May 31, 2005
There’s Nothing Sleepy About This Beauty
Grade: A
A charming and exquisite piece of puppet theatre, La bella dormente nel bosco is sure to please everyone in your Spoleto party
By Jennifer Corley
“Magical” is probably the word you’ll most hear when audiences describe legendary puppet man Basil Twist’s newest work, La bella dormente nel bosco (”Sleeping beauty in the forest”). And magical is indeed an apt word. With the production’s swirling fairies, singing cats, galloping spindles, leaping frogs, and dancing roses, there’s not really a more appropriate word that exists.
The story, in a nutshell, is this: the King and Queen procure fairies of good fortune to become their new baby daughter’s godmothers. A jilted fairy, at the princess’ baptism, lays an evil curse that on the princess’ 20th birthday, she will prick her finger on a spindle and fall into a deep death-like sleep. Once that happens, a good fairy lays a new spell that says the coma will be broken when true love awakens her. Surely you know what comes after that.
The seven opera singers, clad in robes, take the stage whenever the character they’re voicing is onstage. But they remain in the sidelines. They act almost as translators or interpreters for the puppets — as if they are merely the vocal conduit for what the object is expressing. They watch the puppets’ movements and sing in explanation as they look out to the audience.
All of the opera singers except one take on multiple roles. Talented soprano Nicole Heaston sings only the part of Sleeping Beauty. She’s a bit stiffer than the others when it comes to her stage presence, but her voice is clean, powerful, and moving.
As the voice of the King, baritone Daniel Sutin has the most expression of any of the seven. He also changes his voice for his other characterizations the most. He sings for three other characters and has a richness that seems to fill his entire body.
Tenor Eduardo Valdes has an ebullient personality that spills out in his singing, which he makes appear so carefree. He gives voice to a Jester and to Sleeping Beauty’s Prince. As the Prince, his voice floats off his tongue and rolls over the audience’s heads so soothingly and naturally, that if it were food it would be liquid chocolate.
Mezzo-soprano Kathryn Day has a commanding menace in her recitative as the villainous Green Fairy. (As Day’s stern face looks on, the Green Fairy swoops over the heads of the kingdom’s well-wishers as they tremble violently in fear.) There are a couple of moments during her performance as the Old Woman when she is difficult to hear in the lower register, but aside from those moments, she’s extremely robust.
Olga Makarina, as the Blue Fairy, the leader of the pack, is excellent. She also opens as a nightingale that sets the tone of the piece. Her coloratura is bright, sparkling, and clear, and a perfect fit for this production. She seems to have a certain radiance of goodness, through her voice and her expressive eyes.
Michaela Martens, mezzo-soprano, displays a lovely, heavy sadness in her voice as the Queen as she fears her child lost forever to the curse. She has a majestic stance, befitting of a queen, that causes her voice to project beautifully. She and Sutin have a lovely, strong duet as the King and Queen lament their daughter’s fate.
It would’ve been nice to see mezzo-soprano Patricia Risley more. She’s delightful in her voicing of the Old Woman’s raggedy cat. She gives it a lot of character without detracting from the puppet itself. She also voices a songbird, Cuckoo, with soft, pleasant precision.
The singers all have a purity of tone, with the strength and density of a light beam, that almost seems to project directly out of their chests instead of their mouths.
The principal singers are accompanied by singers from the Westminster choir, who flank the stage in the balconies and later perform onstage. They perform excellently, aside from perhaps being a little too laid back in their manner at the show’s beginning (a few of the ladies were smoothing their hair, or looking down at the floor, or talking, and appearing generally unprepared to be standing and facing the audience). Their voices are hearty when necessary and breezy in other scenes.
The set, designed by Matthew Benedict and Twist himself, is dazzling. The castle can be seen in the distance, silhouetted against a twinkling night sky through layers of trees and overhanging branches. The forest seems to breathe as it expands and contracts. Andrew Hill’s ambient lighting design and Mr. David’s sumptuous costume design enrich the piece and help shape the magical environment. And the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra, conducted by Neal Goren, present a gorgeous performance of Respighi’s opera.
Of course, the real stars of the production are the puppets and the artists who manipulate them. A crew of 12 puppeteers work the gloriously expressive puppets — some of them life-size — by string, by stick, and by hand. All of their work is visible to the audience. These puppets do amazing things. One appears to blow a trumpet. Another does a handstand. The fairy puppets are exquisitely human in their peaceful faces, muscular legs, and twig-like, bending arms. The puppeteers are expert in their handling skills.
