He’s like the Music Man leading the parade while singing a rousing rendition of “Seventy-Six Trombones”—and no particular harm in that. But in his natural exuberance, he gets things wrong. Among a number of lapses I could mention, by far the...

The Obama Effect ... Wheee!

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 15:45:44 -0400

It seems to me that the First Couple—of date-night fame—represent great news for theater lovers. They not only enjoy going to the theater; they do it together.

Were the Bushes ever theatergoers? Or the Clintons? Once in a blue moon, when absolutely necessary. True, Bill Clinton is known to recite entire chunks of Macbeth by heart (“If chance will have me king, why, chance may crown me …”). I actually saw him...

Should a Fuss Be Made Over Colorblind Casting?

Tue, 09 Jun 2009 17:00:15 -0400

"I was surprised—shocked, even—by the letter to The Times last Sunday that vigorously protested Phylicia Rashad being cast in the leading role of the white matriarch of August: Osage County. “Let’s keep white actresses playing white roles and blacks playing black roles,” Ronald Fernandez of Pittsburgh concluded sensationally.

His controversial letter raises a number of interesting points (and hackles), and at the risk of offending everyone, I’ll tiptoe with Mr. Fernandez into the minefield.

...

Tony S. at the Tonys

Tue, 26 May 2009 15:29:07 -0400

I would like to begin my highly influential tips for the winners of this season’s Tony Awards with heartfelt congratulations to Dolly Parton.

Dolly has been nominated for Best Score of a Musical for the music and lyrics of 9 to 5. She isn’t going to win. I just think Dolly’s amazing.

On a less happy note, it’s arguable that the members of the Tony Award nominating committee should resign en masse....

My Plea to Directors: Quit Screwing With Beckett!

Tue, 12 May 2009 14:21:12 -0400

There is, I believe, a catastrophic error of judgment in Anthony Page’s production of Waiting for Godot, starring Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin.

Samuel Beckett’s seminal Modernist masterpiece—first produced in America in 1956—is famously set in a void with only a near-barren tree (a Beckett tree: one too fragile upon which to hang yourself). But I felt sunk the moment the curtain went up to reveal the stage cluttered with fake rocks and boulders...

Will New York Fall to The Norman Conquests?

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 14:25:20 -0400

And so to the burning question: Which one of Alan Ayckbourn’s trilogy of vintage 1973 English comedies, The Norman Conquests at Circle in the Square theater, must you see?

The first, Table Manners, is my favorite. Not only is it consistently, irresistibly funny; it contains a dinner-party scene so blissfully hilarious that I was on the floor laughing.

All three plays take place during the same absurdly traumatic country-house weekend. They can be...

I’m Tickled by Torture! Durang Deals Serious Comedy

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 12:31:28 -0400

It's very good news that Christopher Durang, our Poet Laureate of the Absurd, has written a smashing new play.

Why Torture Is Wrong, and the People Who Love Them at the Public Theater is a black farce that’s essentially about, well, torture, and a peculiar brand of American paranoia and bigotry—and I haven’t had such fun at the theater since the recent revival of Mr. Durang’s fable about his own dysfunctional childhood, The Marriage...

Move Over Lear! New Crazed King in Town

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:33:00 -0400

It's a pleasure to acclaim Geoffrey Rush in Eugène Ionesco’s 1962 absurdist masterpiece Exit the King. Put simply, Mr. Rush is giving one of the greatest virtuoso performances I’ve ever seen.

And, in the best of all possible ways, it’s a daringly old-fashioned performance—the kind we feel exceptionally lucky to witness nowadays. From his first strutting entrance as Ionesco’s 400-year-old King, Mr. Rush is not only in relaxed and riveting command of the stage;...

Forever Fonda: Jane Looks Perky as Dying Patient in 33 Variations

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:24:53 -0400

At the risk of seeming ungracious about Jane Fonda, I must confess that I didn’t quite recognize her when she first came briskly onstage at the start of 33 Variations. In her first Broadway role in 46 years, the star, at 71, looks simply marvelous! Not that I expected her to look anything less. But it was almost as if no time had elapsed at all since Klute.

