Three-In-One Posting -- Music and Theatre!

It's crazy.  So many arts events this June, and here I am falling behind on my blogging.  I have three events to write about today!  Waste not your hour, Ken, and get on with it!

Wednesday night: Toronto Symphony.  Concert began with Green by Toru Takemitsu, a work with links to the TSO, which gave it a premiere recording way back in the 1960s under Seiji Ozawa.  Very strange, like Debussy crossed with Schoenberg, but not in an unpleasant way.  I would want to hear it again. 

Schumann's Piano Concerto, a long-time favourite of mine,  came next with the solo part beautifully played by Jonathan Biss.  However, the orchestra were distinctly getting out of sync with each other at a couple of passages -- I suspect due to lack of rehearsal because "everybody knows it" even though it doesn't get played too often.  Pity, because I really wanted to enjoy this and couldn't quite relax into it. 

Shades of my one and only year in the Toronto Mendelssohn Choir where we didn't even crack our Messiah scores until 2 nights before the first performance, because "everyone knows it" and we were deeply busy with other music.

The "other music" in this case was the Shostakovich Symphony # 11 "The Year 1905".  I missed this when the orchestra did it 4 years ago.  This sprawling, panoramic, almost cinematic piece is actually very quiet for about 70% of its 65-minute length, and the quiet passages were played to perfection -- icy cold and devoid of emotion at all times.  The strings were right on the mark here in the fiendish fugue passage which introduces the scene of the Bloody Sunday massacre, and again in the wild skirling figures of the finale.  Kudos to Peter Oundjian and the orchestra for an incredibly tight, solid, effective performance of a very tricky symphony!

Saturday: two musical shows at the Stratford Festival (what a change of pace!).  In the afternoon, 42nd Street, a new one for me.  I thoroughly enjoyed the performance as a whole, with every member of the acting cast projecting their characters clearly and strongly.  The dancing was simply phenomenal, and the Festival Stage is a wonderful venue to watch tap dancers going at full throttle -- unlike a proscenium stage, you can see every move of the flying feet! 

My only disappointment was in the book.  Okay, I'll assume that the story hews closely to the original 1933 movie which I haven't seen, and to the novel which that was based on.   But the character of Dorothy Brock, the leading lady, comes across as totally bitchy with no redeeming niceness at all.  And unlike the comparable character of Lilli Vanessi in Kiss Me, Kate, she has no equally spiteful male partner to put her in her place and draw out her vulnerable side.  So it's too easy to just hate her -- and that makes her solo bow at the end of the show doubly puzzling, when the show really tells the story of the young Peggy Sawyer who replaces her and becomes a star on merit.  But still, a fabulous couple of hours of singing and high-octane hoofing.

In the evening, an old favourite, The Pirates of Penzance.  As a teenager, I sang chorus in this show (with my brother John as the Pirate King) so I've always enjoyed revisiting it.  Unlike the last turn Stratford took at Pirates, this performance was not full of sheer over-the-top nuttiness.  I loved director Ethan McSweeney's insistence that the fun you need is all written into the script already, and just needs to be drawn out.  He's right -- and his production proves the point, in spades. 

The staging was both mechanistic and "Victorian", in the sense of recalling the theatrical and technological whimwhams of that era.  Choreography was limited but effective, being focused mainly on choreographic pratfalls and a balletic battle scene.  Extra music was effectively provided for these in a style that was half folk, half music hall. 

Singing and acting were again on a high level.  I first thought that Gabrielle Jones was in over her head as Ruth, with unlovely and forced tone production, but at the end of the show when she appeared "transformed" (I'm not saying how!) her voice too changed, becoming much smoother and more beautiful in sound.  Larry Herbert struggled a little with the Major-General's patter song (but who doesn't?  A G & S patter song is a very specialized art form indeed), and drew plenty of laughs with his enactment of the added encore verse.  This, by the way, was almost the only amendment to the text that was used, a far cry indeed from the last Stratford mounting of the show.

Sean Arbuckle was a very effective Pirate King -- it's just too bad that the costume and makeup departments decided he had to be made to look like Johnny Depp playing Jack Sparrow.  Amy Wallis as Mabel was, alas, a little two-dimensional amongst more vividly realized characters, until her Act II solo, Ah, leave me not to pine when she suddenly became a heartbreakingly complete person and drew tears to my eyes.

Star of the show, and of the whole day, was Kyle Blair who captured all the heroics of Frederic with complete seriousness, which of course makes him much funnier.  His marvellous tenor voice put him right on top form in all his many musical numbers.  And that was after having performed a similar leading tenor role in 42nd Street in the afternoon -- how's that for a full day's work?

Both of these shows are great fun, and well worth a trip to Stratford.  Next time I go, I expect to start getting into some Shakespeare!