Word: chorus
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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David Wheeler's production departs from Brook where it shouldn't and follows it where it must. This is inevitable, since the play really doesn't exist apart from its interpretation. Wheeler substitutes a broad cineramic "happening" stage for Brook's deep proscenium, paralyzing the underlings and thrusting the chorus in our laps. This is fine, for he makes good use of vertical poses (pyramids, piggy-backs, tableaux) at the expense of marching scenes and horas. But there are other problems. Kimball and Kimbrough, while excellent, are all too evidently acting toward their roles from their personalities (which shouldn...
...Weiss/Brook's inspiration and contributes a little of its own. The play "breathes." Marat (Clinton Kimbrough) hunkers in a large bathtub at the center, periodically approached by Corday (Lisa Richards) and Sade (Frederick Kimball). The patients sprawl, wander and sprint across the stage in johnnies and slippers. And a chorus in the tatters of Revolutionary costumes roams from the lights to the wings, now clustering around the tub to mime the principals' conversation, now reaching out to incite the patients to riot. Each brawl is quelled by the nurses, and our attention returns to the tendentious rhetoric of Sade...
...Marat/Sade is so intrinsically exciting, and TCB's acting so good, that the play is exhaustingly effective. John Coe (Herald), Frank Cassidy (Coulmier) and Bronia Stefan (Marat's mistress Simonne) deserve mention. Roberta Collinge and Josephine Lane highlight the chorus, and the full-throated Katherine Garnett (who drools) very nearly takes the show. Go, if you think you can Brook it. But hope David Wheeler tightens up Act I by tonight, when I'm going again...
Palace and hovel, ships, torches, caves, rocky passes, thunderstorms, primeval forest, a chorus of "unborn children." The whole idea for a new opera called Die Frau ohne Schatten (The Woman Without a Shadow) so excited Richard Strauss that he wanted to be gin composing right on the spot. That was in 1911. It was eight years, however, before the shadow became a reality, and then, despite wide critical acclaim, it was 40 years more before it was staged in the U.S. Trouble was, with all those ships and rocky passes, the technical demands of the fanciful libretto were more than...
Austerely contemporary in sound, Penderecki's two-hour oratorio draws on a wide musical spectrum ranging from pious Gregorian chants to the dry linearity of the twelve-tone school. In a fresh departure from the Passions of Bach and Telemann, his chorus participates as well as comments, punctuating Christ's ascent to Calvary with hisses, shouts and mocking laughter, while the music quavers and sighs in sympathetic counterpoint. With the lean, clean strokes of a fencer, Penderecki slices to the heart of the Passion, revealing through the intolerance shown to one man the tragedy...