Stage

Michael Castillejos in Gentlemen Volunteers (photo Lindsay Browning)

Pig Iron Theater Company is renowned as one of Philly’s most innovative theatrical troupes. They are celebrating their 20th anniversary by restaging their production of Gentlemen Volunteers by Suli Holum who was also one of PITC ‘s founders. First staged by the company in 1998, its powerful antiwar message resonates more that ever. Set in 1916-17 as America was about to enter the WWI, it follows the lives of Red Cross nurses and soon to be US recruits on the front lines in France.

The play is deftly staged at in the rustic brick and iron foundry space at Christ Church Neighborhood House and co-directed by PITC founders Dan Rothenberg, Quinn Bauriedel and Dito van Reigersberg.
The audience is instructed to move around en la ‘promenade’ around these scenes, which leads to some audience scrambling, but this element, playing to the scene, jars the senses.

There is a captivating musical prologue as the audience files in the theater as Francoise de la Tour (Melissa Krodman) sings a rousing French cabaret song and if followed by Jean (Michael Castillejos) her accordionist who then sings the saucy Ragtime tune “Everybody’s doing it!”

The story starts on the Yale athletics field where a recruiter is looking for volunteers to assist in France in anticipation of the US entry into the war. Yalies Rich Conwell (Bryant Martin) dreams of learning how to drive a Model T, while Vincent Barrington (Scott Sheppard) a budding poet looking to chronicle his experiences in the service of a good cause.

They head ‘over there’ as drivers and assistants in a Red Cross field hospital near the front where Francoise is head nurse, who runs her unit with steely command. Her English cousin Mary Pinknell (Lauren Ashley Carter) has also just arrived to start as a nurse volunteer. She starts off on the wrong foot, but Francoise gets her up to speed without pause. Mary is attending her first patient, with Rich suddenly at her side, who then faints she attends to a wounded soldier’s wound. The chance meeting turns into something more, but not before Francoise walks in admonishes them “this is not a cabaret.” she barks. Later she tells her nurse corps (aka, the audience) “You are here working between life and death….and don’t you forget it.”

Lauren Ashley Carter & Bryant Martin (photo Lindsay Browning)

But Francoise forgets it and falls into a torrid affair with Vincent, after they get drunk in a bar. Now she doesn’t have time to keep an eye on Mary, who spends every off duty hour in bed with Rich.

The directors devise elements of physical theater, mime and ensemble acting to orchestrate Holum’s gritty, economic, sometimes whimsical dialogue, elegiac meditations about war.

Some of pantomime scenes – in the operating room or operating an ambulance crank-shaft on period vehicles are easy to decipher, but there is also more cryptic mime relating to the senses and emotional motives between the characters, who remain tentative under the stress and trauma of war.

The lover scenes are particularly well handled with tension and tenderness of the circumstances. Francoise and Vincent fall in love and their after hours affairs unravels la Tour’s guarded secrets. When they are separated Vincent writes her passionate letters, but she can’t bring herself to read them. Meanwhile Mary has surprising news for Rich, but he has joined up as a commissioned Doughboy off to fight in Italy. Everybody looses. Vincent articulates the pyrhic victories and vows to write about the realities of war.

In brief flashbacks, Castillejos is a dynamic Jean, revealed as Francoise’s husband, a casualty of war. He also is L’Homme d’ Orchestre, playing a Ravel nocturne on clarinet timpani for various precision battlefield effects. He also performs the original (award winning) sound designs by James Sugg. As in the days of radio they are performed manually with such items as paper, fabric, typewriter, eggbeater, enamel basin, surgical instruments, etc.

As Vincent, Scott Sheppard conveys warmth and humor and a sober drive of a writer witnessing fateful events. As Rich, Bryant Martin has the spunk of an All-American and deftly communicates his growing disillusionment observing the real cost of war. Lauren Ashley Carter is all heart and courage as Mary and has a hilarious mis-en-scene doubling as an snarky cockney war photographer. Melissa Krodman gives nothing less than a tour de force performance as the heroic and tragic Francoise de la Tour.

