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March 2005
‘Lonely Hunter’ a theatrical landmark
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW: ”The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.” Through April 24.
The verdict: An historic occasion for Southern drama.
In the opening and closing moments of the Alliance Theatre’s ”The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter,” deaf-mute John Singer actually talks.
He says he learned how to speak as a young boy but that it never felt right. Then he met his friend Antonapoulos, a fat, Greek candy-maker who was also deaf and mute, and there was never a reason to utter another word. Alas, when Antonapoulos got carted off to a mental asylum, Singer’s world collapsed.
Such is the sorrowful beginning of Carson McCullers’ celebrated novel of personal and political passions, a sprawling portrait of a small Georgia town in the depths of the Great Depression. A cluttered, clamoring tale of drunks, fanatics and lost souls, ”Lonely Hunter” is most often remembered as a classic story of initiation about McCullers’ autobiographical character, Mick Kelly, a restless teenage tomboy who dreams of becoming a symphonic conductor.
For dramatic purposes, playwright Rebecca Gilman and director Doug Hughes wisely center this epic on Singer, who pines for Antonapoulos while the rest of the townspeople project their troubles, dreams and desires onto this silent beacon of kindness.
Opening Wednesday night, this world premiere is a lovingly crafted, sensitively rendered, psychologically devastating evening of theater. Co-produced by The Acting Company of New York, it’s a landmark achievement from a high-profile Broadway director (”Frozen”), a gifted playwright (”Spinning into Butter”) and a theater (”The Color Purple”) that, should it continue this season’s momentum, is poised for national acclaim.
Too often an adaptation of a claustrophobic, out-of-focus manuscript merely exacerbates the rough edges. This one smooths them out.
Structurally, Gilman has condensed and refined the swirling panorama into a logical circle of clear, precise images. Hughes, whose ”Doubt” opened Thursday on Broadway, has separated dense strands of material into a quiet marvel of a production. And Henry Stram, who plays Singer, gives a singularly expressive, heart-shattering performance. His characterization is so intuitive, so minutely detailed, that it makes the notion of muteness irrelevant.
Though McCullers’ 1940 novel dances around the nature of the deaf-mutes’ relationship, here it’s treated as a love story, a decision that clarifies Singer’s motives. He clings to his bulky friend (sweetly played by John Sierros) as if he were a Teddy Bear, cries out when they are separated and never recovers.
Ron Cephas Jones is brilliant as the solemn Dr. Copeland, an African-American who is embittered by the treatment of his people. Roslyn Ruf (as Copeland’s daughter, Portia) imbues her character with courage, grace and authority. As the dissipated labor agitator Jake Blount, Andrew Weems has one of the few truly comic roles, and he barks and drools appropriately.
‘Tis a pity, then, that New Yorker Julie Jesneck’s misguided Southern accent turns Mick into a Hollywood stereotype of a gangly redneck girl with an emerging butch streak. Sorry, but ”Fried Green Tomatoes” this ain’t. Jesneck’s approach feels ridiculous and affected. When Mick cries at the sound of music, you don’t believe for a minute that her tears are real. This is bad acting, and any number of Atlanta actresses could do better.
For its part, the design team makes choices that are beautiful, sleek and evocative, yet technologically sophisticated.
Neil Patel’s set, a wooden scroll with a single window, recalls a prison, an apt touch, considering that nearly every character is isolated in some fashion. David Van Tieghem’s pitch-perfect soundscape murmurs like a beating heart, pulsating toward its inexorable finale.
Michael R. Chybowski illumines the stage with shafts and pinpoints of glowing light. Jan Hartley’s projections of handwriting samples, interior monologues and graffiti come off like digital magic, while her projections of sepia-toned photographs give a sense of a place that’s both frozen in time and constantly changing. Catherine Zuber’s costumes are appropriate to the period — never showy. All this makes smart visual shorthand.
In sum, ”Lonely Heart” is a remarkable treatment of a work by a hypersensitive young artist who felt great empathy for her characters — black, white, Jewish and homosexual — who are often shortchanged both spiritually and financially. Unlike most dramas, which take an evening to evoke a catharsis, this one grabs you from the get-go. What’s happening at the Alliance will leave you in a state of sadness and awe.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays; 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. Sundays. Through April 24. $15-$45. Alliance Theatre, 1280 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-733-5000, www.alliancetheatre.org.
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A moving ‘Movin’ Out’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW. ”Movin’ Out.” Through Sunday. The verdict: Riveting dance-theater.
If ”Movin’ Out” were just an amalgamation of the gleaming pop songs of Billy Joel, it would probably be a sorry excuse for a musical.
Instead, the 2-year-old Broadway hit builds its appeal by combining the live energy of a rock concert with the sexual expressiveness of dance. You don’t have to be a balletomane to appreciate the lean, unfussy choreography of Twyla Tharp. Nor a social commentator to see the instructiveness of this Vietnam-era elegy, which provides flesh-and-blood evidence of how war can rob us of our very souls.
Making its Atlanta debut at the Fox Theatre this week, ”Movin’ Out” ranks among the most moving and physically glorious theatrical experiences of the season.
The genius of this show, which was conceived, directed and choreographed by Tharp, is that it uses Joel’s storytelling songs to evince a fully developed narrative arc.
Theater-goers of a certain age remember Brenda and Eddie as the ”popular steadies” from ”Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.” We know Tony as the young renegade from the titular ”Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song).” Tharp imagines these three as a love triangle that’s soon joined by sweethearts Judy and James (”Just the Way You Are”). Then she plops them all down in the town of Hicksville, where it’s just one big sockhop of dancing, making out and cruising. (I mean, what’s a ’50s musical without a red convertible?)
But “Movin’ Out” can’t linger long in the nostalgia because of Vietnam. Or as Joel’s culture-referencing ”We Didn’t Start the Fire” spews: ”JFK, blown away, what else do I have to say. Birth control, Ho Chi Minh, Richard Nixon, back again.”
Backed by a terrific eight-piece band, vocalist/pianist Darren Holden invests Joel’s repertoire with his own kicky style and personality. It’s Bruce Springsteen meets Elton John —- in a good way. The band perches on a catwalk that crowns Santo Loquasto’s set of steel girders and speakers, while lighting designer Donald Holder shifts tones with symbolic strokes of gunsmoke blues and apocalyptic reds.
However, these visual enhancements never get in the way of this ensemble’s glorious dancing. The unassailable star is Rasta Thomas, who envisions Eddie as a mixture of James Dean and Mikhail Baryshnikov. With Kirov and Joffrey Ballet credits, Thomas is an angelic presence and a technical virtuoso. (Note that the part of Eddie rotates between Thomas and Brendan King.)
Corbin Popp makes a blond and bulky Tony, Laurie Kanyok an appropriately vulgar Brenda and Matthew Dibble a sweet and tragic James. In widow’s weeds, Julieta Gros (Judy) is an ethereal, diaphanous ballerina of great emotional complexity.
On its own, Billy Joel’s reputation would appear to be on the wan. He’s an entertainer —- not a poet. But Twyla Tharp manages to reshape his vision into a meditation on war that’s profound, cathartic and ultimately redemptive. Defying all conventions of musical theater, ”Movin’ Out” rocks the house and moves the heart.
THE 411: 8 p.m. tonight-Saturday. 2 p.m. Saturday. 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sunday. Through Sunday. $22-$62. Broadway in Atlanta, Fox Theatre, 660 Peachtree St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-817-8700, www.foxtheatre.org.
