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Nosferatu
I was the one in the audience who liked the TR Warszara and Teatr Narodowy production of NOSFERATU that closed Saturday night at BAM. The show was in Polish, with English supertitles, and presented by an ensemble cast whose names (some of which have showed up in press reports) were not in the program. The…
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Sider
SIDER is a dance performed to the soundtrack of a film of an unspecified Elizabethan tragedy that the dancers hear through earpieces but that the audience does not. There is other sound and musical accompaniment that we do hear, including vocalizations, which do not seem to me to be in a particular language, although I…
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The Master Builder
There is much to appreciate in the version of THE MASTER BUILDER now playing at BAM. John Turturro’s sheer onstage presence as Ibsen’s feckless protagonist can scarcely be gainsaid, nor can the charm and playfulness of Wrenn Schmidt as Hilde, the young woman who changes everything by walking into – BACK into – the master…
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The Turn of the Screw
The aesthetics of the ghost story and of horror in general are essentially those of the Symbolist movement that spanned the 19th and the 20th centuries. Phenomena that are perceived by the senses, say the sight of a ghost or the sound of a raven tapping on the chamber door, intimate the existence of a…
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Faust: A Love Story
In retrospect, it is not that surprising how easily the Faust story adapts as a Christmas play. It’s just that it had never occurred to me as it did to the Vesturport and Reykjavík City Theatres of Iceland whose FAUST: A LOVE STORY is playing – in English – this weekend at BAM. Poinsettias greet…
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Untrained
UNTRAINED is a piece by the Australian choreographer Lucy Guerin that pairs two trained professional dancers with two untrained non-dancers. The latter are auditioned and swapped out with new non-dancers every so often, so as not to let their fish-out-of-water qualities dissipate with experience. The dancers, for reasons unclear to me, are all male; perhaps…
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The Roman Tragedies
I would say that last night I sat through six hours of Shakespeare’s three historically-based Roman tragedies – in Dutch, but in fact I did what I was invited to do and milled about. I lounged center-stage on a couch for the first scenes of Coriolanus, at one point dodging a flurry of papers tossed…
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Donka
DONKA: A LETTER TO CHEKHOV is penned and posted in the language of circus. Jugglers, clowns, aerialists, and acrobats are its author. In their writing of it, the director Daniele Finzi Pasca tells us in the program, they “give shape to the silences” in Chekhov’s notes, diaries, and letters. This is not, in other words,…
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Como el musguito…
I think that there is no other person who has been mentioned so often as muse and inspiration by the dance and theater people I know as the late Pina Bausch. That she was one of the signal theatrical artists of our time is beyond dispute, and so is the fact that it took me…
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Elsewhere
My first foray at BAM’s new Fishman Space was ELSEWHERE. Described as an opera for cello, it was the sort of living artwork that washes over you, its individual elements inseparable from general sensation, even with one of them, the cello, plainly at the core. The cellist Maya Beiser cut an imposing figure vocally and…