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Thursday, October 18, 2007
‘Bach at Leipzig’ @ Aurora
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: B -
We tend to think of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music as lofty, sublime, perfect — “an argument for the existence of God,” as one Bach scholar recently put it. To his contemporaries, however, Bach was competent but not great.
After he died, no one bothered to save his music; hundreds of his scores were discarded as scrap paper. During his life, when important jobs came open, he had to audition like everyone else — and he wasn’t anybody’s first choice.
That’s the starting premise of “Bach at Leipzig,” Itamar Moses’ charmingly, maddeningly daffy play that wears its cleverness on its sleeve, running through Oct. 28 at Aurora Theatre in Lawrenceville.
In lucid, precision-timed direction by Danielle Mindess, and with a winning cast, the characters carve for themselves rounded personas: None is especially likable, none is forgettable.
It is June 1722. Leipzig. The revered Johann Kuhnau, music master of the Thomaskirche, dies at the pipe organ. Georg Philipp Telemann, “the greatest organist in Germany” (Jim Adkins, grandiloquent in his silence), is the favorite to capture the prestigious post.
Meanwhile, six nobodies — Moses concocted this cadre, based somewhat on historical figures; Bach never appears — can’t hope to compete on musical merits, so they scheme, swindle, poison, blackmail and counter-blackmail in hopes of landing the job.
All the wannabes are named either Johann or Georg (a point of comic confusion that never tires the playwright). There’s Lenck (Dan Triandiflou), a con man who hopes to restore his reputation through more trickery. Steindorff (Jeremy Aggers) is the pretty playboy who really wants to be a dancer. Kaufmann (Daniel Burnley) stumbles around in a geriatric fog. Graupner (Larry Davis), more talented than the others, still fears the charismatic Telemann.
One by one, each introduces himself by reciting a letter home before joining the thrust and parry of the others. Thus, all of act one is constructed — as we learn at the start of act 2 — like a six-voiced fugue in music. (The audience is encouraged to applaud Moses’ brilliance.) Act 2’s conceit is a play within a play, another opportunity to weave together six or more threads of verbal mayhem.
On occasion, grand ideas about art and society threaten to lift the wordplay and poppycock to a more cerebral plain. Schott (Al Stilo), the traditionalist, argues that Kuhnau prized craftsmanship, never innovation: “When you deny the musical principles laid down by our predecessors, you risk denying their religious ones as well.”
Fasch (Chris Ensweiler), the progressive, counters, “That is preposterous! New music might, in fact, reach those who do not like the work of our predecessors. …” But such chewable exchanges go nowhere, evaporating with the next rim-shot gag.
If “Bach at Leipzig” feels a lot like a Tom Stoppard play — think “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead,” about two insignificant characters yanked out of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” — it’s intentional. Although he credits Stoppard as his influence, Moses can’t match his idol’s balance of theatrical artifice with dramatic substance.
Perhaps that explains why there’s hardly any music in this production (Thom Jenkins gets sound design credit), which further reinforces the notion that “Bach at Leipzig” isn’t about the complexities of art and mankind, but merely a crafty play about itself, clever for cleverness’ sake.
THE 411: 8:00 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 2:30 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Through Oct. 28. $18 - $25. Aurora Theatre, 128 Pike St., Lawrenceville. 678-226-6222, www.auroratheatre.com
BOTTOM LINE: Charming, daffy but not very deep.
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‘Sleuth’ @ Alliance Theatre
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. Grade: B -
Some people insist that Anthony Shaffer’s detective fiction send-up “Sleuth” is a one-twist wonder that’s as thinly worn as an old smoking jacket.
Others will argue that you don’t need an inspector’s magnifying glass to see that the 31-year-old English farce is a richly woven tapestry of bristling dialogue, social satire and pink lingerie.
Ooops. Make that “psycho-sexual politics.”
By the looks of the lavishly decorated, racially fine-tuned production at the Alliance Theatre, associate artistic director Kent Gash probably falls into the second category.
The minute Edward E. Haynes Jr.’s sumptuous country-house living room rolls into view, stealthy as a cat burglar, and the audience applauds, you know Gash is up to his old trick of fluffing so-so material to the nth degree. Got a dubious play? Make ’em cheer the window dressing. The stained glass windows and monumental staircase! The giant Buddha-head and the gilded Empire clock!
OK, I admit it. I love the set. And — this is really embarrassing — Carl Cofield’s radical makeover at the top of Act Two actually had me fooled for a good share of the scene. Did my snooze alarm malfunction?
If you aren’t familiar with this Agatha Christie-meets-Noel Coward dance of wit, about all we can reveal here is that it’s a tightly wound cat-and-mouse game between a successful crime-writing dandy named Andrew Wyke (David de Vries) and his wife’s travel-agent lover, Milo Tindle (Cofield).
Laurence Olivier played Wyke opposite Michael Caine’s Milo in a 1972 film treatment, and a new movie version, with screenplay by Harold Pinter, opens Nov. 9, starring Caine as Wyke and Jude Law as Tindle.
Cofield looks a little stiff when he first appears onstage. But as the night gnashes on, he sharpens his edge. He’s got to, if he wants to hold his own with de Vries, who attacks the multitudinous characters who spew forth from Wyke with scandalous aplomb. Wyke fancies himself as an intellectual heavyweight and “Olympian sexual athelete.” Yeah, right.
The fact that Cofield is an African-American actor playing an Englishman of Italian-Jewish descent is a casting tweak that underscores Wyke’s essential class snobbery and insecurity. It’s also a sign that Gash is delving into the fecund possibilities of human behavior.
What are Wyke’s true motivations? What is to believed and what is not? Who’s really in love with who? At the end of the day, “Sleuth” begs to be more than just a pretty set. The play may taste like a guilty pleasure at first bite, but it’s also possessed of an inner core that is deep, dark and devastating.
A lonely has-been. A grand staircase. A burst of gunfire. Perhaps it’s funny to think of “Sleuth” as a homoerotic version of “Sunset Boulevard.” But there it is.
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