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Savannah Music Festival review
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Savannah Music Festival, now through April 3. www.savannahmusicfestival.com
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
Savannah –- If one sequence of events could sum up the new spirit of the Savannah Music Festival, it happened Friday, a humid and drizzly evening.
In a classical concert, at the ornately refurbished Lucas Theatre, the program included Vivaldi’s Concerto for Two Mandolins and Orchestra. Mike Marshall and Don Stiernberg played the solo parts. They plucked away in splendid counterpoint — two of the show’s six instrumental and vocal soloists.
Before the classical concert was finished, around the corner from the Lucas at the art-deco Trustees Theater, another concert was starting: “Mando Madness,” a mandolin circle jam starring Marshall, Stiernberg, David Grisman, Sam Bush and other heroes of the acoustic-folk scene.
When looking over the festival’s eclectic listings — blues, jazz, bluegrass, classical, dance — and talking with its director, Rob Gibson, my fear had been that Savannah would slip into what’s dissed as “the festival racket.”
Festival is a rosy word, isn’t it? A synonym for a fun atmosphere, it implies, by ancient tradition, the creation of unique events, where artists settle in for at least a few days and make give-and-take connections — with other artists and the audience. (A “racket” would involve a menu of prepackaged touring shows, where “festival” is just a marketing buzzword.)
Location is just as important. To a visitor, Savannah seems to have a rapidly broadening cultural sense — accompanied by a burgeoning arts scene. The Savannah College of Art and Design continues to refurbish old buildings around town, turning them into prized landmarks; you see SCAD marquees (and art students) throughout town. The wavy white Jepson Center for the Arts, designed by celebrity architect Moshe Safdie, is under construction. Savannah has long been an American museum town, where the city itself is the attraction. Increasingly, it’s also a place living of living art.
In his three years in Savannah, Gibson — the former chief of New York’s Jazz at Lincoln Center and, before that, Atlanta’s Quantuum Productions — has done the hard work. He’s made an honest-to-goodness festival. Sharing personnel like Marshall and Stiernberg was one of many savvy hook-ups.
The 17-day event, which opened March 18, is all about connections. As David Grisman’s folky, contrapuntal jam band took requests in one theater, Eddie Palmieri’s suave and funky Latin Jazz Septet got people dancing at another space across town.
Violinist Daniel Hope gave the world premiere of “Abraham,” an attractive new violin concerto by English composer Roxanna Panufnik. Inspired by the Old Testament patriarch, common to Christian, Jewish and Islamic faiths, the concerto includes aural snatches of Orientalism and Korngold-style romantic lyricism, with an optimistic ending. As a composer, Panufnik’s voice is mild. Her ideas are persuasive, but she doesn’t shout them. “Abraham” is among her most assured and compelling works.
More connections: Arianna Zuckerman, a New York-based soprano with an affecting voice, sang a recital last week, then sang Mozart at Friday’s orchestral concert, then helped judge the festival’s five-day American Traditions singing contest, which ended Saturday.
Each of the contest’s five finalists were required to sing in more than one American genre, selected from jazz, classical, country, folk and gospel. The winner of the $10,000 first prize was Andre McRae, a New Yorker of hammy acting skills and a thin, reedy baritone voice. Go figure. The best thing about McRae’s performance was his accompanist, pianist Robert Strickland, who is music director of Libby’s Cabaret in Atlanta.
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‘Voice of the Prairie’ at Theatre Gael
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW: “The Voice of the Prairie.” Through April 10. The verdict: Stories and slapstick from the cornball roots of radio.
For Leon Schwab, a harried radio announcer who cons listeners into sending donations to a fictitious charity case named Miss Emily, “the magic of the ether” isn’t looking too promising.
That is, until he strikes gold by employing David Quinn, an authentic Irish storyteller who conquers the airwaves with the ribald tales of his adventures with a blind girl named Frankie.
This is the essential premise of “The Voice of the Prairie,” John Olive’s craftily corny celebration of radio’s roots, which Theatre Gael is staging with a cast of three led by its uproarious artistic director, John Stephens.
Set in the Midwest in the early 1920s, “Voice” charts the humble days when radio was an audio-almanac of hog prices, fashion tips, folk music and serial dramas that made life among the amber waves of Kansas, Iowa, Nebraska, etc., a bit more tolerable.
Smartly directed by Chad Yarborough and dominated by an enormous wooden radio designed by Stephens, the show shifts between 1895 (when David and his Poppy landed on these shores and 1923, when Schwab’s dubious scheme begins to pay off.
In a reversal that takes a little getting used to, Gabriel Dean plays both Poppy and the adult David, while Stephens portrays the young David, Schwab and an asthmatic preacher in love with the adult Frankie. Caroline Masclet inhabits the skin of feral child Frankie, who seduces David and runs away from her father, and the older Francis, who matures into a prim, Helen Keller-like schoolteacher.
Actually, all three performers are required to change costumes and personalities inside the large radio that doubles as a dressing room.
Dean’s Poppy, smoking a pipe and wearing a chimneylike hat, is a bit too quaint at first. But his David proves to be an effectively mellow foil to Schwab’s fast-talking Svengali. As the hayseed Frankie, whose intuition is such that she actually “sees” better than the orphaned David, Masclet is first-rate.
Stephens, who is too seldom seen onstage, is loud and nasal, fearless and foolhardy in his depiction of Schwab, a hopelessly flustered stooge who speaks in the old “you dirty rat” style of vaudeville. Because of the frequent visits to the radio-wardrobe, Stephens’ bow tie is constantly cattywampus; and by the end of the night, his unruly shirt collar has almost morphed into a separate character. None of this looks intentional, but it’s hilarious and all of a piece with Schwab’s general state of disarray.
Kicky as Irish coffee, this cleverly written screwball comedy is laced with adrenaline-draining physicality and suspenseful twists and turns. Will Schwab’s scandal be discovered by the Federal Communications Commission? Will David and Frankie be united, much to the glee of their fervent fans? Tune in to “The Voice of the Prairie” to find out.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 5 p.m. Sundays. Through April 10. $16-$22. 14th Street Playhouse, 173 14th St. N.E., Atlanta. 404-733-4754, www.theatregael.com.
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Express takes on ‘Oppenheimer’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW: “The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” Through May 7. The verdict: A tragedy for all humanity.
In detailing the tormented psyche of the man who created the atomic bomb, Carson Kreitzer’s “The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer” is a brilliant colossus. As such, it is certain to be a staggering bore for many.
So take a thermos of espresso to Actor’s Express and a willingness to reflect upon the dazzling tedium. Strongly acted and seamlessly directed by Jasson Minadakis, this ambitious, poetic, bone-chilling piece of theater demands a great deal from its audience.
That’s the price you pay for Art sometimes.
“Oppenheimer” is a rambling intellectual exercise that imagines a conversation between Oppenheimer (astutely played by John Ammerman) and Lilith (Tess Malis Kincaid), the woman who, according to Judaic folklore, was ejected from the Garden of Eden for refusing to submit to Adam. It’s an ambitious piece of work that dares to riff on T.S. Eliot’s “Prufrock.”
You know what they say about a woman scorned?
As portrayed by the strutting, hissing Kincaid, Lilith is not a well queen of the damned. Smudged all over with mud, she vamps it up in a catsuit on a runway that surrounds the entire room —- so that she’s literally always there to remind Oppenheimer that he’s responsible for the massacre of thousands of Japanese.
When the government ostracizes Oppenheimer for his Communist sympathies, when he’s dying from throat cancer, when he’s all alone with the horror of creating the ultimate instrument of death, when he cheats on his wife and his beautiful lover commits suicide, Lilith purrs to him that this —- this, Oppy —- is what it’s like to be banished to hell.