Ms. Fonda,...

Runyon Ruined: Snake Eyes for Revival of Guys and Dolls

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 13:30:51 -0500

It doesn’t take a genius to know that what we need right now is a tonic. And what would do the trick better than Guys and Dolls, the greatest love letter ever written to New York City? The show is so good, Adam Gopnik enthused in a recent New Yorker, that it could be a hit even if it were performed by “a company of trained dolphins in checked suits with a chorus of...

Uncle Vanya with Waterworks; Will Ferrell as Doofus in Chief

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 13:58:41 -0500

Expression: Chew the scenery.

Definition: To act melodramatically; overact; ham it up.

We’ve all seen actors chew the scenery from time to time. It goes with the territory. But how many of us can claim to have seen an actor actually gnaw on a set?

My thanks to the Tony Award–winning Denis O’Hare for providing a first in my theatergoing lifetime. Playing the tortured, frustrated Vanya in Chekhov’s Uncle...

Mary-Louise's Bare Bum Had Me Hedda-ing for the Exits!

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 10:51:34 -0500

Has a play ever been revived with more alarming frequency than Hedda Gabler (1890)? As Ibsen’s ghost was heard protesting in Kristiania, Norway, only last weekend: “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

Hedda Gabler is apparently the only play that Henrik Ibsen ever wrote. While the derided revival by the Roundabout Theatre Company could be a final nail in Hedda’s coffin, I wouldn’t bank on it. The new...

Gypsy Waves Goodbye; Becky Shaw Loses Focus; and The Cripple of Inishmaan Stands Tall

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:40:39 -0500

Is there any job more weird than an actor’s?

I’m not so sure that all the world’s a stage, actually. Actors are different from you and me. They pretend to be other people via a state of deliberate amnesia.

It’s commonplace to say that actors must speak the lines as if for the first time. The more beguiling mystery about theater is that the secret art of acting is to forget...

Harold Pinter Enters the Silence Of the Long Pause

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:44:47 -0500

Three or four things I know about Harold Pinter who died in London on Christmas Eve, age 78:

To visit him in his Holland Park home was to enter unwittingly into a Pinter play. After greeting me at the door of his office—which was in a separate cottage in the grounds of the house where he lived with his wife, Antonia Fraser—he triple-locked the door behind him with great, deliberate care,...

Only on Broadway: While the Economy Tanks, Ticket Prices Rise!

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 11:23:20 -0500

Broadway must be the only industry in America that hasn’t noticed the country is in an economic crisis. Its powerful producers and theater owners aren’t just refusing to acknowledge reality. They’ve even got the chutzpah—or the manic greed—to increase ticket prices.

Take the price of an orchestra seat for the new hit musical Billy Elliot. It’s currently an extortionate $146 for the holiday season. The public subsequently catches a...

Dreaming of a Yiddish Christmas, with Sugarplums and a Klezmer Soundtrack

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 12:33:59 -0500

I went to see four Christmas and Chanukah shows recently, and I trust I won’t be revealing any bias—kayn aynhoreh—in anything I say about them.

Take Slava’s Snowshow, now at the Helen Hayes Theater on Broadway. The masterly Russian clown’s production brought out the Grinch in me in this crucial respect: For the remainder of its limited run, the tickets are an extortionate $111.50 with the cheapest seats going...

America’s Chekhov Still Juicy; Sondheim’s Roadshow Blows a Flat

Tue, 02 Dec 2008 15:09:37 -0500

Horton Foote’s Dividing the Estate, which has made a very welcome transfer to the Booth Theatre on Broadway, couldn’t be timelier.

Mr. Foote’s gentle, comic parable about self-interest and desperation over the fate of a family estate in the playwright’s imagined small town of Harrison, Texas, first premiered at Princeton’s McCarter Theatre in 1989. With the rising anxiety about our economic future, the celebrated play and its genteelly feuding Southern characters have become...

