Dave Read

Twelfth Night at Shakespeare and Co.

July 31, 2009 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall.

Shakespeare and Company’s production of Twelfth Night, or What You Will, one of the William Shakespeare’s most delightful and convoluted comedies, is zesty, well-cast, and fast-paced.

The play is set in Illyria, one of those charming “anywhere places” that allows a director to choose any period and romantic locale for its complicated and hysterically funny events to unfold.

Here the period is magnificently evoked and clad by Govane Gohbauer in early Elizabethan grandeur, and Illyria is nearby a sea where a shipwreck can separate family members who believe each other dead, a plot often employed by Shakespeare.

In this play, the plot is complicated by having the lost ones be identical twins, save for sex, Viola (Merritt Janson) and Sebastian (Jake Waid), but having Viola dress as a young man to gain employment in the household of Duke Orsino (Duane Allen Robinson).

The Duke is pining with love (and rejection) for a wealthy neighbor, the young and beautiful Olivia (Elizabeth Raetz) who has gone into seven years mourning for the death of a brother, but who very quickly is roused out of her grief when Viola is sent, as a young page with a love message from the Duke

Viola bravely resists Olivia’s very physical, and hysterically funny attempts at seduction; indeed poor Viola, still grieving for her lost twin, has meanwhile fallen in love with the Duke, her employer.

Cast of Twelfth Night at Shakespeare and Co.

Meanwhile, in Olivia’s household, a comical subplot unfolds as her riotous sponging and drunken uncle, Sir Toby Belch (Nigel Gore) with his friend Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Ryan Winkles) who is more of a clowning fool than the house-fool Feste (Robert Biggs) who tends to rational wit, vagrancy and wonderful singing, and Sir Toby is also helped by the witty housemaid Maria (Corinna May) to entrap Olivia’s piously bigoted steward Malvolio ( Ken Cheeseman) who imposes his Puritanical ways on all, in a situation that will undo his wits.

With so many characters entwined in plots that would seem impossible to unravel, especially when both twins weave among its strands, but never at the same time and thus always being mistaken for the other, all the hysteria leading to duels and an unlikely marriage and even another sub plot involving Antonio (Johnny Lee Davenport) a sea-caption who befriends Sebastian.

However, by the last scene in Act V, with all the characters on stage, everything is happily resolved with three sets of happy lovers united and Viola finally “unmasked” but still clad in her boy’s clothes, and only the unloved (by anyone) Malvolio wheeled away.

The play is threaded by music, that of Shakespeare’s verse and songs within the play itself. The melodies have been composed by Robert Biggs, Bill Barclay and Alexander Sovronsky and are mainly sung by Biggs whose ability to get the whole audience joining in singing along with him is the better part of his role (official clown) which in this production seemed usurped by Sir Andrew in his foppish attire.

I found the production delightful and rewarding. Director Jonathan Croy has led his cast well, and also found time to design the suitable, elegant, and flexible scenery.

Viola has the best part and deserved it with her fine acting. Her scenes with Olivia were my favorite ones in the play. But each actor deserves kudos.

This play begins with music and ends with it and we the audience are all glad we have been there and been a part of it. Even the weather cooperated and failed to produce a drop of rain on press night when dire events were again predicted. How lucky we can sometimes get in the Berkshires!

Shakespeare & Co. 2009 schedule
Review: Measure for Measure – July 22, 2009
Review: Hamlet – June 26, 2009
Review: Pinter’s Mirror – June 14, 2009
Review: Golda’s Balcony – June 17, 2009
Review: Bad Dates – Feb. 1, 2009

Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal at Jacob’s Pillow

July 29, 2009 performance reviewed by Jocelyn McGrath.

Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montreal, photo by Robert Etcheverry

To spend the evening with Les Grand Ballet Canadiens is something like being with a bunch of long lost cousins at a family reunion; there is a tribal sense of belonging without actually having met each other before. From the first image of a red, hazy sea of undulating arms in Four Seasons, to the raucous and earthy old world dance scene in Cantata, there is a primal connection. The roots of our cultural family tree go deep, deep into the Eden-like fields and valleys of the Four Seasons, deep into social and gender bonds of an old world village. 2014 Jacob’s Pillow schedule, Contact info. and links

Les Grands Ballets Canadiens, founded by Ludmilla Chiriaeff in 1952, is a progressive and eclectic ballet company with a long association with Jacobs Pillow. The company’s American debut was here 50 years ago, and since then they have returned many times. The company cultivates the highest level of artistry in a rich, contemporary ballet vocabulary, choreographed by Mauro Bigonzetti: graceful classical arms and leg extensions seamlessly transition to undulating spinal contractions and quirky, gestural hands. Other traditional boundaries are loosened. These are dancers with voices; they are heard as well as seen. They hum, sing, shout, and yip with delight. They beat their chests, clap and slap, and in one case, audibly blow air like the cherubs painted on a Renaissance ceiling, creating enough wind to roll an intertwined pair of lovers slowly offstage.