For all its plodding, what the play does so well is condemn Oppenheimer and make him a sympathetic character. He’s fallen. But, unlike Lilith, he’s human. He was ashamed of his Jewishness, married to a Communist and recruited by the government to take Hitler down. But even after the Nazis were crushed, the killing continued in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The tragedy of Oppenheimer is that he behaved badly, under great pressure, without considering the consequences.
In portraying the United States as a bully that lies to its people, commits mass murder and refuses to take responsibility for its atrocities, the 2003 play feels very much of our time. We can feel the pain of Europe, but we can’t quite fathom the horror of Japan or Iraq because it’s so “over there.” If it’s so over there, then why are we so afraid? Revenge is not higher ground.
Kreitzer is a writer with something remarkable to say. She just hasn’t quite figured out how to make such complex political material as entertaining and funny as, say, Tony Kushner. Nor has Minadakis done much to leaven the gloom.
So thank goodness for the delicious humor of Kathleen Wattis, who turns Kitty Oppenheimer into a martini-swilling figure of fashion, fun and bite. And for the silly coup de theatre involving J. Edgar Hoover (Theo Harness) and a dance of the seven veils. And the veddy British fellow (Joe Sykes) who offers toffees as he tries to obfuscate the spy scandal that may have leaked nuclear secrets to the Soviets. “So sorry,” he says glibly.
Set designer Kat Conley, costume artist English Toole and lighting/sound director Joseph P. Monaghan III have sculpted a visual and aural world that is elemental and reflective.
The bombs you hear in this production echo like the noisy gongs of Armageddon. What Oppenheimer unleashed at Los Alamos will have repercussions for all time.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays. Also: 2 p.m. April 3 and 24; 5 p.m. April 10, 17 and May 1. Through May 7. $21.50-$26.75. Actor’s Express, King Plow Arts Center, 887 W. Marietta St., Atlanta. 404-607-7469, www.actors-express.com.
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‘Enchanted April’ in Duluth
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
ThEATER REVIEW: “Enchanted April.” Through April 10. The verdict: As welcome as spring.
Susan Reid may be the city’s best go-to director for turning a seemingly lightweight story into a meaningful and memorable theatrical experience. She did it with Theatre in the Square’s “Tuesdays With Morrie” last year. Now she’s at it again with Aurora Theatre’s “Enchanted April.”
Based on the 1922 novel by Elizabeth von Arnim and made into a 1992 film starring the magnificent Joan Plowright as the curmudgeonly Mrs. Graves, “Enchanted April” is a well-trod title. So why bother to do the Matthew Barber play that finally made it to Broadway two years ago?
I’ll tell you why.
Because Joanna Daniel’s imperious Mrs. Graves is every bit as funny as Plowright’s. Because Lauren Gunderson and Kate Donadio are among the city’s best and prettiest young actresses. (The former is also a playwright to watch.) And because this tale of two bored, put-upon British housewives who retire to a castle with a pair of eccentric companions is as delightful as the perfume of wisteria under the Tuscan sun.
Lotty Wilton (Gunderson), a veritable hummingbird of chatty energy, notices an ad for an Italian villa for let and persuades new friend and gentle spirit Rose Arnott (Lee Nowell, looking as lovely as an English rose) to join her in renting the place. As soon as we meet Lotty’s priggish and preening husband, Mellersh (the always terrific Chris Ensweiller), we understand why she dreams of escaping. Later, we discover the painful secret that shadows Rose.
Into the rental arrangement floats the ethereal Lady Caroline Bramble (Donadio). A self-described “modern,” this bohemian has perfect posture, takes cognac toddies in the morning and seems to exist in a state of perpetual languor. What exactly is under her tragic veneer?
I’m not sure if it’s a plus or a minus that this production so resembles the film —- from the dialogue and comedic situations down to Lady Caroline’s slick bob and Mrs. Graves’ diction. However, I shan’t complain.
In hats and skirts that render her as stiff as Queen Mary, Mrs. Graves shells and munches nuts with gusto and brags about her friendship with Tennyson and Browning. When loopy Lotty asks her if she knew Keats, this antique woman reports that she did not, then sputters, “I was also unacquainted with Shakespeare!” It’s particularly fun to watch her introduction to the discombobulated Mellersh, who makes his entrance wearing just a towel.
And yet, by the end of the night, the old bag has become enchanted with castle owner Anthony Wilding (Nick Rhoton) and is magically transformed from crone to cupid. (Maybe it’s Wilding’s Byronic locks that captivate her.)
How charming of Aurora to bring us this frothy British trifle about the curative effects of travel, nature and rekindled romance. “Enchanted April” is as catching as spring fever.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays; 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2:30 p.m. Sundays (no show this Sunday). Through April 10. $22-$25. Aurora Theatre, 3087-B Main St., Duluth. 770-476-7926, www.auroratheatre.com.
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‘Petrouchka’ and more from ASO
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org.
Conductor Charles Dutoit brings the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra to its peak of performance. He does this more convincingly, more thoroughly, than all other conductors I’ve heard in Symphony Hall in more than four seasons of weekly listening.
The Swiss maestro, former chief of the Montreal Symphony, has a two-week ASO residency. Last weekend, with illuminating results, he led the orchestra and chorus in Berlioz’s “The Damnation of Faust.”
He did it again Thursday, this time with a balanced program connecting three famously perfect pieces of music, each flawless in its own way, each holding a connection to carnivals — those joyous street fairs that, curtain pulled back, reveal all sorts of wonderfully sinister characters.
Ravel’s “Alborada del gracioso” (“The Jester’s Morning Song”) began the evening. A showpiece of sumptuous Technicolor orchestrations, Spanish rhythms and tightly controlled burlesque, the music under Dutoit’s baton sounded rather louche and breathy. This made it even more fun to hear than usual. The interpretation was fully realized by the musicians, even if their coordination wasn’t yet tight.
In Mozart’s late Symphony No. 39, Dutoit drew a gorgeous shimmer from the violins that one doesn’t often hear. He highlighted the minuet’s merry-go-round section such that it seemed to prefigure Stravinsky’s ballet “Petrouchka,” the work that closed the concert.
No program scenario was needed for Dutoit’s clearly delineated, theatrical and weighty reading of “Petrouchka,” in the composer’s 1947 revision, where a trio of marionettes comes to life and falls into a sordid (and tragic) love triangle.
When we first met the floppy, hapless hero — a low, moist honk on the contrabassoon, played by Juan de Gomar — the audience laughed. Through music alone, they got the picture. Flutist Christina Smith twittered and pirouetted as Petrouchka’s love object, the Ballerina. Pianist Peter Marshall, trumpet player Christopher Martin and a half dozen others enlivened the scene with supple, well-turned phrasing. In short, the musicians here were playing at their musical best.
The ASO players say that Dutoit rehearses them more efficiently than most of his conductorial colleagues. With a keen ear and no wasted motions, he can thus go deeper into the score with fewer loose ends. He gets the technical details aligned with his musical ideas, a powerful combination.
This week and last, the ASO seemed more relaxed, more alert and — the musicians’ highest compliment — working harder than ever to please him. In addition to his musical gifts, Dutoit gets credit as a master of group psychology. It’s exactly what the ASO needs at this stage of its march toward top-tier status. Can we bring Dutoit, or other senior maestros, back soon?
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Wilson’s ‘Piano Lesson’ at Theatre in the Square
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
 THEATER REVIEW: “The Piano Lesson.” Through April 24.