Hurray for Hieronymus! Martha Clarke Re-imagines His Magical Hell

Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:08:33 -0500

I urge you to see the new production of Martha Clarke’s Garden of Earthly Delights at the Minetta Lane Theatre, not least because the signature piece that Ms. Clarke created almost 25 years ago is so transparently lovely and sexy.

While her troupe of dancers is beautiful and utterly natural in its near-nudity, the work as a whole achieves a miraculous theatrical purity. As with the naked simplicity of...

Billy Elliot Taps a Rich Vein of Triumphant British Defeatism

Tue, 18 Nov 2008 12:29:32 -0500

Billy Elliot is the best thing to happen to Broadway for a long while. The hit West End show about a working-class boy in a doomed North of England coal mining town who dreams of becoming a ballet dancer pulls off a remarkable trick: It’s the first musical I’ve seen to successfully combine a huge dollop of sentiment with social fury.

The groundbreaking Tony Kushner-Jeanine Tesori musical Caroline, or Change (2004) had...

Techno-Wizard Lepage’s JumboTron Faust

Tue, 11 Nov 2008 12:12:51 -0500

In last week’s column I argued in favor of the awesome simplicity of Peter Brook’s production of The Grand Inquisitor—that its complete lack of video effects amounted to a revolutionary statement nowadays. Mr. Brook has steadfastly avoided using the fashionable technological stuff (the computer-generated illusions, film projections, video images, infrared cameras, scrims and so on) in favor of an unmediated, utterly natural stage magic.

For a generation, Mr. Brook has been described as...

Brook’s Radical Simplicity Does Dostoyevsky Proud

Tue, 04 Nov 2008 12:05:34 -0500

It’s been 40 years since Peter Brook wrote in the opening to The Empty Space, his famous manifesto, “I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged.”

In his production of The Grand Inquisitor, adapted from Dostoyevsky’s The...

When Did David Mamet Wake Up as Joe Six-Pack?

Tue, 28 Oct 2008 12:23:04 -0400

The 20th anniversary production on Broadway of David Mamet’s famous dissection of Hollywood, Speed-the-Plow, raises a burning question: In publicizing the play, has Mr. Mamet finally gone off his rocker?

His quite recent public conversion from a self-described “brain dead liberal” into some kind of neo-conservative pedagogue isn’t at issue here—except for his espousal of free market self-interest and greed. Profit (at any cost) is the theme of...

McBurney’s Ego Upstages Miller, Lithgow, Wiest—Even Katie Holmes

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 12:34:18 -0400

Simon McBurney, the avant-garde theater director, is the only director I’ve ever seen to take a bow not only after his own shows, but before. It wasn’t always so in the earlier days of Complicité, his London-based troupe with the French name. But the more successful Mr. McBurney has become, the more his vanity has gotten out of hand.

His preening custom of introducing his own productions before...

Beheaded in 1535, Soporific Saint Now Inadequately Revived

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:02:03 -0400

Feeling low? Can’t cope? Unable to sleep at night, what with the global financial crisis and all? Why not visit the Roundabout Theatre for a nice, long nap?

The Roundabout’s sleepy revival of Robert Bolt’s old chestnut, A Man for All Seasons (1960), not only leaves you dozing contentedly. It offers the additional pleasure of making you feel spectacularly virtuous for being there in the first place.

Bolt’s dusty costume...

Beheaded in 1535, Soporific Saint Now Inadequately Revived

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 18:02:03 -0400

Feeling low? Can’t cope? Unable to sleep at night, what with the global financial crisis and all? Why not visit the Roundabout Theatre for a nice, long nap?

Bolt’s dusty costume...

The Seagull Soars, Lofted by Sarsgaard, Scott Thomas

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 12:40:30 -0400

It’s a pleasure to be in the company of the entire cast of Ian Rickson’s revelatory production of The Seagull. Let me throw my hat in the air at the outset and hail it as the finest production of Chekhov I’ve seen in a generation.

The production at the Walter Kerr on Broadway began at the Royal Court Theatre, and Mr. Hickson’s use of British and American actors works...

