"Stage Beauty" flows like a sleazy piece of live theater.
Seventeenth-century English theater saw a transition from stiff gender barriers to the loosening of the proverbial girdle for actresses. As a period piece and film, "Stage Beauty" has fancy speech and little character development - but memorable love scenes.
Billy Crudup portrays an actor of female roles, and Claire Danes, who steals his bit as Othello's Desdemona, seems to desire him - although there is never a true clarification of his bisexuality.
Appropriate gender roles are stressed at the film's end, when Crudup's character plays the Moor, a male role.
Operating under the 1660s paradigm, Ned Kynaston (Crudup) by law must step down as Desdemona and retreat to either a male role or nothing at all. His former dresser, Maria (Danes), helps him find the suppressed man inside of him that has lain dormant since childhood.
The transition from men to women playing female roles should be a victory for women's rights. How unrewarding it was for women when men believed they were more capable of representing women on stage than women themselves.
Keeping the argument gray, Kynaston argues that there is no art in women playing themselves. The hand movements and innocent demeanor of women take many years to perfect.
Unfortunately, these lessons are not easily unlearned, as Kynaston discovers when he can only perform as a woman in a seedy tavern after the new law has been passed. The real-life Kynaston ultimately goes on to play male roles.
At the film's climax, Crudup remains lightweight, not only in his demeanor but also in his believability. He helps Danes with her acting like Sean Patrick Thomas helps Julia Stiles dance in "Save the Last Dance."
