Even in our lightly populated Berkshires, there is so much going on that we have developed three half-price ticketing operations which have offerings ranging from Tanglewood, Jacob's Pillow and Barrington Stage Company to Shakespeare and Company and the Berkshire and Williamstown Theatre Festivals.. The four locations are in Pittsfield, Great Barrington, Adams and Chatham, NY.
Although I enjoy reviewing many Berkshire events for Berkshire Fine Arts, I don't always land the plum assignments, and so I had to reluctantly defer to Editor and Publisher Charles Giuliano to review this new production which you can read here. I went to see it anyway, and here's my twitter synopsis: To Kill a Mockingbird at Barrington Stage is wonderful. The in-depth BFA critique will appear in a day or two, but I wanted to alert you to this show - one of the most dramatic and moving dramas Barrington Stage has ever done. Julianne Boyd and her gifted cast certainly deserved the standing ovation they received on Opening Night. And my eyes were wet. Yes, this old cynic was moved to tears by what he saw, and this coming of age story set in the South should strike a chord deep within you, too.
Harper Lee's book, To Kill a Mockingbird has become a classic book, mandatory in High School classrooms, and a still popular motion picture for which Gregory Peck received an Oscar for his role of Atticus Finch. The staged version is not identical to either the book or the film. I found it even more powerful and spellbinding when performed live.
Coming Up: This Wonderful Life, Carousel and Streetcar Named Desire
Barrington Stage has also announed a Christmas presentation of the one-man show, This Wonderful Life for December 3-20 on their Main Stage. It promises to be a wonderful twist on Frank Capra's timeless film, so full of hope and happiness, humor and and holiday cheer.
For the 2009 season, Boyd also plans to direct a fully staged Carousel by Rogers and Hammerstein, as well as the classic Tennessee Williams play, A Streetcar Named Desire. Still to be revealed: the third summer attraction, probably a comedy.
For tickets and information, you can always visit the Barington Stage website.
You can also hear Jullianne Boyd talk about Mockingbird on You Tube.
It was both whacky and wonderful in the Berkshires over the Columbus Day Weekend. My friends from Boston could not get a room nearby, so they did not get to enjoy the Trockaderos de Monte Carlo who played the Hunter Center at Mass MoCA in North Adams, MA. It was a great show, and you can read my review here:
While North Adams is in no danger of becoming another Provincetown, it surely was nice to see a little diversity in the artistic offerings. And the sold out houses for the "Trocks" indicates that there is a market here for both more dance, and more camp.
Kooza is worth a trip, and the expense for good seats. It is the ultimate spectacle, with both roll-in-the-aisles-laughter from the clowns, and heart-stopping, breath-taking acrobatic acts. Cirque du Soleil is often imitated, but all those second rate companies simply pale in comparison to the real thing, as this traveling edition of Kooza now playing in Boston proves. That includes the the horrible arena shows that Cirque inexplicably sends around the country with Clear Channel Entertainment. If you like beer signs and scoreboards to clutter up your view of the stage, and have very good eyesight, I suppose these horrid arena productions are ok, but my advice is to avoid them like the plague. Most seats are too far away from the stage to see much, and if I wanted to watch them perform on a flat two-dimensional screen, I would rent the DVD. David Shiner wrote and directed Kooza
Kooza was written and directed by the immensely talented David Shiner, and he has done a magnificent job. You can read my full review at Berkshire Fine Arts, the online magazine
"Cirque du Soleil delivers an unforgettable evening of outrageous clowning, astounding acrobats and colorful spectacle that is best described as "Theatrobatics!" Best of all, Kooza is the newest and funniest of their touring shows and even given the pricey tickets, worth every penny."
Kooza's run in Boston has just been extended until October 12, and I would not be surprised if there was one more week's extension, since they do not have to be in D.C. until late in the month. Here is the schedule:
It's been a busy week for this writer. In addition to an enlightening conversation I had with Williamstown Theatre Director John Rando about A Flea in Her Ear, (see item below) I also had a chance to talk with Randy Harrison about his role as Lucky in Waiting for Godot. It will be presented on the Unicorn Theatre stage at the Berkshire Theatre Festival from July 29 to August 23.
Randy's skills on stage are substantial and growing each year. For those who admired his performance on Showtime's popular Queer as Folk series, it has been a revelation. For Harrison is more than just the character Justin which he played back then. He is a man of a thousand roles, each one as unique and challenging as any actor could ask for.
In Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Harrison takes on a theatrical role that is difficult and daring, that of Lucky, the servant, or "slave" of Pozzo. Not as big a role as the tramps Didi or Gogo, but absolutely as challenging. The full interview I had with Harrison is published over at Berkshire Fine Arts, and also includes some analysis of Beckett and Godot. And if you have not yet subscribed over there for their email alerts, it's an easy way to keep up with my adventures, too.
Admit it, there are quite a few of us waiting for Godot, the play, to open at the Berkshire Theatre Festival - so that we can get our Beckett "fix", our mental escape into the theatre of the absurd.
For the person who sees Waiting for Godot for the first time, our passion for this play is as mysterious as the play itself. Most first time audience members content themselves with the physical comedy, the play on words, and leave wondering what all the fuss was about.
But that is where the addiction to Godot, and all things Beckett begins. Innocently. With a simple recollection of unexplained nonsense. I got bitten, bad, by the Beckett bug many years ago, and my malaise grows worse, the mysteries even more unfathomable than on first viewing. Like his character Lucky, I too am doomed to carry this baggage and noose around my neck for the rest of my life.
I too was young once, and entertaining, and now I speak what appears to be gibberish, at least when I discuss Godot. So many of my friends do not get it, lucky souls.
The text of Lucky’s speech is strange. Imagine taking all the great works of Western thought, putting them through a paper shredder, and then pasting them back together as best you can.
What you end up with is a total deconstruction and desecration of the basis of philosophy and the logic of science. Since I sometimes wrestle with the limitations of writing complex thoughts in simple language, it is liberating, even hilarious.
At the end of the interview I was able to snap a few quick photos of Randy. Here is another.
I had the pleasure of talking with John Rando, the director of A Flea in Her Ear which is soon to open at the Wiliamstown Theatre Festival. The interview is located here, In Berkshire Fine Arts and covers a lot of territory. French farce is a fascinating subject, and the focus on the production he is mounting limited the amount of personal information I could include.
Rando's life is as interesting as his work. John had a secret love of the theater - and if anyone needed to be a chameleon about his real career goal in order to keep parents paying the tuition bills - he's your guy.
"I had this little secret dream in my heart that I had to keep hidden from my parents. I wanted to become a theatre director, certainly not one of the easiest or most sought after professions. So, to reassure my folks that I wasn’t frittering away my education and at the same time to keep my dream alive, I pretended, like many of you now, that I was heading for law school.
Every time my parents came to see me acting in another play, I had them believe it was all just pre-law training. You know, I have to learn how to speak well… for the courtroom...and stuff. " John Rando
This address to the graduating students at the University of Texas is a masterpiece, and I think it illuminates the life path of a gifted theatre artisan whom we are lucky to have in the Berkshires this summer.
John Rando is the Tony Award winning director of the Broadway musical, Urinetown, for which he also received the Outer Critics Circle Award for best director.
His upcoming production of A Flea in Her Ear, with new translation by David Ives, is not to be missed. It is going to be laugh-until-you-sides-hurt funny.
Memorial Day weekend brought with it the openings of two superb, if serious, plays. I Am My Own Wife at Barrington Stage Company and The Caretaker at the Berkshire Theatre Festival. So it was a welcome change of pace when Shakespeare & Company decided to open with a superb reworking of Georges Feydeau's French Farce, The Ladies Dressmaker, under the title of The Ladies Man.
If you missed my rave review over at Berkshire Fine Arts, well, you really should read the full account of this fun evening:
The biggest delight of the evening was the re-discovery of Elizabeth Aspenlieder's immense comedic talents. In a note after the performance, she wrote that she had worked hard on her " 47 entrances and exits…wild! In fact so much so I tore all my intercostals during rehearsals last week…we are all bruised and beaten but are having a ball." As I said in my review, farce is hard work, especially if you want to make it all look so easy.
I have said it before, and repeat again: do not miss this production, things this funny only come along once in a great while! The Ladies Man runs all Summer long.
When I walked into the Berkshire Theatre Festival's Unicorn Theatre last Sunday afternoon, I gave up the glorious Berkshire sunshine and lush carpet of green for the grey and dingy squalor of a London flat. In creating the set for their season opener, The Caretaker, scenic designer Jonathan Wentz has done such a convincing job of hopeless chaos, I wanted to escape back to the flowers of Spring, and the hope of renewal that was just beyond the theater walls.
