Word: poemes
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
This is the way the year began--with what, by any standard, qualifies as a loud theatrical bang. No sooner had most of us unpacked our boxes than Erik Amblad was on stage in "The Hollowmen," an adaptation of the famous poem by T.S. Eliot...
...strangely appropriate that the show's title is slightly different from the title of Eliot's poem, "The Hollow Men"; this show is Eliot, distinctly skewed. The words of "The Hollow Men" are only the starting point for "The Hollowmen," a loud, extravagant, psychedelic play that feels very much like a live music video...
...Eliot's poem is a fairly short one, and all of "The Hollowmen" comes in at under 45 minutes. But in that time, artistic director Mark O'Maley does just about everything you can do with a stage draped in tinfoil, a strobe light and an actor in a metallic suit. Briefly, what happens is this: as the poem is heard on the sound track--mixed and looped, sped up and slowed down, intermingled with classical music, rock, and a pounding techno beat--Erik Amblad performs a highly elaborate pantomime, in which his only prop is a large red chair...
...stage is only one part of this show. Even more important is the soundtrack, in which Eliot's poem is made to undergo transformations he couldn't have imagined, and probably wouldn't much care for. Here, too, the sheer achievement is impressive; sound designer Amar Hamoudi prolongs a poem that would take five minutes to read aloud into a rhapsody of sound. Hamoudi, along with O'Maley, creates a series of moods based on the speed and intonation of the speaking voice, enhanced by various beats, snatches of music and random snatches of speech. (Some fragments of "The Waste...
...think that's how he saw himself at the end. Invictus, one of F.D.R.'s favorite poems, was popular in the storm-tossed 1940s and would have been known to a lieutenant named Dole. It is a poem about fierce human will, a poem you might call proud or braying, depending on your taste. And you could say the Dole campaign at the end was a similar kind of poem...