August Wilson has said that his play “The Piano Lesson” was inspired by Romare Bearden’s 1983 collage of the same name. Painting drama from a palette of super-saturated colors, Wilson is himself a collagist —- and a jazz improviser.
His characters riff and repeat. His supernatural visitations explode with unexplained energy and electricity. And his stories are just as likely to end in violent crescendos as they are in uplifting grace notes.
All this is manifest in Theatre in the Square’s production of the 1990 Pulitzer Prize winner, which coincides with a Bearden exhibit at the High Museum that happens to include “Piano Lesson.” Director Gary Yates and his well-tuned ensemble deliver a funny and provocative production that meditates on issues that have haunted and complicated the lives of African-Americans since slavery.
This ’30s installment of Wilson’s decade-by-decade chronicle of the black experience is essentially about the tug of war between Berniece Charles (Carol Mitchell-Leon) and her brother Boy Willie (Geoffrey D. Williams), who wants to sell the family’s heirloom piano so he can buy a farm.
But Berniece, who is both strident and lovelorn, is not about to let him hoist the instrument out of her uncle’s Pittsburgh home, where Boy Willie has landed with his friend Lymon (Neal Hazard) and a truckload of watermelons. After all, their ancestors were traded for the piano. Their father was killed in a botched attempt to steal it back. And their grieving mother “rubbed it and polished it and bled over it.”
Complicating matters further is the fact that the ghost of slave master Sutter has come to reclaim the piano, too. In Rochelle Barker’s marvelously detailed, sepia-toned set, picture frames suddenly turn askance, lights flicker, and the Charles family threatens to implode.
As in every Wilson play, visitors drop in and out of the picture, to great comic effect.
There’s straight-man Doaker (Rob Cleveland), the family’s uncle and cook, and Avery (LaParee Young), the preacher who’s smitten with Berniece. (Or maybe he just wants to get his hands on that piano.) There’s fast-talking peddler Winning Boy (J. Michael), who unloads his wares on dimwitted Lymon. And there’s Boy Willie’s floozy friend, Grace (Crystal Dickinson), who’s none too thrilled that the only furniture at their disposal is a couch.
Making his stage debut, Michael, who doubles as music director, pulls the comedic punches as adroitly as he bangs the piano. Though sometimes louder than necessary, Williams is an appropriately obnoxious Boy Willie.
But it’s Mitchell-Leon who musters a powerhouse performance as the story’s moral pillar. When Berniece’s brother threatens to sell the family legacy and symbol of its suffering, her pride and strength erupt in a maelstrom of rage and fury, and she whips him with a kitchen rag.
At nearly three hours, “The Piano Lesson” is long-winded, and you must pay careful attention to understand the family’s complex history. Though some of the ghostly special effects felt a little clunky on opening night, the play ultimately finds the musicality and rhythm of Wilson’s poetry. Soaked in blues and splashed with red-hot passion, “The Piano Lesson” is a powerful, painterly song of a play.
THE VERDICT: Well-tuned.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Tuesdays- Saturdays; 2:30 and 7 p.m. Sundays (no 7 p.m. show April 24). Also, 11 a.m. April 13 and 20; 2:30 p.m. April 7. Through April 24. $18-$32. Theatre in the Square, 11 Whitlock Ave., Marietta. 770-422-8369. www.theatreinthesquare.com.
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Party music by Atlanta Chamber Players
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Atlanta Chamber Players. Tuesday at Georgia State University’s Florence Kopleff Recital Hall. www.atlantachamberplayers.com
In the “Fiery Red” finale of Jennifer Higdon’s Piano Trio — of pounded hard surfaces and relentless, industrial motion — the Atlanta Chamber Players took the energized and enigmatic music to the breaking point.
Is the music a sardonic commentary on our modern and increasingly desensitized world? Is the exuberance meant to evoke kids on a playground, swinging higher and higher, oblivious to danger? What’s it all mean?
In her music, Higdon — a Philadelphia composer raised in Atlanta and now performed world-wide — asks more questions than she answers. And her 2003 trio, loaded with compelling but vague imagery, looked and sounded fiendishly difficult to play.
Yet Tuesday at Kopleff Recital Hall, pianist Paula Peace, violinist Christopher Pulgram and cellist Brad Ritchie delivered the complete package: personality, virtuosity and a vivid sense of engagement. The music was important to them. This convinced the audience that it should be important to us, too.
That attitude — eloquent, affirming, hungry to communicate — covered the entire concert. Peace, who founded the group 29 years ago, also has a knack for smart programming. Here she juxtaposed two recent melting-pot American works with jazzy music from 1920s Paris.
A 1990 Piano Trio by Bright Sheng, a Shanghai-born composer now teaching in Michigan, came as the evening’s happiest discovery. He fuses the off-balance rhythms and gutsy, nasal twangs of his native Chinese folk music with Western classical forms. Fresh, playful and profound, Sheng’s voice is among the most compelling on the scene today.
In Francis Poulenc’s 1926 Trio for Piano, Oboe and Bassoon, Peace was joined by Russ deLuna and Carl Nitchie. They found a range of moods, from insouciant to disarmingly tender. Nitchie, the ASO’s principal bassoonist, sang with a bright, burnished tone, sounding at times almost like a French horn.
Although the hall’s noisy ventilation system tried to distract us from the quiet, songful middle movement, the players’ engagement with the music kept our attention rapt.
Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu’s 1927 ballet score, “La Revue de Cuisine,” featured Atlanta’s all-star talent. Among the six musicians were Laura Ardan on clarinet and Christopher Martin on trumpet.
They had a grand time romping through this jazzy, neo-classical “Kitchen Revue.” With the Charleston and Tango among the invited guests, the music seems like a party thrown by Jay Gatsby. It lasted just 15 minutes but could have gone on all night.
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ASO’s ‘The Damnation of Faust’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Thursday in Symphony Hall. Program repeats Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. www.atlantasymphony.org
If it wasn’t the supreme achievement of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s 61-year history, it sure came awfully close.
For Hector Berlioz’s “La Damnation de Faust,” Thursday evening in Symphony Hall, the ASO assembled all the right pieces. Swiss conductor Charles Dutoit, who led Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique” in 2002 — the most musical and inspired I’ve ever heard the ASO — was back for “La Damnation.” It’s one of his specialty works. He led lustrous, top-tier vocal soloists and the always splendid ASO Chorus. It’s that special, and that good.
This despite the fact that the wonderfully irregular music of Berlioz isn’t easily mastered. A maverick by nature, he wrote a lot of gorgeous and emotionally fraught music intended, seemingly, to please only himself. His sense of theater and dramatic pacing is his own. Self-taught, he never learned what an orchestra cannot do. His imagination and flights of creative fancy thus dominate everything he wrote.
Berlioz called “La Damnation,” from 1846, “an opera without decor or costumes.” He had invented a form of concert opera, in other words, in which the singers tell the story and the orchestral music paints the scenery.
Fired by the French composer’s own emotional turmoil, it’s based on the pessimistic and philosophical first book of Goethe’s “Faust,” where the pasty anti-hero plunges into deep isolation and emptiness.
Mephistopheles, as a dashing incarnation of Faust’s most destructive instincts, becomes the enabler of his ruin. Berlioz understood the inherent sexiness of bad guys and the romantic virtues of depression, two very 19th-century ideals. (“La Damnation” holds more brilliance and complexity than his more famous “Symphonie Fantastique,” but the neuroses-set-to-music floorplan is similar.)
Dutoit’s exciting and erudite success comes from tight control of rhythm and orchestral texture. He gets the orchestra to speak in long, eloquent, unbroken paragraphs — the ASO at its best.
