Stage

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Designers, PhillyTheater, playwrights, politicalplays, RussianHistory, Theater, WilmaTheater

Sarah Glinko, Ross Beschler & Steven Rishard in Ravji Joseph’s Describe the Night at the Wilma Theater
(photo by Joanna Austin)

Describe the Night

Written by Ravji Joseph

directed by Blanka Zizka

The Wilma Theater

Broad & Spruce St., Philadelphia

Feb- 1-Feb 22, 2020

www.wilmatheater.org

The Wilma Theater has been redesigned as a multi-tiered amphitheater to frame Rajiv Joseph’s provocative 2017 political play ‘Describe the Night.’ A sterile sunken stage lined with hundreds of file boxes, and looming behind, a distant forest in Poland circa 1920.  In the dark shadows of the forest, Isaac Babel is a wayward soldier writing in his diary about war crimes he has just witnessed. A Russian officer named Nikolai, interrupts and the two start a conversation that sparks an argument.  

Nikolai says he understands a field war report, but ‘personal observations’ are lies and proclaims “Truth is what happens, false is what does not happen.” Who wins this debate is left in the shadows, as we are transported to 2010 in a car rental outlet in Smolensk, Russia. Feliks the agent has witnesses a plane crash in which Polish government officials, including the president and his wife are killed. The KGB has just interviewed him and are coming back.

Meanwhile, Mariya, a journalist pounds on the door begging to be let in. She just escaped the crash scene where other reporters were being rounded up by Russian officials. The police return and Feliks and Mariya both escape, one with a mysterious diary given to Feliks by one of the dying passengers on downed flight.

But before we know what’s happened to them, we flashback to 1937 Moscow, where Nikolai and Isaac get together after many years. Nikolai’s wife, Yevgenia appears and seems to barely be tolerating Nikolai’s controlling ways and fancies herself a seer, who Nikolai has said, always predicts war. He makes her sit with Isaac and predict his future in a ritual involving blindfolds and bathes his arms.  The fates and secrets of these characters are some of the play’s most dramatic moments.

Joseph goes back and forth in time as we try to piece together the mysteries of this narrative puzzle that frames the dystopian realities and scabrous illusions of 90 years of Russian history. At times, the pile-up of dizzying fragmented exposition can strain one’s concentration over the course of the near three-hour production. But, past trying to figure out all of the pieces, this is exciting forensic theater of the absurd laced with magic realism.

The urgent messages of totalitarian governments boiled down to the horrors of the inescapable ‘techniques’ used to get ‘enemies of the state’ to submit.  The playwright echoes the omens of Orwell realized, and of Bertolt Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui which Brecht wrote as a warning to America that the rise of a fascist leader can happen anywhere in the world.

Joseph’s dialogue cycles are character-driven even though the subtext is freighted with political subtext, there is a sustained emotional drive in this material. This whole cast is uniformly excellent through this heavy handed material.

Blanka Zizka’s sharp direction brings out the best in lengthy two-character scenes, but this is ensemble work, the artistic results of the Wilma’s HotHouse roster of actors working together in studio work together (ala repertory theater) all year round.  Zizka wisely doesn’t have the cast use Russian accents.

Ross Beschler and Steve Rishard, as Isaac and Nikolai, deliver edgy performances full of naturalism and operatic intensity.  Fine performances by Anthony Martinez Briggs and Brett Ashley Robinson as Feliks and Mariya in the dense fog of action and freighted dialogue of the first act, and later when their characters reappear.

Sarah Glinko’s shows amazing range as the beautiful and furtive Yevgenia and eventually as the scary ancient Yevgenia, serving her leach soup and predicting war. Keith Conallen gives a chillingly convincing performance as Vovo, the low-level, judo-loving KBG agent who is trying to gain power by any means necessary. Vovo is Joseph’s inspired proto-fictional Putin, as a cipher wrapped in a tyrant around a little boy.

He agrees to shadow a young woman that is trying to escape to the west in 1989 when the Berlin Wall comes down. Campbell O’Hare’s is Yevgenia’s rocker granddaughter Urzula, who knows how to tame the volcanic Vovo.  The character is a fictionalized Putin, written as a cipher wrapped in a tyrant around a little boy.

The production designs keep giving and is a stunning collaboration of Thom Weaver’s lighting in tandem with Matt Saunders’ set, video elements by Christopher Ash and hypnotic music and sound design by composer Christopher Colucci.

