Will Fink The script is at once serious yet playful, superficial yet deep. Depression, suicide, and deadly disease sit next to the dalliance of drugs and frat-boy pranks. It’s the combination that Adam Rapp balances so well that makes this piece what it is. And Mary-Arrchie Theatre brings a smart interpretation of the text with strong actors that make this a piece really worth watching.
Modest Mussorgky’s only completed opera is not for the faint of heart; it is not for those who like the Italians and nothing else, the lyrical, the symphonic, the easy ones. Boris Godunov is a difficult piece, at once crass and deep, with, on the one hand, somewhat technically amateurish composition, and, on the other, incredible insight into not only how to musically convey the moods of the characters but how to convey the chaos and horror around them.
Eye Inside is a blatantly great concept. It’s – okay, it kind of sounds chintzy at first glance – it’s about an evil agent who takes uniformly good-spirited and magnanimous actors and turns them into fame-whores and coke-fiends. He is a corrupter of the pure. But, honestly, making a rock opera out of the subject – and I’m selling it short, it’s far trippier than that sound-bite summation – well, it just makes sense.
There are two schools of thought as to how Shakespeare is to be done: there are those who think of it as sacred text, and would not have it touched but for (necessary) cutting; and then there are those who see it as a playground and something meant to be reconstructed and reimagined. The Globe Theatre in London certainly is not afraid of improvisation and crowd interaction from on the stage. Indeed, that position almost is more truly Shakespearean – one cannot expect Richard Burbage to have followed exactly the text.
The famous sextet when Edgardo crashes the wedding between Lucia and Arturo, Chi mi frena in tal momento?, is rich with countermelody and contrappunto, the polyphony not just musical but emotional, with six people expressing themselves deeply and strikingly. When Lucia loses her mind, Il dolce suono…Ardon gli incensi is an absolutely astounding representation of madness in music. Pardon the plebeian expression, but it is mindblowing. And Susanna Phillips absolutely brings it home. A superlative performance, to any eyes.
created a very difficult, very real, very European piece of theatre. The characters do not speak exactly as normal people would; it is a kind of artificial speech that furthers the play’s goals of shocking us out of our day-to-day boredom and non-introspection and forcing us to look inwards, consider ourselves, consider society, consider what we believe the world should be like.
From the Circle is not just a play made up of folktales from around the world; and yet it is simply a play made up of folktales, taken from around the world. It is at once heady and primeval, even primordial. The show takes acting, takes theatre, back to its roots – in storytelling. The acting is broad, archetypical, basic. And because of this, the emotions can all the more easily seep through and affect the audience; the audience no longer needs the actor to feel for them, they find the emotions coming up from within themselves. It is a transposition that reminds us of what real theatre is.
And yet, although the overall effect of The Tales of Hoffmann is comic, Offenbach is a deft manipulator of emotions, and the very end of the piece is profoundly and deeply affecting. At the very end, Offenbach brings true, devastating weight to the opera, and leaves the audience with exactly the feeling he wishes.
Kabulitis focuses on two periods in Afghan history: the return of the foreign-educated sons seeking reform, and the aftermath of invasion in 2002; this is done through a single family, a single person: Mildred (Caron Buinis), a Manhattan girl married to the Afghan Hamed (Gustavo Obregon) who is determined to reform his country. They travelled back to Kabul during the Second World War, but were eventually forced out because of the impending danger they faced.
Theatre is often about something other than what the people on stage are talking about. And Red is no exception – as Logan himself says. The backdrop is art, but the subject is mankind, fathers and sons, mentors and protégés. Art is the intellectual canvas on which these two characters paint their relationship. “The son must kill the father,” Rothko tells Ken, speaking about what the Abstract Expressionists did to the Cubists. “Respect him, but kill him.”