He propelled the pops hit “Hungarian March,” which comes early in the opera, to be as loud as possible while keeping each detail clear and in focus. Later, in the “Ballet of the Sylphs,” he brought up the low pedal tone, adding menacing undertones to a lullaby. Dutoit made the grotesque “Ride to the Abyss,” where Faust is driven to hell on crazed horses, about the most scary and exhilarating thing I’ve heard in a concert hall. (Unbelieveably, the audience Thursday didn’t applaud the March, nor any of the vocal arias. And in turnout, the audience was depressingly small for such a grand event; perhaps the ASO’s regular crowd was instead bar hopping for St. Patrick’s Day.)
Dutoit’s singers, making their ASO debuts, contributed much. Mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer, as the naive lover Marguerite, sang with darkly luminous tones, delivering a rapturous “Romance” song — perhaps foremost among the evening’s highlights. With a bright, high, nasal voice and a boyish manner, tenor Gregory Kunde sang an endearing Doctor Faust — not a gnarly old man but as a wayward young depressive. (Kunde is proving his mettle as a Berlioz specialist. He stars on a new CD of the opera “Benvenuto Cellini,” on the Virgin Classics label.)
Sir Willard White, already an operatic legend, acted and danced and purred as Mephistopheles, his bass-baritone ringing, powerful and corky, with a firm bounce in his voice. Baritone Christopher Feigum did well in the small role of the Brander, offering a properly snarky “Song of the Rat.”
The ASO Chorus, too, were at their best. Prepared by Norman Mackenzie, they sang clearly, warmly or fiercely (as required) in three languages: French, Latin and Berlioz’s invented Infernal tongue. And with such a strong, unified performance, for once the chorus couldn’t boast that they were unmatched on stage.
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Boston Marriage at 7 Stages
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
”Boston Marriage.” Through April 3. The verdict: A wickedly wordy drawing-room comedy.
Forget the bouquets. “Boston Marriage” is said to be a Victorian-era euphemism describing a monogamous, and uncelebrated, relationship between two women of certain means and sexual preference.
In David Mamet’s funny, exhilaratingly verbose play of the same name — now receiving a seductive and spirited production at 7 Stages — the title arrangement between the two main characters is rocked at the outset by a pair of developments: Anna (imperiously hilarious Shelly McCook) has taken up with a male “protector” for financial reasons, while Claire (tempting second fiddle Mary Emily O’Bradovich) has fallen for a pretty young lady. Adding to the indignity, Claire wishes to conduct her wooing in the “respectable” refuge of Anna’s home.
Set in turn-of-the-20th century Boston, it all sounds so very — how should we say it? — unMamet-like.
After all, the playwright is famous for his corrosive, rat-a-tat portraits of modern-male desperation (“American Buffalo,” “Glengarry Glen Ross”). So what is he doing raising his pinky and cavorting with Beacon Hill’s tea-and-strumpet circle in the days when the city was a hotbed of women’s suffrage?
Just having some fun, it turns out, lifting the fig leaf of propriety.
“Boston Marriage,” which made its world premiere in 1999, may be set in the fragile, decorous milieu of Henry James, rich with elegant airs, Biblical references, Basque proverbs and dense vocabulary. Yet underneath you can sense Mamet dancing on the cushions in delight as he constructs his house of parlor games and punctures a world of stifling gender stereotypes, class animosity and ethnic prejudice.
It’s not all done through high-flown language, either. His characters talk candidly of sensual matters and he throws in some four-letter words, too, lest you forget whose work you’re watching. And for a few minutes, you might. At least until he begins with the comic sexual allusions to a certain item of winter outerwear. (You figure it out.)
Initially, the heavy wordplay threatens to turn this chamber comedy — three characters, 90 minutes, no intermission — into a chilly exercise in intellectual showmanship; some theaters have included a glossary in the program notes. But the 7 Stages production, a regional premiere handsomely directed by Joe Gfaller, does not take long to warm up to. If all the drawing-room philosophizing smacks of self-indulgence and lacks emotional depth, the play keeps its message in clear context.
Suspense (and laughs) are built through an O. Henry-ish plot twist involving an emerald necklace; a goofy seance idea that seems headed for Woody Allen country; and the mysterious question of who’s playing whom, and for not unsentimental reasons.
Ultimately, though, it’s the tart-tongued McCook who makes this “Boston Marriage” worth the RSVP. With her upswept hair, high-necked collar and studied virulence, Anna not only embodies the perpetually insulted look of faded beauty, she’s an erupting volcano of vitriol. “Can you not conceive of a world above your waist?,” she demands of the smitten Claire.
Her nastiest remarks, however, are reserved for the servant stripe, in the person of her maid (Katie Merritt), a poor put-upon lass from Scotland. Or maybe it’s Ireland. “All is confusion at the water hole,” Anna deadpans.
In the end, of course, this threesome occupies more similar circumstances than they may care to admit. “Men live to be deceived,” Anna says. “They would rather be deceived than sated. We shall prevail.”
At 7 Stages, at least, there’s little question about that.
8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday; 5 p.m. Sunday; 10 a.m. March 24 and 31; 2 p.m. Saturday; 5:30 p.m. March 23 and 30. Through April 3. 7 Stages, 1105 Euclid Ave., Atlanta. 404-523-7647, www.7stages.org.
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Private Lives at PushPush Theater
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Private Lives.” Through April 2. The verdict: A sophisticated drawing-room comedy, minus the sophistication.
Imagine arriving at a seaside hotel for your second honeymoon only to find your ex-spouse honeymooning in the suite next door.
Such is the sticky wicket British playwright Noel Coward created for his most famous couple, the can’t-live-together-can’t-live-apart Elyot Chase and Amanda Prynne, in his wicked and witty 1930 play “Private Lives.”
When the pair fail to convince their new partners to flee and find themselves alone together, their dangerous yet irresistible chemistry resurfaces. Faster than you can down a glass of champagne, they abandon poor Sybil and Victor and make for a Parisian love nest.
In PushPush Theatre’s stripped-down production of “Lives,” that love nest is nothing more than a lumpy love seat on a bare stage.
Not only has director Tim Habeger done away with the usual well-dressed set, he’s made the characters American rather than British and moved the setting from 1930 to the present day. This approach, he says in his program notes, is designed to help audiences feel that the play’s essence still resonates.
Well, the story and characters do hold up — and hold our attention. (In fact, the couples may remind you a bit of the unhappy foursome in the recent play-turned-movie “Closer.”) The problem is that Habeger’s take on the play’s essence — that it’s a battle between personal freedom and moral restraint — is perhaps a little nobler than what Coward had in mind.
Amanda and Elyot are selfish, shallow people: They couldn’t give a fig what others say as long as they’re happy. Their predicament, as Amanda points out, is that they can’t stay happy — together or apart.
The real essence of Coward’s play lies in the vagaries of romantic attraction and the notion that none of us really knows what goes on behind our neighbors’ doors.
Setting “Private Lives” present-day also results in some credulity-straining moments: Would a man who listens to Wilco really be shocked to hear that his ex-wife has taken up with other men during their five years apart?
And while we might see the humor in a man of 1930 proclaiming that “some women should be struck regularly, like gongs,” we’re less inclined to forgive that from a man of 2005.
Then, too, Coward’s language belies Push Push’s modern music and costumes. No one in this century uses words like “shilly-shallying” or marvels at the technological might of the radio.
Though Habeger’s vision of the story may be cloudy, his vision of the stage is spot-on. He makes the absolute most of his tiny piece of real estate, and he isn’t afraid to turn his actors’ backs to the audience to serve the feeling of realness he’s attempting to create.