Hi-Yo, Equus! Daniel Radcliffe Rides Into Town

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 12:17:14 -0400

It’s good to have Peter Shaffer back on Broadway with Equus. Whatever the flaws of the watershed 1973 psychodrama that became one of his biggest international successes, Mr. Shaffer reminds us of the lifeblood that’s being drained from the theater: the power of articulate ideas and ritual.

Like all his major plays—The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964), Amadeus (1979)—the confrontation between two male protagonists in a war between ecstatic instinct...

LuPone’s Last Lampoon? A Fond Farewell To Forbidden Broadway

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 14:52:18 -0400

I once asked in this column, with typical modesty, who you would vote for as the best drama critic in town. Taking a wild shot in the dark, who, my children, is the wisest, wittiest of them all?

The answer is … Gerard Alessandrini.

And you thought it was me! (You always do!) But I know...

Bless You, Pittu! Peter Bartlett Swishes Through Campy Musical Spoof

Tue, 16 Sep 2008 12:31:19 -0400

David Pittu’s What’s That Smell: The Music of Jacob Sterling, at Atlantic Stage 2, is an affectionate, somewhat familiar, campy spoof about a perpetually aspiring Broadway composer who has no talent. It’s billed as a World Premiere. Small world, isn’t it?

Campy parodies of bad musicals are as current as the kitschy celebration of the third-rate in Xanadu, while long-forgotten musicals are frequently elevated to cult status by City...

Is Broadway Ready for Afrobeat? Swivel Those Hips!

Tue, 09 Sep 2008 14:46:49 -0400

There was a lot of talk last season about the new Broadway beat of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Latino musical In the Heights (which became a multiple-Tony-winning hit), and Stu’s cult rock show Passing Strange (which didn’t). Mr. Miranda’s breakthrough musical was first staged at 37 Arts, the small, uninvitingly cold theater on West 37 Street where Bill T. Jones’ ambitious Fela! has opened the new season.

The Wall Street Journal recently asked the legendary...

Chekhov By Way of (Urp) Buffalo; A Chorus Line From the Cheap Seats

Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:24:03 -0400

Why do we go to the theater? Put it another way: Why, oh why, do we go to the theater? It frequently frustrates and disappoints us. And it’s expensive. Yet we keep going, come what may.

But look at it from the point of view of the people who work in theater. It frequently frustrates and disappoints them. And it’s expensive for them, too, because as a general rule...

Let the Fogies Fawn Over South Pacific—Hair Revival Rocks

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 12:53:40 -0400

The Public Theater’s smashing new revival of Hair (1967) in Central Park is a joy from beginning to end. It’s just the best, though fans of South Pacific (1947) might not agree with me.

I felt about Lincoln Center’s loving revival of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific that while the audience seemed to be in heaven, I was in a retirement home. But Hair is different. Hair is my South Pacific.

...

Waiting for McGovern: Fiennes, Neeson Preludes to a Beckett Genius

Tue, 29 Jul 2008 15:05:31 -0400

The thing about the plays of Samuel Beckett is that while I’ve read a number of fine books and scholarly essays analyzing them, and fancy I can grasp what a state of “non-being” is, and even the fuzzy meaning of a “non-play” for that matter, the truth is much simpler in my case: Beckett’s plays never fail to make me feel absurdly, wonderfully miserable.

Which reminds me of my favorite anecdote about the...

Durang’s Dysfunctional Home Life; Barker’s Stubborn Renaissance Painter

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 10:43:16 -0400

The Marriage of Bette and Boo, Christopher Durang’s dark 1985 comedy about his own nutty family that has received a sparkling revival at the Laura Pels Theatre, is a peculiar pleasure.

Mr. Durang has furtively written a tragedy disguised as mad farce. His famously absurdist comedy is good-natured and grotesque, and awfully sad, especially when it becomes alarmingly clear that his apparently adorably eccentric family is more or less insane.

