Word: paulus
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...creators of these shows, of course, don't 'fess up to anything as crass as pandering to nostalgia. "Janis Joplin's music sells better now than it did 20 or 30 years ago," says Jennifer Dumas, producer of Love, Janis. Diane Paulus had never heard Laura Nyro's music before she was asked to direct Eli's Comin', and she argues that this new breed of musicals fits perfectly in the theater's participatory tradition. "If you can bring music into the theater that the audience already has a connection to, you're just increasing the power of what...
...then there's the title. With the exception of a single line at the very end of the play, Paulus's production has absolutely nothing to do with enormous, city-destroying gorillas. Then again, the brilliance of the show is that it defies any sort of certainty, it attacks all of our expectations. Maybe the lack of reference to the other King Kong is in itself a way of showing...
Directed by visiting artist Diane Paulus of the Project 400 Theater Group, a New York-based theater company whose stated mission is to redefine what people think theater is, King Kong is a show that is as challenging as it is engaging. Loosely based on Richard Wagner's 1848 opera Lohengrin, which in turn was based on a German version of an Arthurian legend, Paulus's multimedia production tells the story of the virtuous knight Lohengrin and his efforts to save and marry Elsa, a princess unjustly accused of murder...
...white, Lohengrin and his posse burst into the Ex more like characters out of Boyz'n the Hood than heroes of an Arthurian legend. Wearing stuffed animals--those archetypal symbols of sweetness and caring--on their heads like helmets, they perform an absurd dance as a show of force. Paulus and costume designers Amy Rose Berliner '02 and Amanda Whitman '01 toss around concepts of good and bad, passivity and force, absurdity and authority more freely than professors of postmodern literary theory...
...then there's the title. With the exception of a single line at the very end of the play, Paulus's production has absolutely nothing to do with enormous, city-destroying gorillas. Then again, the brilliance of the show is that it defies any sort of certainty, it attacks all of our expectations. Maybe the lack of reference to the other King Kong is in itself a way of showing...