The first scene of Four Seasons is lush, a luxurious of sea of bodies (On a stage the size of the Pillow’s, twenty dancers is a sight to behold…). Arms wave in harmony, then differentiate, then couples form. Each couple abruptly embraces and then almost instantly springs apart, as if that one moment time has just reversed. This clutching repeats, rhythmically, percussively. The pointe shoes worn by the women in Four Seasons also become percussive—sometimes in a booming stomp, sometimes in the staccato rhythm of the quickly released releve. The female dancers firmly hold deep lunges on pointe—statuesque in the way of the Roman goddesses. Minimal, filmy costumes in nude and terra-cotta lead to thoughts of natural man and woman, to a time of primal, playful innocence. Humor is an important ingredient in making this familiar musical piece fresh.

The emotional texture of the second piece of the evening, Cantata, originates in the music, performed live by Gruppo Musicale Assurd. Composed of four women vocalists, they are one of the foremost performing troupes of traditional and popular Italian music. In the way flamenco instrumentalist and vocalists are integral to the art, these women sing and play while intermingling with the dancers on stage. Their voices, earthy and raw, lend hope and humanity to the darker themes of human relationships.

For this piece, the back of the stage is exposed, the huge, rustic wooden beams providing a perfect backdrop to a freewheeling old world village scene—a social dance perhaps, with all of the players on stage at all times either watching or dancing. The tenderness and authenticity of the songs balances the disturbing motifs: clustered group of women bite their fingers and hands; the men extend a claw of a hand, mouths wide open; a woman stretches both arms behind her, hands writhing. Women are carried by the men in a strange variety of ways—convulsing, or draped as if dead, or flipped sideways like a board, completely upside-down and then back again.

Though the gender relations are unsettled and tense, the dancers are literally straining alternately toward each other and then away, the emotional resolution lacking in the duets is ultimately found in a joyous full company celebration. Loose-limbed, with flinging hair, the wild energy mounts as the piece culminates in a raucous explosion. And this village is welcoming and generous—we are all invited to join the party—simply as members of the extended human family.

Each piece runs 40 minutes, with an intermission in between.

Brahms’ A German Requiem at Tanglewood

July 25, 2009 performance reviewed by Dave Conlin Read.

We stepped away from the careening carousel that life in the Berkshires can become by late July to attend Brahms’ A German Requiem, on words from Holy Scripture, performed in the Koussevitsky Music Shed at Tanglewood by the Boston Symphony Orchestra with James Levine conducting, Hei-Kyung Hong, soprano, Matthias Goerne, baritone, and the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, John Oliver, conductor.

Our need for a little inner quiet was met fully by this performance of the piece that served dual purposes for Brahms, addressing the deaths of his mother, Christiane, and of his mentor and spiritual father, Robert Schumann.

We arrived early enough to read Jan Swafford’s program notes, as well as the scriptural passages to be sung, drawn from 11 Biblical sources, including Matthew, Peter, Psalms, Ecclesiastes, Corinthians, and Revelations. This is not a liturgical work, not a Mass; Brahms assembled the text from the Protestant Bible but omitted Christian dogma in favor of espousing a humanist view.

The opening and closing movements are similarly quiet and sombre, “Selig(Blessed)” the first and last word to be sung; at first, it is the living being blessed, or comforted, and then, finally, the dead, “…that they may rest from their labors; and their works do follow them.”

Brahms’ triumph, and tonight’s beautiful performance meant that the listener didn’t need the text in order to experience a full range of emotion, nor to be swept into a meditative state from time to time. For our part, we came away feeling that, as insignificant we may indeed be in the scheme of life, nonetheless there is magnificence to be experienced (or, to the experience) along the way, if we will.

The Truth that life is best lived in community was reenforced by the brilliance of the Tanglewood Festival Chorus, which was first among equals in this performance; for all the artistry of tonight’s soloists, it seems that the solo parts could have been sung by ordinary choristers, as stand-ins for every man and every woman.

