First, a big shout out (John Cage style) to Josh Schmidt, local composer and sound designer extraordinaire. His musical, Adding Machine, has opened in New York to rave reviews. Everybody is talking about it. Read the New York Times review here.
And now to things a little closer to home….
Looking Forward:
Eileen Favorite lives in Chicago, but a few years ago, she spent a lot of time on the road between Chicago and Milwaukee to visit her ill brother, a former teacher at Riverside High School. Those long drives spurred her imagination, and lead to the fanciful novel, The Heroines, in which a rural bed-and-breakfast is visited by women like Scarlet O’Hara, Emma Bovary and Daisy Buchanan. She’ll read from her work with Aryn Kyle, whose The God of Animals is one of the most praised first novels in recent memory.
A few years ago, you couldn’t swing a dramaturge without hitting a production of Antigone, Sophocles’ powerful meditation on the conflict between personal conscience and political efficacy. That just might have had something to do with our own political circumstances, but who knows. Now that those circumstances have changed (not!), Milwaukee Dance Theatre and Present Music collaborate on a fresh version of the story, written by MDT’s Mark Anderson and Isabelle Kralj, with original music by Present Music’s Eric Segnitz.
An “opera in church vestments.” That’s what Verdi contemporary Hans Von Bulow (no relation to Klaus, we hope), called Verdi’s Requiem Mass. Big, blustery and, yes, operatic, Verdi’s mass has been called the loudest piece of music ever written. We’re sure that Andreas Delfs and his orchestra, chorus and soloists will give much more than volume. But consider this one classical piece that “turns it up to 11.”
Contemporary jazz composer and pianist Vijay Iyer might be on the other end of the musical spectrum. But his music still packs a wallop. Recently chosen as both the top “rising jazz soloist” and “rising jazz composer,” Iyer’s solos and compositions dig deep into multiple music traditions, including the ragas and hypnotic patterns of Indian music.
From the multiplex to the matriarchal. Get away from standard Hollywood fare by checking out the Women without Borders Film Series, five days of documentaries about the lives and experiences of women from around the world. The highlight will certainly be Jennifer Fox’s Confessions of a Free Woman, a six-hour exploration (shown in two parts) of women’s identity in cultures that have thrown off traditional ideas about gender roles and power. Fox will be at both screenings.
And for those of you who still need some more Russian literature in your lives, it’s the last weekend to catch Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s terrific production of Crime & Punishment. For a refresher, see my review from last week.
Looking Back:
Imagine a play in which none of the characters talk to each other, but only to themselves, or perhaps directly to us – that anonymous collection of humanity we call The Audience. Would that be a play at all? Brian Friel’s mesmerizing Faith Healer mines the tradition of Irish storytelling to seemingly do the impossible: create a piece of drama with rich characters, strong narrative anddevastating conflict that is composed entirely of four monologues.
Next Act Theater’s production, directed by Edward Morgan, captures the myriad richness of Friel’s script – its lilting, glorious language, its resuscitative humor and its slow, devastating journey into the dark realities of the human soul. And its music.
For that’s how Friel holds things together in these tales – shifting tones, restated themes, elegant variations. Francis Hardy begins the play by intoning the Welsh towns that his itinerant faith healing show has visited: “Abergower, Aberfeldy, Inverary, Dunvegan, Dunblane.” And his wife (or mistress, depending on whose story you believe) repeats the mantra in her own story. Phrases echo one another – “about as far north as you can go in Scotland,” each character says, describing the town where one of the story’s most horrifying events takes place. Fred Astaire’s sweet voice winds its way through the play as well.
But it’s the dissonances in the music that are the meat of the play. The story says more about the teller than the tale, and perhaps more about the nature of truth and memory, as well. Here, the tales are both defensive and confessional. They wrap their tellers in illusion one moment, and scrape down to the bone in the next. And ultimately, they paint a picture of lives lived in a charmed space between truth and fiction – as all lives must be.
Jonathan Smoots is not naturally suited to play Frank Hardy. An actor of commanding presence with an operatic baritone of a voice, he might have overwhelmed Hardy’s wily, slippery charm. But Smoots makes this convoluted showman his own, using the dynamic range of his voice to suggest all of Hardy’s facets – bombastic, insecure, self-lacerating and, in fleeting moments, transcendent. Mary MacDonald Kerr plays Grace with a painful sense of lonely regret, a woman completely overwhelmed by and obsessed with her memories. As Teddy, the “company’s” tour manager, David Cecsarini is stunning, completely inhabiting the sly, cockney showman who has put his faith in the power of the theater – whether the “shows” involved Frank’s unearthly healing or a whippet dog that plays the bagpipes. With his neat bow tie and slicked-down hair, Teddy is a man of surfaces who somehow became enmeshed in the tangled questions at the very foundation of humanity.
My only regret about this production is that my schedule didn’t allow me to see it until the final weekend. It’s a piece of work that should be – or should have been – seen by everyone who loves the theater and the stories it tells.
The joys of the UWM Theater Department’s production of Of Mice and Men are in the lobby as well as onstage. An extensive and thorough display of original documents and photographs from the 1930s spans the outside wall of the theater. Pamphlets from political and social organizations, rallying cries, posters and photos give a palpable sense of the world in which John Steinbeck’s story is set.
Director Rebecca Holderness’s interest in Of Mice and Men as a piece of social history goes beyond the lobby, though. None other than writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans occupy the world of the play, first in a prologue drawn from the pair’s famous chronicle of rural poverty, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and then as silent figures hovering around the action of Steinbeck’s story.
Agee’s book is famous both for its vivid description of the impoverished lives of Southern sharecroppers’ families. And for its anxiety about living among them as a voyeur, using a chronicle of their private lives to entertain or fascinate American magazine-buying intellectuals. (Fortune Magazine, which assigned the story, eventually rejected it.) There’s no record of Steinbeck having similar anxieties, but Agee was obviously right – both about Walker Evans’s photographs and Steinbeck’s characters. We look at them now from a sepia-tinted distance that turns them into bloodless icons instead of real people who are victims of particular social forces. The play is certainly a tragedy of sorts, but the kind of tragedy that plays out in the lives of real people every day.
Holderness wants to strip away the stale iconography from Steinbeck’s story. She uses the breadth and depth of the UWM Mainstage Theater to evoke the vast American landscape. And she throws WPA-era photographs of itinerants and farmland onto two huge projection screens (set and lighting design by Richard H. Graham) so we keep the realities of place in mind. The characters move in a thoroughly contemporary space with bench-like structures that create the bare outlines of the ranch bunkhouse and barns where the story takes place. The sheet of silver Mylar in the background suggests we’re seeing everything through a huge camera lens, or perhaps the lens of history.
While the metaphor is rich, it involves some practical compromises. Most of the action is set back from the front of the stage, and the distance keeps us from the emotional relationships of the characters. And the platforms don’t quite represent the structures of the buildings, so there are awkward entrances and exits.
Still it’s a potently modern take on a play caked with layers of nostalgia and sentiment. The actors – particularly Daniel Koester (George), Michael Cotey (Slim) and Jack Swokowski (as Candy, the crusty Walter Brennan role) – find ways to cut through the schmaltz without sacrificing truth or heart. The incidental music – folk songs by Bob Dylan and Townes Van Zandt – are reincarnations of Woody Guthrie for a modern world. They remind us that the struggle for decency and humanity is a story that is not simply a part of history, but a part of life.