Pinter is hard. If you take his work seriously, you have to surrender your own comfort level and exchange places with his sodden characters who have so little to live for. As the press release states so cooly:
Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker is an enigmatic and sinister comedy about the struggle for power. The fragile relationship of two brothers, Aston and Mick, is turned upside down when Davies, a homeless man, enters their lives. Since its premiere in 1960, this play has been recognized as a landmark in 20th century drama.
Director Eric Hill comments: “I’m excited to examine the dramatic tension and mystery of Pinter – always a study in trying to get behind the words and underlying causes of the relationships.”
I think this play was a triumph as I wrote in my review in Berkshire Fine Arts, but it is also depressing. Honest examination of the human condition is rarely upliftiing, at least in Pinterland.
Just don't see it on a glorious spring day, save it for a cloudy or rainy one. Pinter is brilliant, this production is absorbing, but it is also deeply affecting.
The Barrington Stage Company under Julianne Boyd has been taking a lot of risks in recent years, starting with their move to Pittsfield from Great Barrington. Happily most of their regular audiences took the change in stride. They too benefit from a wonderful new theatre and larger base of fellow theater-goers. The company is no longer just a summer operation, it presents plays almost year round.
So it was only a small surprise when they announced they were doing the Doug Wright Tony and Pulitzer winning I Am My Own Wife with the incredibly talented Vince Gatton playing the three dozen or so roles in this one man play.
At Berkshire Fine Arts, Charles Giuliano did the lead review, and declared it more powerful and absorbing than the original Broadway production:
Charles and I decided this play deserved more attention than just a single review, and so I undertook to write a second story, detailing the conflicts and debates that still rage about Charlotte von Mahlsdorf. She was the one and only transvestite to reign in Berlin during the Communist era.
In my research on Charlotte, I read numerous other takes on her life. The best of the lot was in a review of her film, I Am My Own Woman, found at Planet Out. Its details were a little too frank for inclusion in my own article in Berkshire Fine Arts.
Now a 60-something lady who loves to don Victorian lingerie and display her ever-youthful butt, Charlotte speaks fondly of her mostly deceased ex-lovers. She's always had a penchant for older men, and time has outrun most of them.
There was a time, after the Wall went up, when gay East Berliners were barred from meeting one another in public; gay bars were closed and gays were prohibited from placing "contact ads" in newspapers or magazines. That's when Charlotte met one of her great loves in response to a number scrawled on the wall of a public latrine.
Her story seemed to both absorb and mystify many in the Berkshires audience who listened in polite, presumably stunned, silence. There is wonderful humor in the production, but not many in the opening night audience laughed. So I quietly chuckled as the bon mots were delivered by Gatton.
In my treatment, I decided that Charlotte was not only his own wife, but her own husband as well. You can read why I came to that conclusion here:
Jesus is portrayed in a diaper debating the Devil, with Springer as referee.
The Ku Klux Klan surprises us, swishing their gowns in an energetic chorus line.
The KKK sings and dances for the JerryCam.
Jerry and guests with big hair go hand in hand.
Jerry's chorus is anything but Greek.
The "real" Jerry has real guards recruited from the Chicago Police Department.
Jerry has strange guests on the Operatic version of his show.
Opera is not a dead art. Far from it. But it has been a long time since a new opera had protesters picketing performances, especially in the less fundamentalist U.K. Because the content of Jerry Springer - The Opera includes the characters of Jesus and the Devil depicted in less than worshipful words and images, it has raised a howl of outrage, one heard even in the USA where its scheduled Broadway run was cancelled due to skittish backers. American audiences, they think, are far too conservative for this.
Perhaps the spectacle of a tap dancing Ku Klux Klan sent a few too many chills down their spine and into their pocketbooks. Yet it seems that this opera has sold out its run wherever it has played. In 2007 several regional companies mounted productions, taking enormous risks with their resources and supporters, but weathering the storm, and in once case, extending the run by a month.
Recently, it played two nights at Carnegie Hall in a production where Harvey Keitel played the non-singing role of Jerry Springer. Of course it was sold out, and received rave notices from the New York Times, which does not compliment new works easily.
Many excerpts of the opera are available on YouTube since the entire production was televised on the BBC. On January 7 2005, the day before the broadcast, the BBC announced that it had received over 47,000 complaints about its plans to screen the opera – the most complaints ever received about a British television broadcast.
Many commentators, including the BBC, attributed such a high volume of complaints to an orchestrated campaign by various Christian groups. Supporters of the BBC's broadcasting of the show pointed out that the supposedly blasphemous content was clearly presented as a fantasy in the mind of the dying central character and was not intended to be a serious comment on Christ or Christian theology. John Beyer, chairman of Mediawatch-UK, argued that the BBC should shoulder much of the blame for the campaign against the opera since they had promoted the opera as "pushing back the boundaries of taste" and "controversial" when it had never been intended to offend the groups who campaigned against it.