Their finest moment came with the verse from 1 Corinthians, where they loosed a tremendous, defiant sound, repeating (in German, of course) “O Death, where is they sting? O Death, where is thy victory?” Although the sound couldn’t be more different, we recognized the passage as being the likely source for the classic Bluegrass song “O, Death,” an a capella version of which earned a Grammy award in 2002 for Dr. Ralph Stanley.

Merce Cunningham’s gift

We are re-posting material relating to Merce Cunningham upon the occassion of his death, July 26, 2009: this reminiscence and review of Merce Cunningham Dance Company came to MASS MoCA that originally were published on NewBerkshire.com in 2000.

The Greenwich Village artists’ scene of the 1940s, as recalled by Frances Benn Hall.

When I graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1941, I was so eager to dash off to seek fame and fortune in the arts world of Greenwich Village that I boarded the first train for Manhattan and told the college to mail me my diploma.

Getting a job, any job, proved difficult. I finally found a lowly clerical one in the garment district. It paid $17 a week – all my MA in theatre was worth at that time, and the job only obtained when I said I could give Sinclair Lewis as a local reference.

(During the previous Fall at college, I had been one of a group of fifteen to whom he taught creative writing. Only one member of our class seems to have achieved literary fame in later life; Howard Moss was for years poetry editor of The New Yorker.)

In those lean years, The Village still thronged with starving artists. Finding housing was easy. I quickly moved into the front room of a basement apartment on West 13th Street where my rent was $6.00 a week. I shared the kitchen and bath with two dancers from Martha Graham’s group. One had a tiny maid’s room in the back, and the other, Merce Cunningham, slept on a cot in the communal kitchen. Their weekly rent was even lower than mine.

Merce was already honored in the dance world and that Spring was performing the solo “Dear March Come In”; in Graham’s Letter to the World, but was not yet world famous as he would become, and thus as needy as the rest of us. He worked at his dancing like a demon, but he did find time to join, with me, a Village theatre group called The Bendukov Theatre Studio, to which we went evenings to work on, but never have money to produce, exotic plays such as Cummings’ him and Byron’s Cain.

Food was a big problem, and what little our pooled pittances could afford was stored in a small wooden ice-box in the kitchen to which the ice-man automatically came. However, it got to the point where his bill had mounted alarmingly, and because we could not pay it, we avoided meeting him. This had a negative side in that he kept delivering ice even when there was no food in the box.

I can remember standing in the kitchen beside Merce as he emptied the water from the drip pan into the sink and sadly remarked, “There goes another quarter.” In that long-ago Manhattan where a nickel was all one needed for the subway or for a boat ride across the harbor from the Battery to Staten Island, a quarter was not treated lightly.

Since I had a “real” job, I had more ready cash, meager though it was, than Merce usually had. However, once, rather hurriedly, he thrust a dollar bill at me and said, “Buy yourself something frivolous,” before he loped off to rehearsal in Martha’s studio over in a loft just north of Washington Square.

I took my dollar, boarded the 7th Avenue subway at the corner of West 12th, got off at Macys where in the basement bookstore I bought my first copy of James Joyce’s Ulysses. It now sits proudly among the three long shelves of Joyce books on my living room wall among several other copies of Ulysses I have since acquired. But it remains my favorite one because on the fly leaf I wrote the date and the words, “Something frivolous from Merce.”

Had I become the great writer Lewis had encouraged me to try to be, I would know that the above paragraph is my conclusion. However, I must add a coda to round out the picture.

My large front room also, when I was not sleeping in it, served us as a communal living room, and we sometimes held parties there. One night there was such a party at which I was not present. When I returned around midnight, the party had wound down, and the stragglers left so I could go to bed.

They had been having a bit wilder time than usual, and although none of my personal belongings were ever disturbed, that evening a young artist in his glee had painted a mural on my ceiling. It was not unattractive. I remember thinking it really quite good. It was a great angel with outstretched wings that covered most of the ceiling. I felt I could sleep with that angel hovering over me and went to bed.

However, my alarm woke me to a startling and embarrassing discovery. Lying in my bed, staring at the ceiling changed my perspective. That so innocent-seeming angel had been so painted that a foot-long pipe, relic of some long-ago light fixture, had become a giant phallus.

Life among the artists had become too much for me. After work that day, I found a room on West 12th Street with a nosy and prudish landlady, very fussy about keys and using the pay phone in the hall after 8 PM, but willing to rent me a room with which I could cope.

It was only recently, discussing those days with a Graham dancer who was present at that long-ago party, that I was reminded of a fact that I had forgotten: The young artist was named Robert Motherwell.

