Theater on Both Sides - A Repeat Experience

It's amazing what one actor can do for a show.
My second English class took another trip into the city today, this time for Peter and the Starcatcher.  Some readers will know that I have already seen this show (my previous blog post is linked to;  I'm always surprised by how much of a pretentious ass I sound like when I re-read posts...) and they'll know that I loved it.  Or they just refreshed their memories.  Either way, Peter and the Starcatcher was awesome the first time around.  Not so the second time.  I mean it was good.  It was very good.  It was still quite funny.  But some of the humor is a little blunt.  The puns are somewhat obvious.  I hadn't realized that because Christian Borle played them so subtly.  He did not ham it up.  The new Black Stache is a much campier actor; so the show is still funny, but not in the same way.  It felt smarter the last time I saw it.
The staging is still remarkable.  Lighting and Sound America did an interesting piece on the show in their July 2012 issue which informed me on a number of interesting factors (I would link to it, but I can't find it).  The proscenium arch is decorated with what is essentially gold painted trash, which is an interesting touch.  Everything seems a little bit thrown together, like a bunch of people got together in a mostly empty space and decided to put on a play, and the proscenium adds to that.  It looks like part of the gilded interior of the theater, but it's made of hundreds of everyday objects.  Which is really cool.  I'm not sure what that means from a critical perspective, but it's cool.

Perhaps some of my nonplussed reaction to my second trip to the Brooks Atkinson theater stems from my new-found dislike of Peter Pan.  The reason this show was on the schedule for my class was that we read the original version of the book (not the play) recently.  And you know what?  Peter is an asshole.  This play references the original material in interesting ways, but I can't escape from understanding those references.  In the final monologue, they quote, round-about-ly, the last line of the book "so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless".  I understand that reference and it makes me angry.  Peter is a dick to everyone.  He forgets people and kills people and doesn't care.  This is held up as the ideal of the one child who never grew up.  Now, I think you need to grow up a little to be humane.

In any event, the production was very different.  Was it fun?  Yes.  Would I still recommend it?  Probably not...

Theater on Both Sides - Como el muguito en la piedra

Pina Bausch's last work was on stage at the BAM opera house.  For some reason, it felt odd to see a dead woman's choreography.  We see dead dramaturges' plays - Shakespeare, Brecht, Beckett, et al. - but those are written words.  Not movement.  I feel like movement should be more ephemeral.

Setting that minor oddity aside, Como el muguito en la piedra (Like moss on a stone) is a beautiful piece.  After Pina's sudden death, it became a hot commodity and has been touring since.  It takes a lot from Chilean tradition and history, which was especially cool for me as a Spanish speaker.  Setting aside the music which was either instrumental or with lyrics in Spanish (in fact the title of the piece comes from Violeta Parra's "Volver a los 17"), the piece incorporates actual dialogue which I thought was an interesting choice.  Women in jewel tone dresses float across the stage and, often, men in dark suits try to hold them back.  Going through the year in AP Spanish Lit, I have reached a unit of works on machismo y feminismo, so this idea is especially relevant.   The piece begins with a woman on all fours, yelping like a dog as she is first carried in that position by two men, then lifted like a marionette by a group of male dancers.  The interplay between the male and female dancers is fascinating.  The opening scenes of both acts are very male dominated - I have already described the first snippet of the piece and the second act opens with a man greeting women as they enter his home for a party not by name but by descriptors like "the blue one" or "the little one" - to a very harmonious moment where the company is lined up diagonally playing with the hair of the person in front of them to even a moment that seems almost female dominated where the men mirror the movement of the women but always seem one step behind.  

Technically... well, I wasn't really paying attention to the minutia of the tech performance.  I know, readers will be disappointed (assuming that ), but I was really caught up with the dance.  One obvious aspect of the design was the stage.  The stage was completely white and completely bare, but the deck separated to form these wild cracks in the ground.  Inspired by Chile in many ways, it is unclear whether this is seismic activity, the Atacama desert, an Andean glacier, the cracks through which so many fell through during the Pinochet regime (many of the songs used and pieces themselves reference the disappeared), or simply dying earth.  

It was truly beautiful.