Even with its jagged structural edges, and a few flat character twists, (one, in particular, is a surprise when it lands, even though it is a too convenient plot device),  without doubt Ravij Joseph has written an explosive and timely political play. The messages and implications in Describe the Night narratively and visually, stay with you to chill you even more in our winter of discontent.

BooksBooksBooks

Tags

Cole Porter, diaries, gaycomposers, GreatAmericanSongbook

Love, Cole 

The Letters of Cole Porter

Edited by Cliff Eisen & Dominic McHugh

Yale University Press

Hardcover, 662 pgs photographs

https://yalebooks.yale.edu

After his death, Cole Porter’s relatives and estate basically wanted to erase any perception that one of America’s greatest songwriters was gay, though it was common knowledge even during his lifetime. The matter is now officially settled by the composer himself settled with the publication of The Letters of Cole Porter, just released by Yale University Press.   

Cole Porter starts his lifelong letter writing habit when he was a student composer at Yale, and  even at the height of his fame, while he composed hit Broadway musicals, Hollywood films and a was a star in his own right in the theater world and cafe society in New York, Paris and London. 

He married socialite Linda Lee Thomas in 1918.  By all accounts, his wife knew and accepted his affairs with men, but they were the celebrity couple on the theater and society circuits in New York, Paris and London.  Even during their yearlong globetrotting honeymoon, Porter was writing lusty letters to Boris Kochno, a star dancer in Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.  At times Porter sounding completely obsessed that he would not be able to arrange clandestine meetings with the dancer.

Porter was from a wealthy family, and he easily moved among wealthy American and European society, where men had the means to create a protected private gay life.

Few clues to Porter’s love for Linda come through in his letters.  He speaks of her so off-highhandedly about their relationship that she comes off as a companion than a.  His passion is more apparent when writing to his colleagues, lovers and Yale alums, as he globetrots with Linda living a gay (in the old meaning of the term) and a barely hidden life as a most famous gay composer living a most extravagant double life.     

 Many of the letters reveal Porter as a charming, egocentric tunesmith right out of one of the frothy backstage musicals RKO and MGM were churning out during the Depression.  But other than being tone deaf to the strife of millions of Americans in the 30s, he was at the height of his powers as a composer that connected with his audience, in the theater, in films and by way of popular singers and big bands.

 Top stars like Ethel Merman, Fred Astaire, and Eleanor Powell, just to mention a few championed his work. As did bandleaders and popular singers.  Many performing his songs even before the charts were published.A short list of classics would include ‘Night and Day’ ‘Easy to Love’ ‘Let’s Do It’ ‘Anything Goes’ ‘Begin the Beguine’ ‘Too Darn Hot’ ‘So In Love’ ‘In the Still of the Night’ ‘Love for Sale,’ et al.

Porter had the mutual admiration of his contemporaries, including  Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, Noel Coward, Johnny Mercer, et al. Even late in his career, Porter and Berlin shared the distinction of being the most prolific and successful songwriters of the 20^th century.

The diary entries reveal Porter as a hard-working composer writing at the top of his game and ready face off with Hollywood and Broadway producers, stars and moguls to promote and control how his music was used commercially.  

In 1937, Porter life radically changed will he was riding in the country and his horse reared up, throwing Porter and then landing on on top of him, crushing both of his legs. Throughout the rest of his life, Porter faced risky surgeries and other physical difficulties, but he didn’t really complain about it more than document the setbacks that affected his professional life.

And he continued to compose multiple productions in New York and Hollywood, even though his shows weren’t the hits they used to be. His cache as one of the authors of the Great American Songbook increased as singers and bands on the ‘hit parade’ continued to record his songs.

After WWII Porter’s brand of sophisticated, escapist musicals lost their appeal with audiences.  He had two flops in a row and a biopic about his life with Cary Grant was also panned by critics (though both scores produced hit songs).   His triumphal comeback was the musical Kiss Me Kate, which revived his career during the 50s, with a string of hit musicals Can-Can, Silk Stockings, High Society and several revivals of his earlier shows.

His letters to his lovers and close friends during Linda Porter’s slow decline reveal little about his relationship with Linda, but it is obvious that her health was foremost on his mind. The older Porter essentially doesn’t change, but his worries about his career, his mother’s health, Linda’s reveal a sadness that he masks with his characteristic positive outlook.

He doesn’t slow up professionally or socially after Linda’s death and outside of a few passing references in his letters, he doesn’t really write about how he is handling grief or carrying on without Linda.

When Porter has to return to the hospital for more operations on one of his legs, that ends in his right leg being amputated, Porter, now over 60, he essentially becomes a recluse, cutting himself off socially and turning down work.

 The Letters of Cole Porter makes for compulsive reading as fascinating, if sketchy self-portrait of one of the architects of the Great American Songbook. The editors fill in some gaps for continuity, but for the most part, this collection is Porter’s narrative via his own correspondence~~In equal measure frank and furtive~ there is a lot to read in between the lines~ cue music~ Well, Did you Evah? What a Swell Party It (still) Is.

ClassicalPhilly

Tags

Beethoven, Boulanger, composers, Farrenc, PhiladelphiaOrchestra, VerizonHall

Pianist Daniil Trifonov (courtesy Philadelphia Orchestra)

The Philadelphia Orchestra

Yannick Nézet-Séguin, conductor

Daniil Trifonov, piano

Jan. 30, * 31- Feb 1-2, 2020

Verizon Hall, Philadelphia

To commemorate Beethoven’s 250th birthday, Philadelphia Orchestra conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin has launched BeethovenNOW, the year to revisit and put the current orchestra’s stamp on all the symphonies and the bounty of other repertory from Beethoven’s works.

Yannick kicked it off in grand style, with the orchestra back in their longtime house, the Academy of Music, for a subscription concert for the first time in two decades. Pianist Yefim Bronfman performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 4 (slated for CD/digital release). The same week the orchestra was back in Verizon Hall with four performances with pianist Daniil Trifonov performing Beethoven’s 1st and 5th concertos. Trifonov may have been the marquee draw, but the rest of the program proved just as interesting with works by Lili Boulanger and Louise Farrenc, that also highlights the orchestra’s season long overdue concept of performing more works by women composers.   

Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 has a lengthy symphonic opening, played on this night with full force. Trifonov makes a warm entrance, a bit distanced from the orchestra and. there were moments the pianist-orchestra energy was a little cold.  Everything came together in the Largo and some moments of Beethoven transcendence by the Rondo Allegro 3rd movement. Trifonov’s interpretive artistry came thundering through in Beethoven’s cadenzas, illuminating the edge of Beethoven’s adventurism.  

Trifonov revels in the improvisational aspects of certain composers (brilliantly with Chopin) and   in this concerto give him room to explore. He is in the zone, lurching over the keyboard with an entranced intensity, then pulling back, bolt upright, his head drops back in the progressions and orchestral resolves. Worth noting that the maestro kept close eye on the pianist, there was no doubt who was driving this concerto. You sense his visceral connection to the music that is not a performance pose or mask. After three curtain calls of unabated standing ovation, after a long pause backstage Trifonov strode back onstage and unceremoniously sat down to play   Wilhelm Friedemann Bach’s Polonaise No. 8 in E minor with its haunting lyricism that is simply magic in Trifonov’s hands.

This season the orchestra is finally performing more music composed by women, past and present, Nezét-Séguin and on this night the orchestra performing two works that should be part of the orchestra’s heavy rotation repertory.  A surprise that the maestro didn’t introduce either work, something that he often does with compositions that are being performed by the orchestra for the first time.

The concert opened with a radiant performance of Lili Boulanger’s D’un Soir Triste (Of a Sad Evening)   composed in 19 17-18 the last year of her life. She was only 24 years old.  There is so much musical life in this work, even with the foreboding atmospherics, Boulanger’s vivid dynamics of the strings and frame the her progressive mise-en-scenes.  Among the outstand soloists- cellist Hai-Ye Ni, harp and violin dialogues by David Kim and Elizabeth Hainen. Kyoto Takeuti in the haunting background celesta. All of it so distinctly Boulanger’s, what a great loss to music that she died so young.

The closer proved just as captivating in an altogether stellar performance of this rarely performed work. In a program note for Louise Farrenc’s Symphony no. 2. Nézet-Séguin writes that concert audiences not familiar with Farrenc’s work will be tempted to compare it to the famous classical-romantic composers of the early 18^th century- Berlioz, Gounod, Schubert, etc. and certainly on the surface of the symphony there are symphonic tropes of the era.  Nézet-Séguin in the program notes that Farrenc’s voice “doesn’t sound like any of these people. It sounds like her.”  The structure of the symphony’s four shorter movements is unique, as are the pulsing subtleties of the strings, the sensual blend of woodwinds prescient to French tone poems of the early 20^th century. Farrenc was writing her own chapter of French symphonic music that has, without doubt, too long been ignored.