Camp Dionysus Plays Euripides for Laughs

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 10:58:51 -0400

My excited interest in the production of The Bacchae during the Lincoln Center Festival was less about Euripides, good though he is. It was my admiration for the dynamic creative team who’ve taken a few liberties with the play (which premiered successfully in 405 B.C.).

The National Theatre of Scotland’s John Tiffany, The Bacchae’s director, and the leading Scottish playwright David Greig, who adapted it from a literal translation...

Foul Is Fur! Open-Air Macbeth, with Giant Bunny

Tue, 01 Jul 2008 11:52:54 -0400

Notes for and against Macbeth 2008, directed by Grzegorz Jarzyna, hailed by some as a theater visionary:

I think the avant-garde Polish director should have given his contemporary take on Shakespeare’s tragedy a different title.

Throne of Blood, Akira Kurosawa’s 1957 masterpiece, is famously based on Macbeth, but its title takes us directly into another world. Set in medieval Japan, the movie uses very little of...

Stay for the Curtain! Eustis Quotes Bergman in Pedestrian Hamlet

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 12:38:40 -0400

Let me begin at the end.

Place: Central Park. Time: almost 11:45 p.m. Play: Hamlet. Spirits: low.

Fortinbras and his army have entered Denmark at last, signaling the end. Hamlet has just died—poisoned in the duel scene—and is probably glad to be out of it. The king, the queen, Laertes, Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern—all now dead. Only decent Horatio survives—someone, according to...

Albee’s Nevelson Interview Wakes Up in Last 12 Minutes

Tue, 17 Jun 2008 11:46:02 -0400

“Good evening, ladies and gentleman,” the interviewer begins genially, indicating a figure now entering dramatically from the wings. “The great American sculptor … Louise Nevelson.”

The audience applauds as if on cue. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Nevelson says. She’s alive?! You can’t tell the difference. You’re not meant to. Nevelson is being expertly impersonated by Mercedes Ruehl, who’s wearing a sort of kimono, sculptural necklace and...

Sing Out, LuPone! My Tony Tipsheet

Tue, 10 Jun 2008 12:23:38 -0400

And so to the moment the nation and Patti LuPone have been waiting for—the Tony Awards on CBS, Sunday, June 15, at 8 p.m. What a great night it’ll be for Ms. LuPone and the diva’s devoted followers known as LuPonistas. It better be! But first things first:

Who do you think is going to take home the Tony for Best Sound Design of a Musical? Sound is pretty...

Pushing Up Daisey: Mencken-Loving Critic’s Sputtering Sentimental Journey

Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:21:52 -0400

There’s a drama critic in every man (and woman, of course). Audiences can be pretty severe critics, and, in private, theater folk can be, too. An actor-writer by the name of Mike Daisey is a rarity, however: He goes onstage to criticize theater publicly.

And it pays off, apparently. Mr. Daisey’s How Theater Failed America has now moved from Joe’s Pub to the Barrow Street Theatre downtown, and judging by...

Hindi-pendence Day! Meet the Parents, Indian-Style

Tue, 27 May 2008 11:48:06 -0400

It’s understandable if you think British theater holds up a burnished mirror to the bourgeois in the audience. Theater revolutions come and go, but no one absorbs them better than the spongy, resilient middle classes of England. For centuries, British theater has been dominated by the image of a white middle-class country. When have we seen a black or Asian character in the plays of Harold Pinter, Tom Stoppard, Alan Ayckbourn and David Hare?...

Best Actor of the Year? Boeing-Boeing Farcemeister Mark Rylance

Tue, 20 May 2008 11:49:46 -0400

If you ask me—and please do—who I’d like to see take home the Tony for best actor this season, it would be a genius named Mark Rylance.

Mark who?

There you are! Mr. Rylance’s wonderful performance in the retro farce Boeing-Boeing has been acclaimed by one and all, but his name still isn’t quite recognized in New York. Not like Patrick Stewart, who’s starring in Macbeth. Besides, Shakespeare is serious, and...

