Word: showing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...generally not a good sign when the producers think it necessary to hand out a plot synopsis before a show begins. But, then again, King Kong, the Musical, Part 1: Lohengrin, this year's product of the Peter Ivers Visiting Artist Residency, is a show that defies generalizations...
...every sense of the word, a show. It has an infectious energy that seems to vibrate (literally, when the music is turned up loud enough) in the walls themselves, an energy that quickly captures every member of the audience. King Kong may not be the defining musical of this theater season, but it undoubtedly is the theatrical event of the year at Harvard...
...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...
...difference? It's hard even to tell exactly when the play begins. It could be when the actors get into character, when the lights go down, when the music (masterfully mixed by Reeve Hohlt '99) begins or when the action actually starts. The audience's expectations of what a show should be--something that you watch, not something in which you participate something with a definite beginning, not a slow evolution--are destabilized. And the fun is just beginning...
...King Kong gathers energy and begins to rocket towards its conclusion, the scenes grows progressively more jarring. The entrance of Lohengrin (played with unsettling gangsta coldness by Andres Ramos Nolasco '99, the first of several actors and actresses to play the part before the end of the show), perhaps one of the greatest single scene of any production this semester, is a case in point. Though they are garbed in virtuous 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...