That’s just one of the highlights of Stew and Rodewald’s sensitive and thought-provoking music for Settle’s “Othello’’ — and it is Settle’s “Othello,’’ and not just because the copyright line on the production script says so. The opening scenes in Venice pass by so swiftly, and with such rearrangement of parts, that the uninitiated could get dizzy. But that means Othello defends himself directly to the audience, not to the duke (cut) or the senators (also cut), and this immediacy serves Settle’s quest for intensity and focus well.
Some other choices are less successful. It makes sense to move quickly at the beginning, to get us speedily from Venice to Cyprus for the main action; to cut and race through the final act, however, vitiates the mounting fear that we must share with Desdemona and, to a lesser extent, Emilia. Death comes so quickly to all that we don’t have time to dread it, and it’s dread, not just death, that makes a tragedy.
The acting, too, is impassioned but uneven. Jesse J. Perez, though he has a fine sergeantly swagger, plays Iago’s evil intentions so broadly that you almost expect him to start swirling a cape. As his wife and Desdemona’s attendant, Stephanie DiMaggio takes an equally hard line: Her Emilia is so tough and cynical that it becomes difficult to believe she’s blind to Iago’s treachery — but she must be, just as Othello must be, or the whole thing falls apart. These are strong and consistent performances, but in the service of too flat a vision of the shifting forces that surround the Moor.
Stephanie Fieger’s Desdemona, meanwhile, is puzzling in another way. She’s beautiful and seductive — but is seduction really what we expect from the innocent Desdemona? If she seems too worldly wise, as she does here, it’s again hard to imagine that she won’t notice and elude the traps that Iago sets to make Othello believe her untrue.