Basil Twist has created an enchanting, uplifting, and magical realm in which it’s easy to lose oneself. You can see that every person involved onstage is absolutely dedicated to, and happy to be in, the project. It’s one of those rarities in theatre — a good-spirited, charming, whimsical production without an ounce of corniness. So if you can still get a ticket, go get one. — JC
Eliza Ingle on tap sensation Savion Glover’s Improvography:
Savion Glover is an electric performer whose energy and skill translate into a highly entertaining show. For the first part of the evening, Glover is joined by four great jazz jazz musicians: Tommy James, Brian Grice, Patience Higgins and Andy McCloud. As each musician entered, a dialog between dancer and instrument ensued until at last the dancer became an instrument himself. Glover is a sound machine producing intricate rhythms that come from his remarkable feet and songs from a confident voice, including an inventive rendition of “The Way You Look Tonight.” At times Glover taps at such speed one wonders if his legs aren’t plugged into electrical sockets. By the end of the first 30 minutes he is drenched from head to toe and finishes in a glorious collapse as the stage goes to black.
When the lights come up again, the stage is shared by three talented tappers: Maurice Chestnut, Ashley DeForest, and Cartier Williams. The ensemble work is at its strongest when solos emerge like the nonchalant hammering of the 14-year-old Williams or the more refined dynamic of Chestnut. The group work is less affective and becomes more academic and less heartfelt. Unfortunately, I found the recorded music to be an annoying distraction to the sound of the tappers.
Improvography is a terrific combination of inspired jazz arrangements and the prowess of this generation’s hottest tap dancer, who continues to push the form into new directions. — EI
Spencer Deering on Pirates! — the Revenge of Colonel Rhett:
The Actors’ Theatre of SC production of Pirates! bills itself as a kid-friendly romp, in which famed hero Colonel William Rhett saves Charleston from brutal buccanears. Problem is, the show — though a very kid-friendly 35 minutes — is essentially a series of monologues doled out by Rhett, then nasty pirate Stede Bonnet (played by the very entertaining Clarence Felder), and finally dastardly Dirty Dirk. For one moment at the play’s beginning, when Rhett and Bonnet meet, and a few at the play’s finish, there’s the threat of actual on-stage fighting, but it fizzles before anything memorable can happen (save a cap pistol’s discharge).
Though ripe with alliteration and fun allusions to local lore that adults and older kids can relish (Folly beach as “coffinland” and hangings at White Oak Gardens), not many little kids will get goosebumps from words like “macabre” and “corpse” when simple words like “scary” and “dead body” would do. Kids under six get in free, but it’s the tots between six and ten who will get the most out of the freaky tales in this play filled with words, not action.
SD
Shawnté Salabert on Bananimagination!
When Memorial Day boat trip plans were rained out, I decided to entertain a friend’s bored two-year old at the Bananimagination! show. Although she decided to unleash a stinky pile in her pants 15 minutes into the performance, it was an hour well-spent. Shana Banana herself didn’t seem to mind the frequent potty and temper-tantrum breaks the under-10 set had to make, and she kept the sparse crowd pretty engaged with repeat-after-me songs and a duo of dopey dog puppets.
When I asked my mini companion for her thoughts on the show, her approximate response was, “Puppies! I want food!” She’s two, people. What more can you expect?
I’m sure I saw something remarkable at Emi Greco | PC’s performance last night of Rimasta Orfano in the Sottile Theatre, but I’m still not certain what. It’s been said of dancer and choreographer Emio Greco that he mines everyday movements for his work. I don’t know about that, but I can tell you if I saw anyone moving in the manner he and his troupe of five other dancers moved that night, I’d be calling 911. I found it impossible to follow any sort of narrative for the 90-minute dance, but the extraordinary pictures theese dancers made, the hyperkinetic way they twisted, contorted, shivered, writhed, dropped, squirmed, jerked, undulated, and spun, was clearly in the service of a story (Rimasta Orfano translates as “abandoned orphan, for what it’s worth.) David Gordon’s powerful music ranged from long stretches of absolute silence to a cacaphony of alarms and air-raid sirens, barely audible sounds of crickets chirping and gently humming machine sounds to jet aircraft crossing the room and string and brass ensembles. Afterward, it was clear not everyone in the audience understood what they’d seen, but judging from the chatter on the street outside the Sottile, they sure respected it.