He commits a brilliant bit of staging midway through Act 2. The script calls for Amanda and Elyot to dance blissfully at an imaginary party, but Habeger has instead choreographed it as a wicked pas de deux. As they come together, arms raised to clasp one another, Elyot instead whacks her on the behind. On their next move, Amanda returns the favor. It’s a perfect illustration of the violence that lurks beneath even their most loving moments.
Habeger also does well as an actor in his role as the frumpy, serious Victor. He displays a tremendous sense of moral correctness and seems truly to love the headstrong Amanda.
Heather Heath as Amanda, Robin Bloodworth as Elyot and Shelby Hofer as Sybil also deliver solid performances. To her credit, Hofer has found a way to tone down the often-shrill Sybil, though she sometimes takes her delivery so far she throws away lines altogether. Heath and Bloodworth in the lead roles possess excellent comic timing but are more convincing fighters than lovers.
Again, that probably stems from the director’s vision: A man can’t cut much of a romantic figure while making silly voices and wearing a shabby bathrobe. By modernizing the play, Habeger has also stripped away some of the essence of all Coward characters: sophistication. Without their gowns and grand pianos, Elyot and Amanda aren’t nearly as much fun to watch.
8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 7 p.m. Sundays. $16 Fridays and Saturdays; $10 Thursdays; $12 Sundays. Through April 2. PushPush Theater, 121 New St., Decatur. 404-377-6332, www.pushpushtheater.com.
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The Exonerated
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
”The Exonerated.” Through March 29.
The verdict: A harrowing, eventually human-affirming look at six people wrongly sent to death row.
The magnanimous spirit of Sunny Jacobs, a woman who unjustly spent much of her life on death row, illuminates “The Exonerated.”
Strikingly portrayed by Parks Stamper as a vital, affirming free spirit, she stands in triumph at the climax of the documentary play based on the true stories of six innocent people sent to death row.
“I’m planting my seed everywhere,” Sunny says, in celebrating her “joyous” moment of long-delayed freedom. Both defiant and sweetly forgiving, she tosses her head as if taking in great gulps of air.
Falsely convicted of murder along with her husband, Jesse, who was brutally killed in a malfunctioning electric chair, she says that her “living memorial” will be that “she didn’t get crushed.” Still, recalling the productive years wasted in prison, she’s suddenly shaken by a sob.
Jessica Blank and Erik Jensen’s anti-death-penalty play, performed last year at Georgia Tech’s Ferst Theater with Lynn Redgrave in the Sunny Jacobs role, exposes legal incompetence, inequities of class and race and justice-system violence. It will come as no surprise that the South once again stands accused for its legalized inhumanity.
A work based mostly on characters’ spoken recollections rather than action risks inertia, but the production largely overcomes this problem with fast intercutting of character appearances and effective dramatic enactments of their words.
Still, the sameness of the stories makes the production drag at times. Each character relates a tale of false arrest, a grossly unfair trial, horrible imprisonment, agonizingly complicated release and a struggle to re-emerge in society.
Providing another strong emotional pole for the Jack in the Black Box Theatre performance, Tyrone P. Holt gives the role of Delbert Tibbs an energetic combination of rap cool and bookish eloquence. The black poet and philosopher serves as a sort of Greek chorus, defining themes and ennobling his own experience of condemnation and redemption with wonderfully street-smart yet transcendent language.
As Robert Earl Hayes, a black man freed with the aid of his own legal maneuvers, Dwayne Jackson oscillates between gentleness, rage and sorrow. Allen Hagler as Kerry Max Cook, James Sutton as Gary Gauger and Kevin Harry as David Keaton define well-etched personalties whose stories go far beyond case studies.
Douglas Curlin and Craig Glassco portray a series of cracker lawmen and incompetent lawyers, reinforcing well-worn, not-so-good-ol’-boy Southern stereotypes.
With much more complexity, Curlin delivers one of the production’s highlights, portraying Jacobs’ husband, also on death row but in a separate prison miles away. Reading a love letter to her, he conveys their enduring love and sexual passion, despite the distance between them. A humorous, tender moment arises when Sunny tells how she and Jesse wrote their intimate language in Japanese to evade the prison censors.
Such well-staged sequences allow a production that risks turning preachy and dogmatic to mostly succeed as theater.
“The Exonerated.” 8 p.m. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and March 27-29. 2:30 p.m. Sundays. $15.00. Horizon Theatre, 1083 Austin Ave., Atlanta. www.jackintheblackbox.org.
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‘Summer and Smoke’ at Theatrical Outfit
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW: “Summer and Smoke.” Through March 20.
Well, I declare: After a long stretch of the vapors, Miss Alma Winemiller has emerged from semi-retirement for Theatrical Outfit’s handsome new production of Tennessee Williams’ smoldering 1948 classic, “Summer and Smoke.”
Alma —- a high-strung preacher’s daughter in Glorious Hill, Miss. —- was William’s favorite heroine, her story the most vivid imitation of his troubled life. Possessed of nervous fits of laughter, heart palpitations and a spirit that’s essentially good and kind, Alma is as sexually frustrated as Maggie the Cat, as sensitive as Laura Wingfield and as neurotic and drug-dependent as Blanche DuBois.
Alma has pined for good-looking Dr. John Buchanan Jr. since they were children, when they used to frolic at the town drinking fountain beside a stone angel called Eternity. This being a magnolia-scented tragedy about unrequited love and the promiscuity of failed romantics, you can be sure that the tale of Alma and John Buchanan Jr. will come to no good end.
Directed by Jay Freer and starring Elizabeth Wells Berkes as the terminally misunderstood Alma, this “Summer” is a mixture of hyperventilating emotional excess, lost comedic opportunities and revelatory interior transformations.
Berkes’ performance is as meticulously constructed as a Gothic cathedral, and as over the top. Though Alma’s trademark laugh is as funny on the 50th time as the first (to me, at least), Berkes is so overwrought from the beginning that she has no place to go. No wonder the whole town mocks poor Alma behind her back.
At the other end of the see-saw is John Jr., a suave and flirtatious womanizer perpetually garbed in white linen. To Thomas Piper’s credit, John doesn’t lapse into the kind of mealy-mouthed Southern caricature that often typifies a Williams man. Unfortunately, his characterization is so somnambulistic that it’s almost devoid of humor and irony.
Such hot and cold performances seem to typify this production. As Alma’s father, Chris Kayser refrains from showmanship, while Marianne Fraulo (as her petulant mother) is a strange brew of garbled sounds and fussy mannerisms. In fact, nearly the entire supporting cast fumbles the comedic episodes that the playwright situated with such glee, the disastrous meeting of Alma’s parlor-room intellectual society being a case-in-point.
The exception is Tom Key (the Outfit’s artistic director) as Dr. John Sr. It’s one of the smaller roles, but Key reinvents himself so fully that he’s almost unrecognizable. Speaking in a nasal monotone, he conducts a probing psychological examination of Alma without ever looking up from his desk. Clearly, this Alabama native knows something about the manners of Southern patricians.
Part of the pleasure of this “Summer and Smoke” comes from its intimate staging at the new Balzer Theater at Herren’s. As per Williams’ explicit production notes, scenic designer Michael Halad unspools a starry cyclorama that serves as a backdrop to the town square and the interiors of the Buchanan and Winemiller homes. Sydney Roberts’ costumes —- ice-cream suits for the men, flouncy frocks for the ladies —- are authentic to the turn-of-the-century milieu.