In the past year there have been five productions of the opera in the USA. The two concert presentations this week at Carnegie Hall, plus full productions at Chicago's Baliwick Repertory Theatre, Minneapolis Music Theater and Playhouse on the Square in Memphis. The Chicago production ran with extensions, for three months, selling virtually every ticket it could print.
Upcoming are productions in February at Stage West in Des Moines, and in midsummer at Studio Theatre's Secondstage in Washington, D.C., a production I hope to see and report on both here and for the web magazines Maverick Arts and Berkshire Fine Arts.
Christians express their distress over the opera's content, ignoring its ultimate moral message.
One of the reasons Christians get upset at the opera is its use of profanity. "It has been accused of including "8,000 obscenities"—it is not known where this count originated, but the 8000 figure is popularly quoted. This however is impossible, as 8000 obscenities over the show's 120 minute runtime would mean that there were 66 obscenities a minute, and thus 1 and a half a second. Several publications, including the Daily Mail and The Sun, claimed a figure of "3,168 mentions of the word fuck and 297 of the word cunt".
As stated in the BBC's findings, however, "the reported figure was in fact a vast exaggeration. In reality, there were 96 uses of "fuck" and nine uses of "cunt". While a substantial number, this was not necessarily unacceptable in terms of late night terrestrial television." The numbers resported were found by multiplying the number of cast members singing a profanity at the same time, ie the reported 297 uses of the word cunt is the result of multiplying the 33 cast members with the genuine amount of uses of the word, ie, nine times.
According to director Stewart Lee, there are 174 swear words in all." From here:
There is a DVD of the opera, though since it was issued in the UK I am not sure if it will play on all US machines. Other than the YouTube excerpts I am not aware of any music excerpts being available. Anyone can use the comments section to add resources, and I will make updates on additional productions through comments as well.
This is a work well worth seeking out, for blessed are the singing, pole-dancing fetishists. As Ben Brantly wrote in the New York Times:
Those who attended “Jerry Springer,” which stars an affectingly disaffected Harvey Keitel in the nonsinging title role, expecting to snigger and hoot were not disappointed. There’s a guaranteed off-the-charts camp quotient in a show that sets the televised confessions of pole-dancing housewives and men with diaper fixations to music that often leans more toward Bach than Broadway.
In terms of sheer audacity, “Jerry Springer” is a helluva lot funnier than, say, “Young Frankenstein.” This is, after all, a work that features numbers with mock-liturgical titles like “Jerry Eleison.” And though I’d love to say that the demonstrators who assembled outside the theater on Tuesday to protest a show that “blasphemes our Lord” would be disarmed if they ever got to see “Jerry Springer,” I can’t.
There are four half price ticket buying locations in the Berkshires
The stage set designed by Marion Williams is evocative of the South. All photos by Kevin Sprague.
An understanding Miss Maudie (Debra Jo Rupp) helps Scout (Grace Sylvia) and Jem (Christian Meola) to understand their father.
Atticus (David Adkins) is threatened by a lynch mob.
The riveting trial of Tom Robinson (played by Jerome Spratling).
Atticus, played by David Adkins lets out a blood curdling scream when he discovers his children were harmed.
Scout (Grace Sylvia) learns a life lesson from Atticus (David Adkins)
A "Trock" Dancer Prepares
The ballerina is doing a "ponche" with one leg en pointe and the other pointing at midnight, a feat which i have never seen a male dancer able to perform.
And this is the gorgeous "Fish" Dive, which is as complicated as a it is beautiful and only lasts a second or two.
The acrobats (below) reach new heights (above) using stilts
The opening act of Kooza is spectacularly choreographed.
David Shiner wrote and directed Kooza
Kooza is Clowns, Acrobats and Spectacle
Randy Harrison contemplates an answer.
John Rando
Performances are from July 30-August10
Shakespeare knows how to have fun
The cast has as much fun as the audience. (Kevin Sprague photos)
James Barry as Mick (l) and Jonathan Epstein as Davies in The Caretaker opening the Berkshire Theatre Festival season.
Promo image from the movie "I Am My Own Woman" which tells the story of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf as a young man (center), a young woman (left) and Charlotte herself in her later years.
Vince Gatton as Charlotte von Mahlsdorf in "I Am My Own Wife" at Barrington Stage Company through June 8.