Despite the crappy weather of Saturday and Sunday night – what with the Reggae Block Party nearly being canceled, the Andre Mehmari trio and their audience schlepping gamely from the Cistern to the Gaillard instead of canceling, and of course yet another dreary, wet first Monday — Piccolo’s Memorial Day concert at Liberty Square in front of the Aquarium went off well, their Children’s Festival at Marion Square was a rousing success, and the Seed and Feed Marching Abominable Band raised the roof at the Market after Saturday’s Custom House shindig, just as they always do.
Rain or no, the coming week holds even more excitement and promise than even the festival’s opening weekend, with Spoleto premieres of Contemporary Legend Theatre’s Kingdom of Desire, two more of the Solo Turns theatre presentations, another Colla Marionette program, the Westminster Choir, both the Choral and Festival Concerts, more Wachovia Jazz and Bank of America Chamber Music concerts, Amajuba – Like Doves We Rise and Hubbard Street Dance Chicago’s famous dance program, with still more after that. And I’ll be seeing a lot more of Piccolo Spoleto in the coming week, which I’ll share with you here in this space.
If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already heard that Don Giovanni, which encompasses the entire interior of the auditorium, is a wonder. And that’s absolutely true. I’m a middling opera fan – by nature more theatrically oriented than music oriented – and so librettos like Don Giovanni’s in which the principals sing the same lines for ten minutes while one short line of English translation sits gathering dust on the superscript screen (is there a word for this?) generally drives me nuts. I’m sitting there thinking, Can we get the freakin’ narrative going again? But Kramer’s production had me mesmerized, because there was as much theatre going on as there was opera. The singers utilized every inch of the performance space; they meandered through the audience, took photographs of us, played with conductor Emmanuel Villaume and the musicians, stopped the opera altogether to gab with those of us watching, and generally broke all the rules of traditional western opera in a most entertaining fashion, all in a spectacular setting and costumes. Too bad it’s sold out.
A stop by the Humanities Center at 6 p.m. Sunday on my way to Memminger Auditorium for the premiere of Don Giovanni brought me to the Farrah Hoffmire and George Hill collaboration Curious Tales, a multimedia event and party at the corner of Rutledge Avenue and Carolina Street. Artists with work up at the event included Hoffmire and her brother, Baird, Tom Wrenn, Stephanie Smith, Lucas Causey, and Kevin Taylor, whose mother was also there cracking wise. Tripp Storm had turned one room into a cool, abstract 3D viewing chamber, and he told me about having seen the three diminutive actors in Mabou Mines DollHouse bicycling down Queen Street the previous day. (Ah, festival time. Ain’t it grand?) Lucas Causey’s stuff seemed similar to the work of Kevin taylor, though George Hill told me they’d never met prior to the show.
Double-bass impresario Renaud Garcia-Fons was at Millennium Music early Sunday afternoon and he wowed a small group of fans from the small raised stage next to Five Loaves Café inside. Among them was ever-cool local bass player Kevin Hamilton, of Gradual Lean. “You can tell he’s classically trained, but he also infuses the music with some of his own stuff,” he told me after the set, noting especially Middle Eastern and other international influences.
Thirty minutes later I found myself watching yet another jazz double-bass player, as the lights came up on Andy McCloud, who was setting a thumping rhythm for tap virtuoso Savion Glover’s entrance onto the Gaillard Auditorium stage. Glover’s Improvography is everything breathless commentators have called it, and the man is a force of nature. He’s the sort of person for whom the word “energetic” is just nowhere near the reality – how he managed not to collapse into a heap on the stage after two hours of almost non-stop, full-on dancing is a mystery to me. He soaked through two untucked, unbuttoned dress shirts over the course of the afternoon, and as things were winding up he upended a full bottle of water and drained it dry, to much laughter from the audience. His show was a blast, but two intermission-less hours of even the most remarkable tap can be a little much. By the time 4 p.m. rolled around, I was ready to have done with it. Especially seeing as how I still needed to drop by a couple of exhibits before heading to memminger Auditorium for the opening of Don Giovanni.
Last Saturday, I found myself in the American Theater for Kathy and Mo: Parallel Lives. Brandy Sullivan (one third of local improvisers The Have Nots!) and Robin Shuler were just as funny in the show as they were when I saw them perform it eight years ago at the Midtown Theatre. As angels musing on the fate of humanity, as ‘tween girls giggling about boys and West Side Story’s remarkable similarity to Romeo and Juliet, as girls at a Christian youth camp, as militant feminist performance artists Sister Womyn Sister, as hilariously real redneck fixtures in a small-town bar, the pair showed amazing versatility as actors and superb coming timing. Catch it if you can.