By the end of this uneven but ultimately satisfying production, the ensemble finds the rhythm and majesty of Williams’ poetry, and Berkes calms down to deliver a heartbreaking Alma, who’s become addicted to sleeping pills. As she tells her latest conquest: “The prescription number is 96814. I think of it as the telephone number of God.”
THE VERDICT: Captures the eternal sadness and misplaced passions of Tennessee Williams.
THE 411: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Saturdays. 2:30 p.m. Sundays. $16.20-$43.20. Theatrical Outfit, The Balzer Theater at Herren’s, 84 Luckie St., Atlanta. 404-577-5257; theatricaloutfit.org.
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Horizon’s ‘String of Pearls’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
THEATER REVIEW: “String of Pearls.” Through April 3.
Cole Porter once penned a charming ditty called “The Tale of the Oyster,” about a “bivalve social climber” that insinuated itself from sea to table to a society matron’s stomach … and then —- blech —- back to its watery home.
It was quite a circuitous journey for the poor little oyster —- but nothing compared with the titular “String of Pearls” in Michele Lowe’s cleverly strung together play at Horizon Theatre.
A better title for Lowe’s script might be “20 Ways to Lose a String of Pearls.” The story begins when soon-to-be-wed Amy discovers that her grandmother’s pearls are missing. It then fishhooks its way through 27 characters, four decades and the belly of a striped bass before coughing up the lost treasure.
By turns funny and poignant, “String of Pearls” is nothing if not a fully exploited writing conceit and acting exercise. It’s probably three or four beads too long and uses a premise so ridiculous it becomes magical. Yet ultimately it works as a sweet affirmation of the feminine quest for beauty, love and remembrance.
Apparently, women’s feelings about pearls are second only to their lust for chocolate. But no lady in her right mind passes truffles, creams and nut clusters from generation to generation. (Or if she does, no one has yet written a play about it.)
Pearls, on the other hand, carry a whisper of eternity, and they are meant to be handed down like memories.
Directed by Megan Monaghan, “String of Pearls” gives a workout to four character actors who are required to orchestrate endless costume and personality changes. It’s a testament to the performers (Monica L. Williamson as bride-to-be Amy, Ann Wilson as her grandmother, Sally J. Robertson as her mother and Donna Biscoe as her mom’s friend, and so on) that they sculpt each portrait with a lapidary’s precision.
Lowe deals with issues of abandonment, loss and betrayal —- as well as caregiving, friendship, independence and the blush of unexpected romance. We go from weddings and funerals to adulterous trysts and speedy getaways.
Robertson, who bears a slight resemblance to actress Kathy Bates, paints some of the most vivid characters: lesbian gravedigger Cindy, “cultured white trash” cafeteria worker Cheryle, judgmental mom Gloria. Williamson and Wilson bring youthful spark to their never-ending transformations. And Biscoe has the best comedic timing.
The one gaffe here is Wilson’s portrayal of Beth. Despite the creaky voice and stooped posture, the actress can’t make us believe she’s a 74-year-old grandmother.
Designer Wm. Moore smartly keeps the scenery simple and symbolic: Baseball-size pearls bob in a pair of reflecting pools, and a barren tree is festooned with strands of pearly buds.
Though the playwright has said that she literally taped pieces of paper together to connect the dots, “String of Pearls” never reads like a cut-and-paste job. Lovely to look at, it’s a well-polished trifle that speaks to the strength and courage of women everywhere.
THE VERDICT: A keeper.
THE 411: 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Fridays; 8:30 p.m. Saturdays; 5 p.m. Sundays. Through April 3. Also 3 p.m. April 2. $20-$25. Horizon Theatre, 1083 Austin Ave. N.E., Atlanta. 404-584-7450, www .horizontheatre.com.
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Hamlet at Shakespeare Tavern
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Hamlet.” Through April 3. The verdict: An inconsistent, much too hammy Hamlet.
Much of the New American Shakespeare Tavern’s “Hamlet” lurches and strains, more farce than profound tragedy. Delicate moments are ruined by playing for laughs, and dramatic tension leaks away.
At the end, though, the company reaches a higher dramatic plane, salvaging the heart-rending denouement of Shakespeare’s most familiar and problematic work.
The problems are typified by Maurice Ralston’s antic and broadly comic performance as Polonius. While the scheming and foolish conveyer of conventional wisdom certainly should be humorous, he should also evoke pathos. But here, so much of the character’s deeper, tragic nature is lost that one of the most chilling, disturbing scenes in English literature — when Hamlet mistakenly stabs the hidden Polonius — brings laughs from the audience.
In the theater’s most demanding role, Matthew Felten as Hamlet comes off more like an amusing, kooky frat boy than a seriously disturbed, threatening, self-tortured character, one of the archetypes of Western culture. His portrayal of Hamlet’s feigned or real madness in the Danish court of Elsinore and his despairing inability to avenge his father’s murder reveal too little of the character’s defining anguish.
Yet, like Hamlet himself, he reaches a deeper level in the final sequence. The high point is the famed “Alas, poor Yorick” speech at the graveyard. Cradling the skull of the long-dead court jester Yorick, a surrogate father for Hamlet in early childhood, Felten shifts from low-voiced, fond introspection to cocky, sardonic musings on death, defining a young man who has cast off boyhood affectations for a new maturity.
Marc McPherson, who resembles the next-door neighbor in a TV sitcom, is miscast as Claudius, the dynamic, evil and conspiratorial king of Denmark. Yet his undeniable acting talent delivers one of the performance’s strongest moments when Claudius cynically and incongruously kneels to pray in an attempt to remove his guilt over murdering his brother, Hamlet’s father. Alone and vulnerable, with Hamlet approaching with drawn sword before again failing to act, McPherson almost makes us pity Claudius, slowly building to the speech’s climax. “O wretched state! O bosom black as death! O limed soul, that struggling to be free, art more engaged!”
Amee Vyas raises the dramatic temperature of the performance with her portrayal of the doomed Ophelia’s madness, more disturbing and convincing than Felten’s effort at Hamlet’s. David Weber as Horatio achieves the full heartbreaking power of the final scene, when, embracing the dying Hamlet, he delivers the famous farewell, “Now cracks a noble heart. Good night, sweet prince.”
The fine closing raises regret that the company that discovered unexpected riches in Shakespeare’s obscure “The Winter’s Tale” could have fallen short with the playwright’s most essential achievement.
“Hamlet.” 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 6:30 p.m. Sundays. $19.50 Thursdays and Sundays; $22.50 Fridays; $24.50 Saturdays. Through April 3. New American Shakespeare Tavern, 499 Peachtree St., Atlanta. 404-874-5299, www .shakespearetavern.com.
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The Michael O’Neal Singers in ‘Elijah’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
The Michael O’Neal Singers. Monday at The Temple on Peachtree St., in Midtown.
Walt Whitman, as a part-time music critic in 1847, heard the first American performance of Mendelssohn’s “Elijah” and pronounced it “too elaborately scientific for the public ear.”
Tuesday evening at The Temple on Peachtree, the Michael O’Neal Singers and several fine vocal soloists delivered an “Elijah” that might have moved the old poet to mend his words.
Similar to Handel’s “Messiah” in structure and form, Mendelssohn’s Biblical oratorio depicts ten scenes from the life of the prophet Elijah, who defended the Israelites’ one God against foreign gods.
And the O’Neal Singers brought it all to glorious life. As a choral trainer, O’Neal has a keen ear for balances and he’s recruited his choir evenly across its sections. At their best, as in the choral number “Cast thy burden upon the Lord,” they sang with a brushed velvety sound.
