THEY BLEW IT

By BRAD LEITHAUSER

IN THE OPENING SCENE OF SHAKEspeare's The Tempest, as a ship careens in a gale, a sailor cries, "What care these roarers for the name of king?" In fact the storm does care. The waves are agents of Prospero, the exiled Duke of Milan, who is about to launch us into a sort of King Lear's Revenge. Once again we meet a deposed, aging monarch and howling winds. But if the storm on the heath undid Lear, the raging of the elements provides Prospero's salvation.

An impressive new Prospero has arrived on Broadway: the Royal Shakespeare Company's Patrick Stewart, well known to TV audiences as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in TV's Star Trek: The Next Generation. In a performance he first offered to much acclaim last summer in Central Park, Stewart gives us a down-at-heels (barefoot, actually) aristocrat of lithe movements and piercing, narrow-eyed glances. Doubt and failure gnaw at him; he's a tatterdemalion schemer who knows, however potent his magic, that he's trafficking in forces that dwarf him.

There is much to admire in director George C. Wolfe's eclectic production, which draws on Kabuki, Balinese puppet theater, rap, jazzy percussion. This is a big, bold, colorful spectacle--a boiling sea of sights and sounds. But something is radically--fatally--wrong with any production in which lines like Miranda's "Oh brave new world/ That has such people in't!" or Antonio's "Say this were death that now hath seized them" are laugh getters.

The innocence of Miranda (Carrie Preston) should warm the spirit; the treachery of Antonio (Nestor Serrano) should chill the veins. Yet emotional extremes--hot and cold--are missing here. Wolfe allows Preston to play Miranda as a panting, boy-mad, '90s adolescent. Reared on an island inhabited only by her father and a pair of spirits, where has she acquired her repertoire of salacious smirks, hotfooted flouncings, pouting moues?

For all Wolfe's attempts to open up the play to outside influences, he simplifies and limits the text. All the hammering percussion cannot drum up the menace his actors fail to instill. All the bewitching lighting effects cannot etherealize an Ariel (Aunjanue Ellis) who delivers a version of "Full fathom five..." devoid of gorgeous heartbreak.

The Tempest is about emancipation: Prospero escapes his exile, Ariel emerges from servitude, Miranda enters the realm of adult passion. Yet this production fails to free its audience. When the storm clears, our feelings--like many a storm-tossed thing--are hopelessly knotted.