DEAD AND LOVING IT
posted by James Reel
By coincidence, death threads its way through all three of my contributions to the latest Tucson Weekly. We go from the ridiculous to the sublime, and end with a situation that is sui generis. First, a review of an Agatha Christie production:
Agatha Christie's Black Coffee so relishes its murder-mystery conventions that the suspects are gathered and locked in the drawing room together in the beginning, not just the end. Even if you can't guess who done it, you always know what to expect from Agatha Christie, and Live Theatre Workshop happily fulfills our expectations. …Then, a review of something far more serious:
Local Agatha Christie productions in the past few years have made the mistake of camping up the material, but here, director Jodi Rankin wisely takes the script at face value, avoiding parody while teasing out the play's natural humor with appropriate subtlety.
The Rogue Theatre has awakened The Dead. James Joyce's superb short story has come to life in an adaptation by director Cynthia Meier that honors the author's text while translating it into something viably theatrical.Finally, a preview of a new production of the one-hour children’s opera Brundibar, whose most famous performances came under harrowing circumstances:
This is no small task, for Joyce's story is even more interior than his more stylistically difficult Ulysses. Joyce provides little dialogue; much of the story consists of observation and an account of the tumultuous inner state of the outwardly circumspect central character, Gabriel Conroy.
Meier has scattered lines of narrative among the 17 actors, who tell the story as much as show the action. There's no other good way around this project, for "action" is not the point of The Dead.
One autumn, a group of kids in a camp put on an opera about two children who outwit a nasty organ grinder who stole the money they'd raised to help their sick mother. The composer, a leading musician, was on hand to help them; another excellent composer volunteered to play the piano, and the set designer from the original production a few years before even built some of the scenery.Click the links above for the full texts.
The show was a great success, and the government even incorporated part of it into a documentary it was sponsoring.
And then, soon after all the cast members and musicians performed the final victory chorus, most of the children were sent to Auschwitz and murdered.