As a conductor, O’Neal led his 100 singers through a fluent, persuasive performance, of thundering climaxes in the desert sun and tender quiet passages, cool as the shade under an oasis palm. (For Tuesday’s performance, organ and timpani served for the full orchestra. I’d like to hear how O’Neal handles a symphonic band.)
As the title character, bass-baritone John LaForge departed from Mendelssohn’s own description of Elijah — “powerful, zealous, but also harsh and angry and saturine.” LaForge sang a mellower, nicer prophet. He tried to convince us rather than scold, which is certainly more in tune with our culture of self-help spirituality books and Oprah.
The sanctuary’s Sinai-dry humidity levels strained the singer’s throats over the course of the evening. Despite this, the other soloists — tenor Benjamin Pruett sopranos Deborah Benardot and Debbie Rostad, alto Karen Sikorski — sang with a much-appreciated mixture of control and panache.
The evening came together in ideal, three-dimensional splendor from scene no. 6, “Elijah’s desert sojourn,” to the “Final Reflection” The sequence was crisply and movingly sung, a pleasure to hear.
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ASO plays Tan Dun and Mahler
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CONCERT REVIEW
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. Program repeats Friday and Saturday. 404-733-5000, www.atlantasymphony.org.
At the breathless, racing climax of Tan Dun’s Concerto for Water Percussion and Orchestra — an instant before the Symphony Hall audience gave a cheering, standing ovation — soloist Thomas Sherwood plunged a colander into a big bowl of water and lifted it high. Arms outstretched, he produced a rainstorm in miniature.
It was a spectacular flourish to cap a uniquely enchanting piece. It was also the most blatantly theatrical image in a 20-minute work that blurred perceptions of concertos, theater, space and even music itself. Anyone who finds pleasure in the simple sound of giving a baby a bath, or washing a dog in a tub, will be taken by the intrinsic beauty of this concerto.
A little background. The New York Philharmonic offered Chinese-born, New York-based composer Tan a commission for its principal percussionist. (Tan, born in 1957, is best known for his soundtrack to the film “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.”)The sound and symbolism of water, an unlikely substance on the concert stage, intrigued the composer.
Premiered in 1999, the score calls for various gongs, bottles, glasses, plastic tubes, wooden bowls and hands to be dunked, sloshed, gurgled, struck with sticks and made to produce sounds — all while immersed in water. (Microphones helped broadcast the splish-splash noises through the hall.)
The Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Sherwood, its principal percussionist, gave the local premiere of Tan’s concerto Thursday. It was a blast to hear and watch.
They began with the house lights low. Sherwood entered from the back of the hall. He and two fellow percussionists, positioned on either side of the stage, creaked a rusty-hinge cacophony — an ominous introduction. Soon the large water bowls became the primary focus, where Sherwood thrust his hand into the fluid, over and again till the ker-plunks and drips became an intricate rhythm. To this the orchestra took mostly an accompanying role, with passages evoking marching soldiers and perhaps ticking clocks and an ancient, mystical Asiatic past.
What’s so disarming about Tan’s concerto — aside from its likable spirit, at once modernist and populist — is its in-your-face innocence. Splashing water is the most primal of sounds, and thus one of the most soothing and unsettling if we listen closely. We’re nurtured by water, and we can drown in it. Tan forces us to remember what most people purposely forget as insignificant. And it was a winning performance for Sherwood, an ASO member since 1999, who here made his solo debut.
After stagehands mopped up during intermission, conductor Robert Spano and the orchestra performed Gustav Mahler’s “Das Lied von der Erde,” (“The Song of the Earth”), a symphonic setting of quasi-Chinese poems with two vocal soloists. There’s water in this music, too, depicted in the tinkles of the allegretto.
Approaching his own death, the composer here put a lifetime of regrets, fears and introspection into music, and in performance it often feels like his most profound work. What Beethoven’s Ninth is for the triumphant and communal, “Das Lied” is for the resigned and personal.
The orchestra responded with moments of immensely fine playing, including firm French horns and trumpets, Jonathan Dlouhy’s plaintive oboe solo in the second movement and Christopher Rex’s droning cello lines, almost a one-note Greek chorus.
The vocal soloists, too, brought much to the evening. Tenor Anthony Dean Griffey sang with a fresh, Siegfried-style voice, both heroic and boyish, a rare combination that proved quite right for the “Of Youth” movement.
Nancy Maultsby is a mezzo-soprano with a lot of personality and a thick, distinctive, ever-present vibrato. She sang “Of Beauty” with tender heart. But by “Farewell,” the longest and last movement, she seemed emotionally spent, and some of the most poignant, heartbreaking lines passed without special attention. This is a program that I suspect will come together better in subsequent performances.
Spano’s command was total and his interpretation substantive, satisfying and thoughtful without holding any emotional revelations. I don’t think Spano is after that sort of Old-Europe response to this symphony. His take was relatively bright and maybe even youthful. He seemed eager to grasp the music’s wisdom, not revel in its sorrow.
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Elvis Costello plays the Tabernacle
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Elvis Costello has recorded some wonderful songs in the last few decades, but his material (like anyone else’s) could easily stagnate if he let it.
Fortunately, he won’t let it. This student of rock history has found ways to stave off boredom — both the audience’s and his own. Like Bob Dylan, he’s willing to rearrange his melodies and he has a huge catalog from which to draw. Songs sometimes dissolve or segue into one-another, and they keep on coming as if shot from a gun.
At a Costello show, you’re going to get a smattering of chunky and verbose favorites, some interesting obscurities and a batch of new material that holds up surprisingly well against chestnuts like “Alison” and “Uncomplicated.”
His shows can be long, but when your eyelids start to droop, he wakes you up with something unexpected — a guitar freakout or an intimate ballad or a searing rendition of something more than 20 years old, like “Pump It Up.”
The 50-year-old singer-songwriter played for 150 minutes with his band the Imposters Sunday night at the sold-out Tabernacle, and the quartet managed to keep things interesting even as the set pushed toward (and past) the 30-song mark in a single marathon set.
Drummer Pete Thomas, bassist Davey Faragher and longtime keyboardist Steve Nieve left lots of space in the music, which seemed appropriate for the generous sampling of material from Costello’s 2004 album, “The Delivery Man,” which was recorded in Mississippi and retains the scaled-back energy of early rock ‘n’ roll.
At its best, the band broke Costello’s material down to its raw materials, dismantling the tunes and tinkering with the pieces. Members would hold back or fall out altogether, allowing the others to surge and show off. During one particularly memorable moment, when Costello’s guitar conversed with Thomas’ drums, the band sounded like the Detroit garage-blues duo the White Stripes.
Other, more conventional highlights included the lesser-known gems “King Horse” and “Suit of Lights,” the set-closing “The Scarlet Tide” (sung, in part, unamplified), plus the rocking cover tunes “I Can’t Stand Up For Falling Down” and “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding.”
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Critic’s Notebook: Emory’s Race and Identity in Music
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
“A Dawson Celebration,” at Emory University, Thursday-Saturday. www.music.emory.edu.
When you chop into an onion, you’re not searching for a core — the valuable stuff comes with the peelings.
In this spirit, Emory University hosted a three-day national conference called “An Exploration of African-American Music and Identity at the Dawn of the 21st century.”
With 41 notable musicians and scholars on hand, curator Dwight Andrews called it a “once-in-a-generation chance” to “help rethink how race is thought about in music.”
The music of William Dawson (1899-1990) served as a launch point, as his papers were recently donated to Emory. Dawson’s most known work, the “Negro Folk Symphony,” from 1934, was performed over the weekend by the Atlanta Symph