Saturday evening also saw the first of John Kennedy’s Music in Time programs. First on the bill was an enigmatic work called Here [Enclosed] by Dutch composer Michel van der Aa which called for Kennedy conducting members of the Spoleto Festival Orchestra with headphones on, a laptop computer, and a strange, tall object at the side of the stage covered in white fabric. I won’t attempt to describe the very cool music itself (how they notate this kind of stuff is beyond me) but Kennedy walked over to the object a couple of times during the performance, peered at it, then walked away. Finally, near the end of the piece, he made to tear the fabric away from the object in dramatic fashion – but it got caught and refused to come away until, after several moments of tugging, a female mannequin wearing a short silk dress fell out from it and backwards onto a nearby chair. I suspect it wasn’t quite the effect Kennedy was hoping for, but he made the best of it, and I doubt the audience knew anything had gone wrong. The program also included an interesting flute concerto performed by Jessica Warren, and a work by Ken Ueno that had the musicians operating 15 hand-cranked music boxes, but nothing so interesting as a mysterious shrouded female dummy. Music in Time’s seconf program, Wednesday night, is an outdoor concert at the Cistern of Iannis Xenakis’ four-movement Pleiades, which is supposed to be a wonderful work. I’ll be there for sure.
On Saturday, a fancy press brunch at the home of John and Meredith Dunnan on 2 Water Street kicked off a warm weekend. (Dunnan’s also an artist, incidentally, with a studio/gallery above Ann Long Fine Art on State Street). Like any address south of Broad whose address is a single digit, the Dunnans’ home went on for days, and my guess is that neither the journalists nor the artists in attendance were accustomed to finding themselves in such refined surroundings. And so we showed no compunction about bellying up before the shrimp salad and finger sandwiches like pigs at the trough, as us bourgeoisie are wont to do. I sat for a while with Marc Overton, a former Spoleto Festival director himself and now the visiting (from San Diego) host of public radio’s weekday morning festival update Spoleto Today. Marc shared with me his candid thoughts on the festival so far (I promised I’d not blab) and we talked about director Mabou Mines DollHouse just long enough for me to realize Marc knows a hellofa lot more than I do about Henrik Ibsen.
In fact, Lee Breuer and two of his MMD actors – Maude Mitchell and Mark Povinelli, who play the two leads, Nora and Torvald Helmer — were milling about the brunch, and I and State arts reporter Jeffrey Day visited with them for a while. Both Mitchell and Breuer are completely bald (though Mitchell wears a wig for most of the play), and Povinelli is just three feet nine inches tall. So it was a unique sort of conversation, as you might guess. We talked about DollHouse and audiences’ responses to it – Breuer said he was quite happy with the previous evening’s premiere – and we discussed Tiny Ninja Theatre’s Hamlet over at the Piccolo Fringe, which I alone in the group had seen, though all hoped to.
Also at the press brunch, Franklin Ashley – husband of Post and Courier arts reporter Dottie Ashley and a first-rate jazz pianist – was performing outside on the terrace with his quartet, and though I didn’t have much of a chance to chat with him there, I’ll be doing so in coming days, since Ashley and I both have original works being presented in next Thursday’s (June 9) short play showcase at PURE Theatre, A Perfect Ten (shameless plug alert: two shows at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. at the Cigar Factory, which we’re both sweating about.
Last Friday, I’d found myself in the American Theater for Tiny Ninja Theatre’s Hamlet. (See Jennifer Corley’s review of TNT also on this blog). I’d seen both of Dov Weinstein’s previous shows, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet, at Piccolo in 2002 and ‘03, and so I was quite looking forward to seeing his take on Hamlet. From the get-go, however, I noticed things were different. Instead of gathering intimately around the small table Weinstein has used as a set for previous shows, this audience was sitting in seats as they would for any show in Stars Bar. This Hamlet, it seems, is a cinematic production, not a stage production. Weinstein utilizes a set of very tiny cameras to project images of his action-figure players onto a pair of screens behind him. It’s an interesting idea, and the possibilities it opens up for the show are as vast as the opportunities filmmakers have over stage directors in telling a story. Sometimes, for example, the camera gives us a single character’s point of view (we peep, as Polonius, from behind the arras as Hamlet harangues his mother the Queen and then rushes at us with a sword). But rather than adding to the play, I felt Weinstein’s strategy backfired this time. His camera work was jerky and sometimes out of focus; it often took him a long time to set up a scene for projection; overall, the concept seemed to add yet another layer of difficulty to interpreting the play rather than enhancing its meaning.
