Brief Encounter, Emma Rice adaptation of Noel Coward

St. Ann's Warehouse is quickly becoming a favorite venue for innovative theatre. And the production brought in by Kneehigh Theatre (a Cornish theatrical group) re-enforces this bias.

Brief Encounter is a multi-media production adapted from both Noel Coward's 1930s play Still Life and the later film version Brief Encounter. Effectively using actors playing double roles, the production switches between theatre and film--and blurring the boundaries between each by letting the conventions of each penetrate into the other--to create a moving mediation on forbidden desire.

Highly recommended.

Mary Stuart, Friedrich Schiller

This play provides a (somewhat) sympathetic presentation of the Mary Stuart (Mary Queen of Scots)--and a rather cynical exploration of England's 16th religious instabilities. Janet McTeer's portrayal of Mary was gripping. She managed to make Mary both compelling and very irritating. The rain scene in the 2nd half is particularly compelling. The downpour--and her ability to stand in the cooling, cleansing rain--is first interpreted by Mary as a kindness and relief from the misery of confinement. When, however, she realizes that the open patch will the arena for her much-sought audience with Queen Elizabeth, her ecstasy quickly turns to panic, shame, and eventually rage at how she'd been set up by her erstwhile allies.

Recommend, enthusiastically.

Exit the King, Ionesco

Engaging production of a very tricky play. With Geoffrey Rush, Susan Sarandan, and Lauren Ambrusco.

Recommend.

August: Osage County Tracy Letts

I really liked the way this production of Lett's gripping play captures the tenor of rural Oklahoma. Its penetrating exploration of how rural life traps and suffocates the "thinking classes" does not let the protagonists off easily. The play hands indicts these characters for falling too easily into thinking their so-called intellectual superiority granted them moral license.

The cast was superb.

Recommend. Enthusiastically.

Don Giovanni, Mozart

We had the pleasure of seeing the Met's 501st performance of Mozart's fine opera. I was especially interested to see Susan Graham perform role of Donna Elvira; I was disappointed.

Satyagraha: Gandhi in S. Africa, Philip Glass

Recommend.

Peter and Jerry, Edward Albee

The second act of this play began as Zoo Story, a one-act Albee wrote early in his career. In the 90s, he added a prequel act to make it more about a man and his marriage rather than a random encounter between two men. The play raises all the usual Albee questions about relationships and sanity.
Kathleen Turner, whom we saw recently in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, was in the row behind us.

Cymbeline, Shakespare

Iphigenie en Tauride, Christoph Willibald Gluck

1 December 2007, 1:30 matinee
Metropolitan Opera, New York City

Featuring Susan Graham as Iphigenie and Placido Domingo as Orestes, this was only the second Metropolitan Opera production of Gluck's senuous 1779 opera. (The first was in 1917!)
The opera is full of beautiful arias and choruses. I thought the highpoint was the final chorus followed by the reconciliation scene.
Beside the lovely music, the staging was particularly effective. I especially liked the split-screen effect that helped keep the two narrative strands parallel, even as the characters were ignorant of each other's movements. The most striking image occured in the final scene, when the priestesses lined the sacrificial alter with flower petals as they sang praises to "Diana, Chaste Daughter of Leto." A (daring?) moment occurs after Iphigenie has learned Orestes' identify; quietly mourning for the death of her mother (at Orestes' hands), it is momentarily unclear whether she will actually reconcile with Orestes. The reconciliation becomes evident only only once she drops her mother's green scarf then embraces Orestes.
This particular production make wonderful use of a smart, 10-person ballet troupe.
All the all, the production fit the opera: simple but opulent.

Prairie Home Companion

After listening to PHC for years on the radio, it was great fun to see the show live at Town Hall in NYC.

Recommend, with enthusiasm.

Die Zauberflote (Mozart)

Julie Taymor production with Joseph Kaiser (Tamino), Diana Damrau (Pamina), and Anna-Kristiina Kaappola (Queen of the Night).

Die Zauberflote, Mozart

Hairspray

Hairspray

Horrors.

Caveats.

I Barocchisti

Swiss Radio Chorus

Mozart Dances

Mark Morris Dance Group

Divinas Palabras (Ramon del Valle-Inclan)

Centro Dramatico National production
Quarrel that develops between family members for a hydrocephalic dwarf good for begging.

Into the Little Hill (George Bejamin & Martin Crimp)

A lyric tale for two voices and ensemble (2006), preceded by Viola, Viola for two violas (1997) and Three Minatures for solo violin (2002).
Interesting music performed by excellent musicians.

This jewel of a narrative is based on the traditional tale of the Pied Piper, who brings music (to a town concerned about a rat infestation) with promises that he will rid the town of their problem. When the strange stranger is denied financial compensation for completing the task, he lures the children away.

Now there are many ways to consider this as an allegory, particularly appealing is the relationship between arts and politics in twenty-first century USA. Politicians want the arts to shape students to concervative values; however, because the arts are actually starved in our schools, the younger generation is denied an intellectually grounded education in the arts, and it turns to a more seductive, maybe even baser but certainly more rebelious form of the arts. Musically, not such a simple allegory: very spare. In works more vertically dense (but not overly so), the ear can hear/apprehend a lucious texture. In works more horizontally dense, that is more melodic, the ear can hear the melody. This work seemed spare in both ways, requiring an ear both better trained than the average ear and a mind curious enough to listen attendtively and repeatedly.

Highly recommend.

Hokaibo (Heisei Nakamura-za)

This performance featured one of only two comic Kabuki and starred Nakamura Kanzaburo XVIII in the lead role. Wonderful and colorful sets and costumes were the backdrop to a drama that depended on physical humor and sexual double-entendres (that weren't always apparent in the English synopsis broadcast through the headsets). The morality of the play was rather dubious, and the rogue character ends up murdered (though he comes back to haunt his somewhat innocent nemesis).
The narrative occupied the first two acts performed before the intermission. After the intermission, the performance accorded more closely with my conceptions of kabuki: traditional Japanese music and dance.
Though predominantly performed in Japanese, the Kanzaburo frequently dropped into English, speaking directly to the audience. This gracious gesture, however, was not necessary for the large number Japanese speakers in the audience, who obviously were able to understand the jokes not apparent via the English synopsis.

So Percussion and Matmos. Lincoln Center Festival. 21 July 2007

This was a fantastic evening of very exciting music. Among the highlights:
"Aluminum Song" was played entirely with items made of aluminum. Its tempo was based on rhythmic period that began when a can of Bud Light was popped open, continued while it was drunk (actually 'chugged'), and then ended once the can was tore into two pieces after being repeatedly bent in half.
The first segment of "Water Song" was structured by the time it took to empty a bucket of water with a coffee cup. That was the only full-fledged water sound. All other 'water-sounds' were instrumental ones traditionally associated with water.
They closed with a selections from a longer work that proposed to translate Verdi's "Aida" into electronic media. The first two segments were difficult to relate to the opera, though I suspect the new piece borrowed rhythmic (rather than melodic) elements. The final segment employed the grand march from the opera and featured manipulated videos from a 1950s-looking movie (maybe either the Elizabeth Taylor "Cleopatra" or "Ben Hur"?). (The longer work is the result of a commision from the city of Verona Italy.)
Though some of the pieces were probably more fun and exciting to perform than they were to listen to, it was a very worthwhile evening.