2014 Jacob’s Pillow schedule, Contact info. and links

Merce Cunningham Dance Company at MASS MoCA

We are re-posting material relating to Merce Cunningham upon the occasion of his death, July 26, 2009: this review and a reminiscence of Merce Cunningham that originally were published on NewBerkshire.com in 2000.

October 28, 2000 performance reviewed by Connell McGrath

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company came to MASS MoCA to perform Summerspace (from 1958), and his most recent work, Biped. Cunningham is one of the pioneers of contemporary dance, beginning his career as a dancer in the Martha Graham Dance Company in the 1940s and forming his own company in 1953. 2014 Jacob’s Pillow schedule, Contact info. and links

The evening was co-sponsored by Jacob’s Pillow and had the feel of an important artistic and historical event. Biped is a great piece of choreography and artistry, and it was particularly meaningful to see it at MASS MoCA while Cunningham is still active in the direction of his troupe. He collaborated with multimedia artists Paul Kaiser and Shelley Eshkar who created the computer graphics for Biped while in residence at MoCA. Collaboration was a significant theme of the evening; MoCA is becoming known for such meetings of various fields of contemporary art and artists.

For Biped, the stage was defined by a transparent screen covering the front of the stage on which computer images were projected, standard black curtains at the sides and a combination of curtain and darkness at the back.

This confining of the stage by the screen in front and darkness at the back made a box of the performance space, a clearly defined arena of performance. Costumes were made of a dark, metallic material that read well behind the screen. Lighting was predominantly white and divided the stage into four quadrants. It was effective, evocative and somewhat moody.

Music was by Gavin Bryars, and performed by David Arrowsmith, Loren Kiyoshi Dempster and Takehisa Kosugi on a variety of instruments, some prerecorded. One striking aspect of the sound score for Biped was the sound of dice being rubbed together and rolled, recalling the use of chance in this piece and as a central force of creation in Cunningham’s work.

The cast for Biped was quite extensive, with fourteen dancers in all, often performing in groups of three or four with men in one group and women in another. A few times during the piece, the dancers paired into male/female partners and danced similar, slightly off sync duets that were lovely and technically brilliant. One aspect of the dancing itself was that no one dancer had a starring role; Biped is an ensemble piece from beginning to end, and it was the movements of the whole troupe that defined its brilliance.

Computer manipulated images of dancing recorded with motion-capture sensors attached to dancers’ bodies are projected on the screen in front of the dancers on stage. These images were used sparingly, and for the most part did not upstage the live dance, but at times the images were dense enough and striking enough to take the audience’s main focus. After some practice, it became possible to watch both at once, but only with effort.

One effect of this use of technology combined with the full troupe on stage was to give the piece a busy-ness and a fullness that is no doubt intentional. In this way, the piece may reflect our current condition, living in a time when relaxation and “down-time” is rare, most landscapes are full of people, and so many different events-many of them computer-generated-vie for our attention. One question that came to me as I watched this dance was “What’s more important, the people or the recorded images of people?”

One of the most effective aspects of the staging is the dancers’ use of the darkness at the back of the stage. They enter and exit from the back, through darkness, and seem to appear and disappear out of thin air. At points in the performance, dancers are positioned in half darkness at the back, holding statuesque poses. This use of entering and exiting through darkness gives Biped an existential quality, with dancers there then not there, or an empty stage suddenly populated with living, dancing beings.

The piece ends with a stage full of dancers, slowly winding down their movements, and stopping by ones and twos. As the curtain falls, only a few dancers are still moving while the rest hold their final poses. Despite sadness in this ending, and the weighty aspect of the ideas evoked by the piece as a whole, Merce Cunningham himself is obviously a lover of life and he creates his dances with a light heart.

Merce Cunningham’s pre-preformance discussion on his career and Summerspace.

On the Thursday prior to the MASS MoCA performance, Merce Cunningham and his archivist, David Vaughan, gave a talk in which they discussed his various roles in the creation of Biped in detail and gave some brief history of Summerspace.

A few aspects of what Cunningham had to say in this talk merit repeating. He made it clear that he knew little about the technology used in the making of Biped, and that he has always been most interested in working at the edge of the new and the unknown. This requires that he give over control of many aspects of his creations to other artists, and this he does with apparent willingness and as a matter of course.