Herstory Repeats Itself with Caryl Churchill’s Classic Top Girls

Tue, 13 May 2008 12:47:48 -0400

When we think of the British playwrights we’re most familiar with, one is a political conservative for the thinking classes (Sir Tom Stoppard), another a safe middlebrow socialist for the carriage trade (Sir David Hare), and another a working-class sentimentalist for Off Broadway (the un-knighted Mike Leigh).

Where does that leave Caryl Churchill—the unrepentant Marxist-feminist poet who’s for nothing less than social, political and theatrical revolution? In my view, she’s England’s greatest...

Roundabout's Icy Liaisons, With a Freeze-Dried Laura Linney

Tue, 06 May 2008 11:43:10 -0400

I disagree with the critics who feel that Laura Linney has been miscast as the infamous sexual predator the Marquise de Merteuil in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Ms. Linney’s controversial performance in the erratic Roundabout revival is living very dangerously indeed. Its unyielding ice coldness is overstylized, riveting in both its originality and waywardness, and ultimately a self-negating mistake, like an experiment in the wrong venue. But which other actress on Broadway, I wonder, is...

Nichols, Freeman Can't Make Country Girl Awake and Sing

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 11:59:28 -0400

And so it’s back to the ’50s (again). “All plays are dated,” Harold Clurman wrote in steadfast support of Clifford Odets in 1970. “They are products of their time.” Yes; but everything depends on how much the dated-ness shows.

In the current Broadway revival of Odets’econd to last play, The Country Girl, it shows too much. Odets himself described the play as superficial, and he is correct. Even Clurman, who first produced...

Harvey Fierstein Makes Scrambled Eggs of A Catered Affair

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 12:29:50 -0400

And so, back to the ’50s (again), with the consciously modest Broadway musical A Catered Affair.

Modesty doesn’t really suit Broadway; it implies “good taste,” discretion, refinement, art—Stephen Sondheim. The British director of A Catered Affair, John Doyle (of the recent minimalist Broadway revivals of Mr. Sondheim’s Company and Sweeney Todd), has treated what’s essentially a wheezing old potboiler as if it were a mini-opera. It’s a rare thing on Broadway in...

Relief From Cornball Retro! Adding Machine Is a Calculated Triumph

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 11:24:28 -0400

It’s no secret that much of our theater is living nostalgically in the 1950s. Coming to a theater near you: The Dancing Eisenhower Years. And why not? This season alone has seen Broadway revivals of South Pacific, Gypsy, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and, of all soapy period plays with an alcoholic hero, William Inge’s saga Come Back, Little Sheba (1950). Whatever next!

Well, later this month there’s the Broadway...

South Pacific Reheats Blueberry Pie

Tue, 08 Apr 2008 12:09:52 -0400

Call me a cockeyed pessimist. While everyone else in the audience at Lincoln Center’s loving revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1949 South Pacific seemed to be in heaven, I thought I was in a retirement home.

Now, now … before I’m drummed out of town, let me say that the score is an unequalled romantic gem. But you know that. The genius of Richard Rodgers resides, of course, in his enduring, wonderful melodies; Oscar...

Lupone and Laurents Make Gypsy Soar

Tue, 01 Apr 2008 12:43:58 -0400

Whether you’re seeing Gypsy for the first (or fourth or fifth) time, you’ll want to catch Arthur Laurents’ revival starring Patti LuPone at the St. James Theatre. For one thing, Gypsy is among the very best musicals ever written, and we assume that by now the 90-year-old Mr. Laurents—who created the masterly book in 1959, and is directing the show for the third time—knows what he’s doing.

He’s like a museum...

Caryl Churchill’s 45-Minute Screed on Bush and Blair; Remembering the Great Paul Scofield

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 11:59:14 -0400

You might want to think twice about seeing Drunk Enough to Say I Love You? at the Public Theatre. The radical politics of the distinguished feminist playwright aren’t giving me pause; it’s the $50 tickets that trouble me.

I’m no mathematician, but by my reckoning, $50 for an evening lasting 45 minutes amounts to $3,852 a minute. If you ask me—and please do—that’s outrageous. It’s a lot. Facts don’t lie. Caryl...