Word: sirlin
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...idiom; and the Wagnerian ideal has been evident in much of his later work as well -- in Hydrogen Jukebox's marriage of Minimalism to the poetry of Allen Ginsberg (1990), and in 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof (1988), which combined David Henry Hwang's text and Jerome Sirlin's images...
Last week the New York City Opera embraced the trend with not one but three premieres on successive nights: Lukas Foss's Griffelkin, Hugo Weisgall's Esther and, most provocatively, Ezra Laderman's Marilyn (yes, that Marilyn). All three were designed by Jerome Sirlin (who did Broadway's Kiss of the Spider Woman), a dazzling visual stylist whose fluid use of video projections instead of built sets annihilates space and time and gives his productions an exhilarating sense of visual freedom...
...Sirlin's wizardry, however, has been lavished on a curiously old-fashioned trio of composers. The best of the new works is Weisgall's Esther, by a composer who turns 81 this week and whose fondness for outmoded, Schoenberg- style serialism remains unabated. The story of Esther's dramatic rescue of the Jews from the evil Persian vizier Haman, celebrated each year in the feast of Purim, is one of the Bible's most gripping tales, and Weisgall, working to a libretto by Charles Kondek, has told it well. Tunes, no; drama, yes. The stark and uncompromising Esther...
...revolutionary cell mate, Anthony Crivello acts with bluff intensity and sings with beauty and power. The men's cramped quarters and surrounding tiers of cagelike squalor become a park, a movie palace, a Russian alley, even a vast, symbolic spiderweb through inspired film projections by set designer Jerome Sirlin, making a dazzling Broadway debut after a career in the avant- garde and in opera...
...Designer Sirlin's biggest challenge was the jail cell, which in the tryout occupied the entire stage. Now it is an authentically crowded 8 ft. by 10 ft., with two beds, a sink and a toilet. Says Sirlin: "A musical about two guys singing to each other in a cell . . . well, it has limitations. Then I realized confinement can be a kind of infinity. There is no end to the enigmatic pieces of jail you see. I wanted many layers of seclusion that you could still see through, to symbolize the lack of privacy and to turn the layers into...