He spoke of chance operations, and revealed that throughout his work from Summerspace in 1958 to Biped in 1999, he has used chance to determine parts of the structure and sequencing in his pieces. Here again is a relinquishing of authority over his work to other forces. Finally, he talked about the collaborative process in deciding how to compose the technological part of Biped. In his discussions with Shelley Eshkar and Paul Kaiser about the computer art and décor for Biped, they requested that certain sequences be kept together for technical reasons, to which Cunningham readily agreed.

The rest of the sequencing was decided by chance operations such as coin toss or roll of dice. This flexibility and humility in his approach to collaboration shows a trust in the process of artistic creation, in chance and in his fellow artists that no doubt informs his work and contributes to its greatness.

Summerspace is an archival piece, and was the first piece in which Cunningham used chance operations in the arrangement of his dance phrases. Each aspect of the piece conspired to evoke summer: Feldman’s music had a light, arrhythmic, melodic sound like occasional bird calls, and the sound of dancers’ footfalls added a syncopation that music lacked. Rauschenberg’s stage-wide backdrop was painted in bright colors, as were his costumes (how many dancers ever get to wear a Rauschenberg?). Lighting was bright, fading slightly at certain points to evoke summer evenings, and adding a dreamlike quality to the piece.

Summerspace is danced by six dancers, two male and four female. The dance phrasing was balletic and seemed dated and simplistic by contemporary standards. The dance movements were of the natural world, sometimes to the point of humor, such as when Koji Minato fluttered his hands above his head like a small bird flying. It is a sweet, mysterious, dancerly piece that was groundbreaking in its time. It is the simple work of a young choreographer at the beginning of the dance revolutions of the 1960s and 70s.

The Prisoner of Second Avenue at Berkshire Theatre Festival

July 25, 2009 performance reviewed by Frances Benn Hall

Berkshire Theatre Festival’s production of the Neil Simon play, The Prisoner of Second Avenue, is a hilarious comedy that at times spills over into farce in the incredible number of disasters that befall the middle-aged couple inhabiting a 14th floor apartment in Manhattan. It is a play that surprisingly has moments of poignancy, as well.

The action all takes place in the apartment of Mel and Edna Edison (Stephen DeRosa and Veanne Cox). When the play opens on a heat wave, with aromas from the city garbage strike wafting in through the windows, with the air conditioning malfunctioning, and with riotous neighbors voices and music disturbing the peace, the final straw is that Mel, now 47 has just been fired from the only job he knows how to do.

Mel is worrying himself into a nervous breakdown, and Edna tries to be helpful and supportive as long as she can. But things get worse when she, having lost her key, goes out for a few minutes leaving time for the apartment to burglarized, down to their last ice cube, and Mel has a nervous breakdown.

At this point, the family assembles from out of town and Mel’s brother Harry and three sisters, in descending ages, Pauline (Jeanne Paulsen), Jessie (Denny Dillion), and Pearl (Alice Playton), appear on the scene. Harry, as family head, attempts to explain to the “girls” how if each were to contribute “x” amount to the situation, things can be worked out. Not an easy task with their interruptions and interpretations, and one shattered temporarily by Edna arriving with a totally different idea.

It is in the tricky family love that poignancy moves in on the play despite the fact that all the scenes are hilarious. And there is a solution, be it slow to arrive in the lives of Mel and Edna, but a solution nonetheless.

The six characters each inhabit their characters meticulously. The dialog is rich and quickly paced, fluent and funny, bewildered and understanding.

As Edna, Cox varies her role nicely from patient support of Mel’s ranting, through attempts to help and encourage, until her own desperate need to literally rend her garments in her need for a hot bath in an apartment with the water turned off.

DeRosa’s Mel brings to his growing desperation moods that vary from a whining desperation to defiant ones of screaming on the balcony at the upstairs neighbors who seem to be having no trouble with their water. Yet he has in him a quality that others love and seek to help. An unsympathetic/sympathetic character able to provoke the strong love (and even envy) of a third leading character in the play, Harry’s final scene with Mel, played strongly by Julian Gamble.

Each of the three supporting roles of the sisters are played by actors with star quality, and each creating a carefully crafted character in the family pecking order.

Warner Shook directed; Scott Bradley designed the great prison-wall front that opens on his intricate set (with almost as many doors and areas as a farce; and they get slammed) and Laurie Churba Kohn’s costumes put us into that 1970s era. Plot lines in script also clue us in in: Erma could be shocked at the high cost of psychiatrist, $40 an hour! Scott Killian was responsible for the sound which included radio sound bites that separated scenes.

The play runs around two hours and seems shorter. Enjoy.

Berkshire Theatre Festival 2009 schedule and reviews.