The ensemble and supporting cast is uniformly excellent. And all three main daughters, sung by Lauren Marcus, Maya Jacobson and Austen Danielle Bohmer, are powerhouses - with Bohmer, a Broadway singer who is not (yet) well known, a particular revelation. Debbie Gravitte, who sings Golde, is exquisite. The production is exquisitely sung Skybell reads as a lighter, more youthful Tevye than is typical and his vocal choices democratize the whole. It freshens the original, removes all potential cliches and deepens both the conflict at the core of the piece (the end of Act 1 is startling and shocking) and the palpable, traumatizing isolation of Tevye’s entire family from its community as the papa bows to the wishes of his daughters that’s a courageous choice and far more intense than you’ll expect and yet honors the piece so well. It honors the traditions of the original, deepening them through such embrace of both human universality and Jewish specificity, with additional Yiddish sprinkled throughout. This is not such a “Fiddler,” and hence my unbridled enthusiasm. Many of those productions, fascinating as they can be, appeal most to those tired of the originals. In the last couple of years, revisionist directors like Daniel Fish (”Oklahoma!”) have created radical productions that repudiate classic American musicals’ original romanticism and their belief in American exceptionalism. Just their own.īut the danger in focusing, like this, on the conceptual innovation is to imply that this “Fiddler” does not deliver what one expects from “Fiddler,” or that a young person seeing the show for the first time would somehow leave with something radically revised from the traditional Topol or Theodore Bikel experience with the Jerome Robbins choreography. The lighting, originally designed by Diego Leetz, is marked by extensive use of footlights, which lends the proceedings the sepia tones of a documentary, especially given the bleak, simple backdrop of winter arbor, a confirmation of what those who must leave Anatevka have to say as they exit, that this was never much of a place, really. The setting, by Rufus Didwiszus, is obsessed with wardrobes and boxes, maybe boxcars, and the contrasts between confinement and space, tradition and impermanence, rootedness and the transience of persecution that are so central to Jewish history. nominated best opera orchestra by the international opera awards 2018, the lyric opera orchestra has been a vital and integral part of lyric opera of chicago since the company’s founding and first performances of mozart’s don giovanni in february of 1954.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |