Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Not a review of The Nightingale and Other Short Fables - at BAM

It's actually Other Fables and The Nightingale, as the fables come first. 

I''m a sucker for Lepage. He's all about theatricality. No beating about the bush. The first fables are illustrated by hand shadows. The opera singer sings: The cat is in the cradle, lalala. And a cat appears on the screen, a really cute cat. Let's have a glass of beer, lalala, sings the opera singer. And the face of an old Russian lady with a very recognizable Russian nose shows up on the screen. It's a delight, because we like to be fooled, and to know that we're being fooled. Theater by definition 

All the fables are illustrated by various shows of light and shades. Lepage obviously had a good time experimenting with these techniques.

The Nightingale has action that's more real, but not much. Each singer manipulates a puppet whose part he/she sings. They play themselves and they play the puppet too in a kind of duplicative motif. Theater is duplication too. Lepage likes machinery, artifice. illusion. He gets his heart's content with birds that fly, dragons that fight in the water, manipulators which are dressed in a mummy-like black outfit. We're supposed not to see them. I won't tell of every trick in Lepage's bag to not spoil the show. 

I have just one complaint of consequence, shared by about a third of the audience: we couldn't see well the water pool at the front of the stage where most of the action took place during The Nightingale. What were they thinking?

The costumes are breathtaking. In the Nightingale they combine gamely Russian and Chinese visual styles. A choir is dressed in colors as bright as a flock of parrots. Spectacular make up spectacular.

The lighting's fabulous. Oh for that moon, or is it the earth, floating on a vibrant blue sky.

The music doesn't do it for me. The singers sang their hearts out, and the lyrics are lovely, but I'm not a fan of Stravinsky. Something's missing in his music: a heart?

Oh, and there's a message about technology not bringing happiness, must be a joke, right? 

Not a review.

Contributed by  - -  Arabella Hutter

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