DanseMetros

Tags

BalletMetros, DanceLegends, PaulTaylorDancers, Tango

Paul Taylor Dance Company

Michael Novak, artistic director

Choreographer: Paul Taylor

Annenberg Center, Philadelphia

Jan. 24-25, 2020

www.annenbergcenter.org

Paul Taylor’s radiant legacy

Paul Taylor was one of the most innovative choreographers in of the 20th century and he was creating dance up to the time of his death in 2018. His indelible legacy lives in the 147 repertory works he made for his company over the course of 60 years. He left that repertory in the hands of his successor Michael Novak, who was a PTDC dancer and now leading The Paul Taylor Dance Company into a new era. The loss of Paul Taylor could have spelled an uncertain future for the company, but, based on their recent program at the Annenberg Center/NextMove Series they are look as vital as ever going forward.

The company is on a nationwide tour, and Novak programmed a concert of company classics that showcase Taylor’s choreographic range and the mettle of the current roster of dancers.

The concert opened with a poignant short film retrospective that includes footage of Taylor dancing that reminded everyone of a certain age of Paul’s own arresting power as a dancer. In interview clip of Taylor answering with some impatience to an interviewer, “Well, I’m a dancemaker.” And the three contemporary works performed at the Annenberg was more than a reminder of what an American master he was.

‘Syzygy’ from 1987 is framed by a backdrop of a comet dust streaking across space.  The full company, dressed in short tunics, by designer Santo Laquasto, bolt onstage in in staggered unison lines in frenzied abstract, movement, their bodies in subject to invisible gravitational fields.  Meanwhile, composer Donald York’s electronica is a space magnetic field that also drives the dancers. 

The choreography is fast paced and full of asymmetrical, chaotic configurations of steps explosive layouts, fragmented phrasing and turns jarringly moving in forward and reverse. Cleaved bodies crashing to the floor, dancers vanish, then cataputed back to the action, their limbs in counterbalance but Taylor’s making it all dizzying choreographic sense. Within that, there is Taylor’s wit, that are completely revelatory choreographic ground. Taylor’s creative control perhaps symbolized by soloist Madelyn Ho’s is a classical pose rotates slowly in space unaffected by the chaotic forces around her.

Next, ‘Sunset,’ scored to symphonic elegies by Edward Elgar, the ballet is a fine example of Taylor’s synthesis of ballet-modernist idioms. The scene is a ship during wartime and the soldiers on deck. Taylor documents their dreams of sweethearts at home, the battles at sea, their hidden fear and camaraderie and even a shipboard gay romance, the battle at sea, and the reality of the life and death dangers they face. All of the dramaturg is conveyed through Taylor’s masterful storytelling prowess.

‘Piazzolla Caldera’ (1997)  is one of the most erotic tango-ballets ever staged outside of Buenos Ares.  Café lamps hang over the dancers as the scenes de actione play out against a deep vermilion backdrop. The sensual atmospherics of composer Astor Piazzolla’s tango music is intoxicating. Tango on modern dancer bodies can lose some of the earthiness within the precision of the patterns and the dramatic attitude. Taylor for the most part is able to overcome that.

The full company is onstage with td the other side in tight black pants and men, bare chested.  Each group stakes their ground in halting, dramatic group stomps toward each other in formation, their arms arced back like a matador’s, their eyes blazing.

Piazzolla’s sultry dialogues of the violin and bandoneon in ‘Conierto pada Quinteto’ with partners Eran Bugge and George Smallwood squaring off in a sexually charged tango, That heats up, even more, when Madelyn Ho joins them. Both dancers lifted in turn sequences by Smallwood and a ménage that reaches the bluest flashdance.     

In ‘Celos,’ dancers Michael Apuzzo and Alex Clayton play soused buddies who after a few punch-drunk acrobatics to stay on their feet, eventually fall down and dance the horizontal tango. They pass out on top of each other upstage as Maria Ambroise and Lee Duverneck pas de deux, Taylor’s potent tango-balletic fusion.

The full company returns for the lusty ‘Escalo’ that left the dancers smoldering on the floor as the curtain came down.  Paul Taylor brought his company to the Annenberg Stage over a dozen times over the years, and it is a true joy, now that he is gone, this company is as good as ever and just as important, breathing new life in Taylor’s repertory. Michael Novak is making sure his works don’t turn into museum pieces, but full of artistic interpretation and dancer immediacy.

For more information about the Paul Taylor Dance Company’s current tour go to www.ptamd.org