April 24, 2008

Duet for Two Hearts

A little over an hour into the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s big-hearted production of Lanford Wilson’s Talley’s Folly, Jonathan West stands center stage, looming over the audience under the tattered gazebo of the Talley family boathouse. “People in Europe are very wasteful of people,” he muses, remembering a horrific event of his past. The entire play has lead to that moment, and West brings it home with a wizened detachment that masks a pain that has nearly paralyzed him all his life. But more than that, he embodies a particular clash of American cultures at mid-20th century. A European Jew looking back (and presciently forward) at horrors visited on his people, framed by America’s sunny infatuation with tradition—faux Victorian brick-a-brack, frayed and crumbling as history marches forward.
Wilson’s play is decidedly a personal story, but also one that resonates with the echoes of global events. West is Matt Friedman, a Jewish tax lawyer who has come to Lebanon, Missouri, to woo Sally Talley, who has done nothing less than revitalize his faith in the power of love and humanity. She’s not exactly a life force. As wonderfully played by Laura Gray, Sally is bitter, fatalistic and closed off from the world. But Friedman senses in her the possibility of connection, and the play spends its 97 minutes peeling away layers of the characters’ psychic armor until those possibilities are beautifully clear to everyone.

Read the complete review at Culture Club.

Photo: Jonathan West as Matt Friedman and Laura Gray as Sally Talley. Amanda Schlicher Photography

Amphibians 'R' Us

Children’s theater has a lot of street cred these days, and part of the reason is A Year with Frog and Toad, a sweet little tadpole of a musical that gave The Children’s Theatre Company of Minneapolis a Broadway hit in 2003. The show received three Tony nominations, and helped CTC nab a Tony award for Best Regional Theater the following year, a first for a youth-oriented company. Based on Arnold Reale’s charming, simple children’s books, the show’s strengths are, well, its charm and simplicity.
There’s plenty of that in the new production by First Stage Children’s Theatre. There isn’t much story here—the play doesn’t really aspire to anything but what its title suggests—but, director Tony Clements is a music theater veteran, and he knows how to keep things springing right along.

Read the complete review at Culture Club.

We (heart) Edo!

Milwaukee’s love fest with Edo de Waart continued last Thursday night, and he gave back in sonic spades. The Music Director Designate conducted Holst’s The Planets in the informal setting of the Milwaukee Symphony’s Classical Connections series. Taking the stage after a snappy promotional video, De Waart received a standing ovation from the substantial crowd even before he lifted his baton.
Classical Connections concerts are designed to appeal to the less snooty music fans. This one featured a video program with images (both real and computer generated) from around the solar system. It was originally scheduled for all the concerts, but the MSO scrapped the screen for the “serious” weekend program. The Connections concerts are also shorter, and are peppered with conversations about the music in between selections. Tonight, however, there was very little said about Holst and a whole lot said about De Waart. Both concertmaster Frank Almond and principal cellist put on their Regis Philbin hats to ask De Waart about his history and his path to Milwaukee (they have both worked with him in the past). Charming but hardly gregarious, De Waart chatted about his early years.

Read the rest of the review in Culture Club.

April 15, 2008

An Armitage Sampler

Karole Armitage is used to a nomadic life. She’s spent much of the past two decades bumping around Europe directing ballets and operas. But in 2005, she decided to set down roots in New York with a new company, Armitage Gone! One of the major projects of that company is “The Dream Trilogy,” the final segment of which premiered in New York in January.
Armitage brought a very pared down version of that trilogy to Alverno College’s Pitman Theatre Saturday night—or it might even be called a sampler. The six dancers performed the first (of three) section of “Ligeti Essays” (2007) without its frozen landscape set by David Salle. And they followed it with a shortened version of “Time is an echo of an ax within a wood” (2004).
So rather than an extended exploration of a particular themes or ideas, we got two short, contrasting works that said a lot about what Armitage is up to with her new company. The “Ligeti Essays,” set to short songs by the much loved Hungarian composer György Ligeti who died in 2007, lost some of its visual resonance on the bare stage (you can see an excerpt of the original staging here). Set on David Salle’s ice-rink in purgatory, the tender duets evoked tenderness on the edge of oblivion, the dance equivalent of Schubert’s long, lonely walk in Die Winterreise. On the Pitman Theatre stage, you could feel the ice with each slide (the dancers wore socks, which allowed an assortment of skate-like moves), but you felt none of the chill.
Still, the movement was remarkable for its viscous fluidity. Though the mood of each of the 15 pieces vary wildly, this is a cozy armchair of a dance—soft, plush, perfectly captured by Peter Speliopoulos’s simple velvet costumes. The partnering is athletic but giving. When William Isaac gently pushes head of Mei-Hua Wang, their whole bodies pulsate like amoebas in a Petri dish. Even as Ligeti’s music shifts from elegiac to wacky, the style of the dance is loose and rubbery. And the sextet has the astonishing technique to render these ideas with amazing ease.
In “Time is an echo…” the mood is completely different. The look is taut and metallic (including Salle’s beaded curtain which ripples sensuously when the dancers step throuth it). The Bartok music (“Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta) is gently propulsive, and the dance’s energy drives it as much as follows along. The style here is equally smooth and flexible, but it has more the feel of bodies at war with themselves. There’s a throughline of tension that isn’t as much resolved at the end of each sequence as held in check until the next phrase starts.
But through both pieces, you can see a brave new combination of Armitage’s influences: Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, her years of dabbling with more pop forms. It’s a dense, beautiful collection of ideas executed by astonishing dancers, even if they didn’t seem to capture the full picture of Armitage’s original vision.
"Ligeti Essays" photograph by Paul Kolnick; "Time is an echo..." photograph by Amitava Sarkar.

April 13, 2008

The Irma Vanishes


If I had my druthers, you'd be reading a review of Next Act Theatre's The Mystery of Irma Vep on this very page. But that's been sabotaged by the sheer popularity of the show. Unable to attend on opening night, I tried to nab a seat last week, only to be faced with a big fat SOLD OUT. That's OK. There's always next week, and knowing my 10-year-old son likes a good mummy joke as much as the next guy, I thought I'd catch the show with him. No such luck. In fact, the current Next Act calendar shows the sell outs stretching into the second week in May. Good for John McGivern and Chris Tarjan, who I'm sure have great fun with Charles Busch's script. Good for David Cescarini and Charles Kakuk and all the folks at Next Act.