During the run, there are two scheduled benefit performances performed by the original 1998 cast which included Dito van Reigersberg and Quinn Bauriedel as Rich and Vincent, Cassie Friend as Mary, Emmanuelle Delpech as Francoise and James Sugg as Jean.

Gentlemen Volunteers runs through Dec. 27, 2015 with performances at Christ Church Neighborhood House, 20 N. American Street, Philadelphia.
http://www.pigiron.org

World of Music

Yannick celebrates backstage with a Citation from Mayor Michael Nutter & the announcement that he is Musical America’s Artist of the Year (photo courtesy of Philadelphia Orchestra FB)

The Philadelphia Orchestra
Yannick Nezet-Seguin, conductor
Hilary Hahn, violin
The Firebird

In late Noveember, Conductor Gianandrea Noseda kept the Philadelphia Orchestra warm with two weeks of programming of Tchaikovsky, Liszt, Rachmaninoff and most intriguingly, the US premiere of Alfred Casella’s Symphony No. 4, 106 years after he wrote it.  Phil Orch musical director Yannick Nezet-Seguin returned early December to put his imprimatur on some rare French repertoire and Igor Stravinsky’s complete ballet score to The Firebird.

Nezet-Seguin’s opened the concert with Georges Bizet’s Carmen Suite in an altogether anemic reduction by Fritz Hoffman composed in the 1990s. Nezet-Seguin leans on the Toreador fanfares to ignite it, but otherwise the orchestra sounding rote with this dimensionless paste-up.

Perhaps all attention was focused on French composer Henri Vieuxtemps rarely performed Violin Concerto No. 4, a fascinating and challenging rarity composed in 1849-50, with classical-romantic atmospherics and but violin solos that anticipate modernist, experimental lines. You can see its appeal for soloist Hilary Hahn.

The first movement has a lengthy and static orchestral opening before the violin makes its vertiginous, her tone sonorous and reserved. Hahn brings her full artistry, eventually, to the lengthy piece.

Hahn is not just in her own soloist zone; she sways to the orchestrals and turns toward the other players, the interlocks with the orchestra building the theatricality of the piece. At times Hahn is passionately technical, and even with gorgeous, resonate tone and bow and bridge dexterity in the 3rd raucous solo movement, and Hahn’s essaying its Vieuxtemps’ fiery temperament in the long, staccato lines, yet still sounding like a gypsy fiddler of in this symphonic template.

Nezet-Seguin kept the edge to Stravinsky’s La Sacre du Printemps at its most lush earthy atmosphere that careened into its most savage dimension. The recording with the Philadelphians 2013 for Deutsche Grammophon deservedly became a bestselling classical album and won a Grammy.

The atmospherics he brings to La Sacre, he has also applied to The Firebird, but the result is different. The complete ballet score is actually a rarity in the concert hall, with most orchestras opting for the Firebird Suite and for good reason.

The complete ballet score has less of a forward thrust in its collaborative element for the ballet stage, is stellar Stravinsky, without doubt, but the flight of the firebird is the main attraction, and Stravinsky is also providing support to the action onstage, akin to what a film composer does, so Firebird has essentially musical divertissement for the choreography.

In the concert hall all this reads as a lot of symphonic foreplay, interrupted with fanfares, the dynamic contrasts get tired mid-way though and in this performance sounding under glass. Still, there was outstanding playing among the soloists, even within its lackluster cohesive musical arc.

The woodwinds, especially, a rescuing band- among the stellar line-up igniting the Firebird- Jeffrey Khaner flute, Daniel Matsukawa, bassoon, Ricardo Morales, clarinet. At the cool end, that trio of Harps, led by Elizabeth Hainen, proved nothing less than lustrous. David Bilger leading the brass into the crescendo, matched with penetrating clarity by premier French hornist Jennifer Montone.

Nezet-Seguin was having a great week otherwise. He was named Music America’s Artist of the Year, and the announcement was made in Philly, along with a special Citation from Philly Mayor Nutter for the occasion, then the official presentation of the award in Carnegie Hall the following day. Days later, maestro Yan also picked up 2015 Grammy nominations for his Deutsch Grammophon recording of the the Fab Phil’s Rachmaninoff Variations conducting 24 year old Russian superstar pianist Daniil Trifanov.