Word: eveing
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...have a moment of silence for Celine Dion who thankfully retired on Jan. 1, 2000.... Here's a rumor for you: Madonna, never very good at being subtle, wins coolness points for her antics on New Years Eve. At a party at Donatella Versace's in Miami, she and pal Gwyneth Paltrow were enjoying dinner when Jennifer Lopez and her posse decided to crash the festivities. Madonna, who's been dissed by Lopez in magazines, reportedly stood up and said "Dinner's over." And the dinner guests dispersed, leaving little Miss Puffy all by herself...
...spin to what are perhaps the world's most familiar stories is the play's explicit purpose, and yet the tension between Children of Eden as didactic educational tool and as entertainment is never fully resolved. The musical engages serious and more humorous numbers alike, ranging from Eve's "The spark of creation" where she questions the validity of her curiosity in Eden to the ironic "A ring of Stones" where Cain, Eve and Abel embrace Stonehenge. This unsettling contrast is no fault of the production staff or the actors but of Children of Eden itself...
This problem becomes more troublesome, however, when combined with other shortcomings in the first act that detract from the cast's raw talent. Eve (Jac Huberman '01) questions relentlessly, but the strength of her part undermines Adam's (Steve Toub '01) on-stage presence. Toub appears uncomfortable on stage, and his voice only emerges fully confident at the end of Act I. The theater, moreover, occasionally feels cramped, especialy during the large ensemble numbers. Almost every scene has the storytellers, or chorus, sitting in white robes on the edges of the stage. And perhaps most importantly, the vocal coherence...
Overall, however, Children of Eden more than recovers from these deficencies, largely due to the strength of the choreography and the staging. Eve's confrontation with the snake is brilliantly arranged. The snake begins as the tree of knowledge, then changes into a slithering six-person serpent. And the depiction of Noah and the Flood, in which the cast virtually becomes drops of water, is another of the first act's great achievements...
...play's inconsistency in a distracting way. God (Dan Berwick '01) is not dressed as an old man with a white beard as one might expect but as a clean-shaven red-robed preacher figure. Act I's storytellers wear all white, and after the fall of man, Eve and Adam don fur vests. Yet in Act II, we find Noah and his children wearing twentieth century rain ponchos. The play is an incomplete anachronism. Ham (Noam Osband '03) wields a gun, while Cain (John Keefe '01) dances around Stonehenge. Cullum's costumes promote a general sense of ambiguity...