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| Slightly
Shakespearean: (l-r) Taylor-Williams and Taylor in The
Tamer Tamed. |
Sad
Songs Say So Much
By
James Yeara
Elegies:
A Song Cycle
Music
and lyrics by William Finn, directed by Rob Ruggiero
Barrington Stage Company, Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center,
Great Barrington, Mass., through Aug. 28
Tony Award-winning com- poser William Finn’s (Falsettos,
The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee) opening
performance of his new work, Elegies: A Song Cycle,
at the restored Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington,
was the stuff of legend.
A fierce thunderstorm had knocked out power to half of Great
Barrington, but the show went on without lights, without sound
amplification, and with the wind whipping against the lobby
door, the rain battering the roof, the thunder cracking overhead,
the sirens howling and, bizarrely, a steam whistle sounding
off at irregular intervals—as if some waterlogged production
of Show Boat were going on in the building next door.
While opening-night audiences are notorious for being overstuffed
with family, friends, students eager to glad-hand, and casts
of other shows anxious to show their support, Sunday’s audience
had available reasons to sit on their hands: Emergency lighting,
while dramatic, isn’t suitable for song cycles; sitting wet
in an un-air-conditioned theater with hundreds of damp, sweating
people is uncomfortable; and the thunder, while romantic,
couldn’t keep the beat for Elegies half as well as
the barefoot pianist, Deborah Abramson, could. However, despite
the reasons not to, the sold-out crowd enthusiastically applauded
each and every one of the 19 songs in the 90-minute cycle,
and gave William Finn, his spectacularly voiced cast of five
(Bradford William Anderson, Sandy Binion, Romain Fruge, Andre
Ward, and Sally Wilfert), and the forlorn lighting director,
Mat t hew Richards, a standing ovation.
And
why not? Elegies: A Song Cycle is brilliantly calculated
to thrum the heartstrings of any audience. Who doesn’t know
someone who has died? Who hasn’t said good-bye to a loved
one? Who can’t remember the times spent together at family
celebrations or friendly parties? Who has forgotten the wet-eyed
look of that family canine long since gone to the dog run
in the Great Be yond? This was a performance that had the
audience in sniffles.
Finn’s
songs celebrate the celebrity egos, the elite temperaments,
and the occasional everyman—and everymom—who have populated
his life. This is all done before a series of 10 photographs
of blue skies and puffy clouds flown upstage, but director
Rob Ruggiero keeps the focus on the singers. Each song was
full-throated and so caressed with finesse by these Broadway
veterans that sound amplification would have been superfluous.
In
fact, to call these soaring songs “elegies” is a misnomer:
None laments a death so much as each celebrates life. Of the
19 soaring songs, the paean to teachers, “Only One,” to James
Goldman, “I Do, I Do, I Do,” and to omnipresence, “Anytime
(I Am There),” stand on tiptoe above the others, due to the
power of their singers and to an odd humbleness of spirit.
When Sally Wilfert was in the middle of “Anytime (I Am There)”
and power was miraculously restored, she gave that rarity
of rarities in musical theater, an unplanned smile. This gave
the song an extra sweetness.
Elegies:
A Song Cycle, with its odes to Joe Papp and references
to Quentin Crisp, Robert Moses and Peggy Hewitt, is a treatise
on the science of the gesture, the calculation of how to manipulate
a response efficiently, assuredly, and repeatedly: “Just saying
our good-byes/The living was the surprise/The ending’s not
the story/ I’m just saying my good-byes.” These were an aria
of notes that soared, as if by force of voice meaning could
be instilled, instead of emotions distilled. There’s a power
in Elegies: A Song Cycle that is chilling to behold.
Ladies
on Top
The
Tamer Tamed
By
John Fletcher, directed by Michael Burnet
Shakespeare & Company, Rose Footprint, through Aug. 27
Those
who can’t get enough of The Taming of the Shrew at
the Shakespeare & Company’s Founders’ Theatre can stroll
down the hill to the Rose Footprint theater tent (future site
of the historically accurate reconstruction of the Rose Playhouse)
and see a 70-minute production of John Fletcher’s 1611 sequel
to Shakespeare’s play.
The fast-paced, robust, and acrobatic staging by director
Michael Burnet makes the most of the theater’s ambiance, the
cast’s abilities, and Fletcher’s slight play—said to have
been written in attempt to gain Shakespeare’s attention. Fletcher
did eventually collaborate on three plays with Shakespeare,
and while the play makes for a nice curio when performed in
repertoire with The Taming of the Shrew, its chief
asset is to underscore Shakespeare’s theatrical genius.
The
Tamer Tamed begins with Petruchio (Tom Wells) lamenting
the death of “our dearly departed Kate” (represented upstage
left by a nicely staged photo of Celia Madeoy, from the Founders’
Theatre’s production of The Taming of the Shrew). The
shrew-tamer Petruchio soon weds Maria (the excellent Catherine
Taylor-Williams, star of last season’s Vita & Virginia),
who conspires with her younger sister Livia (Julie Webster)
and their cousin Bianca (Sarah Taylor), sister to the departed
Kate, to tame their respective men by staging a variation
on the Lysistrata sex strike.
In
The Tamer Tamed, it works, the way to a man’s heart
being through his genitalia. Director Burnet keeps this thin
plot moving through some modern non sequiturs, most notably
a mooing toy cow on wheels, a black-and-gold velvet codpiece
with deep purple ribbons that shows up in the most unlikely
places, some Xena: Warrior Princess-style yodeling
from the sex strikers, and some outrageous accents during
a world tour of the hot climes where servants are born. The
three female leads are having lots of fun, and they share
that with the audience, which is a welcome relief.
—James
Yeara
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