The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, directed by William Church, at Interlochen, by Daniel B. Gallagher


David Montee as Shylock in the Merchant-of-Venice at The Interlochen Shakespeare Festival

The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare,
Harvey Theatre, Interlochen Center for the Arts
June 30 and July 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 10,

Director – William Church (Artistic Director)
Artistic Associate – Laura Ames Mittelstaedt
Scenic Designer – Christopher S. Dills
Costume Designer – Candace Hughes
Lighting Designer – Rachel Konieczny
Sound Designer – Rory Baker

Cast:
Antonio – Justin Flagg
Salerio – Noah Durham
Solanio – Logan Woodruff
Bassanio – Matthew Folsom
Gratiano – Evan Adams
Lorenzo – Andrew McCallum Smith
Portia – Laura Ames Mittelstaedt
Nerissa – Kathleen Kleiger
Portia’s Servant – Jody Burns
Shylock – David Montee
Tubal – Scott A. Harman
Morocco – Siddhartha Rajan
Lancelot Gobbo – Jeffrey Nauman
Old Gobbo/Duke – J. W. Morrissette
Jessica – Rachel Eskenazi-Gold
Arragon – Justin Perez

It is easy to understand why Shylock, the reviled Venetian Jew, became the focal point of The Merchant of Venice in the latter half of the twentieth century. Though we all felt profound sympathy for those he came to represent, we are all familiar with the abuses that exclusive attention to an otherwise fascinating character led to in the theatre. This play is about much more than Shylock.

Yet Interlochen had every right to place Shylock at the center of Merchant once more given that the part was played by David Montee, Director of Theatre Arts at the Academy for twenty-one years. The cast included no less than ten of Mr. Montee’s former students.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International journal for the Arts!







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A Woman Killed With Kindness at the National Theatre by Huntley Dent

Womankilled

Too clever by halves. Although T.S. Eliot was describing Marlowe's once popular, now buried play, The Jew of Malta, when he dubbed it a savage farce, the phrase is a wide paintbrush for Jacobean tragedy, whose absurd motivations, wildly outsized emotions and sheer body count tempt us to burst out laughing. One of the breeziest writers of the day, Thomas Heywood, shuffled genres like a card sharp, and there's no reason to believe that he took his most famous tragedy, A Woman Killed With Kindness (1603) too seriously. There's not much reason to revive it either, except as a study in stage contraptions antecedent to the great age of folderol bien fait in the Victorian theater, which gave us masterly contrivers like Scribe, Sardou, and the like.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts!

Alan Miller

The Tree of Life by Terrence Malick, by Huntley Dent


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First disobedience. Sticklers are fond of pointing out that Proust was not remembering things past but in search of lost time, as the original French title says. So is Terrence Malick. His most Proustian film to date is The Tree of Life, which is now awing and stumping audiences, trailing a Palme d'Or from Cannes in its processional through movie houses where most of the audience, children of Star Wars and Scooby Doo, stand as amazed as Nebudchadnezzar reading God's message in fiery letters. The film is autobiographical and philosophical, like Proust's A la recherche, and just as maannered in its stylized language, although in this case the invented diction is visual.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International journal for the Arts!







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Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life

Sticklers are fond of pointing out that Proust was not remembering things past but in search of lost time, as the original French title says. So is Terrence Malick. His most Proustian film to date is The Tree of Life, which is now awing and stumping audiences, trailing a Palme d'Or from Cannes in its processional through movie houses where most of the audience, children of Star Wars and Scooby Doo, stand as amazed as Nebudchadnezzar reading God's message in fiery letters. The film is autobiographical and philosophical, like Proust's A la recherche, and just as maannered in its stylized language, although in this case the invented diction is visual.

Malick's film is an artwork, replete with dazzling images of Nature, that deliberately overreaches. In all seriousness it competes with the Bible. The Book of Job is played out allegorically through the bitter travails of Mr. O'Brien, as the script tersely calls him (played with sobriety and fierceness by Brad Pitt), an engineer raising his family of three boys and a delicate beauty of a wife in 1950s Waco, Texas. Curiously, critics have taken the setting, with its tree-lined streets, screened porches, and gauzy curtains fluttering in the breeze, to be an innocent world, when in fact it is exactly the opposite: this is the same New World that failed to redeem fallen man when the Pilgrims landed, recycling theological torments that contorted Jonathan Edwards and Captain Ahab.

Read the full review by Huntley Dent on the Berkshire Review, an International Journal for the Arts

A Singer’s Notes by Keith Kibler 35: As You Like It at Shakespeare & Co.


As You Like It, Shakespeare & Co 2011. Photo © 2011 Kevin Sprague.

As You Like It

by William Shakespeare
Directed by Artistic Director Tony Simotes

As You Like It is a play for virtuosos. Rosalind, Touchstone, Jacques, and Celia must be magnificent talkers. They have to command the idiom.  It must seem their natural speech. The players in Shakespeare and Company's well-directed As You Like It went a good way toward doing this. Excess IS meaning in this kind of writing. (Even the poor shepherd Silvius has a long allusive speech near the end of the play). Merritt Janson's Rosalind was in most things led by Kelley Curran's Celia. She was the most listening Rosalind I have heard. Capable of flashing brilliance when necessary, she often chose to measure out her speeches abruptly, even with some uncertainty. This endeared her to me. The bright Ms. Curran had an excellent vitality in her words. She seemed a natural leader and companion. These two actresses made performances which were almost a composite role. Often one could not tell where one left off and the other began. I'm sure this harmony will become even more subtle and dulcet as the run continues.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International journal for the Arts!







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Three Hotels, by Jon Robin Baitz, directed by Robert Falls on a Set by Thomas Lynch at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, by Michael Miller


Maura Tierney and Steven Weber in Jon Robin Baitz's Three Hotels at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Photo T. Charles Erickson.

Three Hotels
by Jon Robin Baitz
directed by Robert Falls
June 29 – July 24 , Williamstown Theatre Festival Mainstage

Creative Team:
Scenic Design by Thomas Lynch
Lighting Design by James F. Ingalls
Costume Design by Susan Hilferty

Cast:
Steven Weber - Kenneth Hoyle
Maura Tierney - Barbara Hoyle

Some years ago, when my sons were small and I used to frequent school fairs and street fairs, I always looked at the inflatable play structures with trepidation. As the children bounced about on them, it seemed to me inevitable that some exuberant or malicious one among them would puncture the balloon, and I imagined the whole—roof and pillars, dinosaur head, safety nets and everything—slowly and harmlessly caving in, until there was nothing left but a flaccid heap of plastic and rubber...and a horde of thoroughly delighted children worming their way out to the street, running away, and dancing tauntingly before their distraught nannies or parents. Minus the kids, this experience and the attendant fantasy came to mind during the boring moments of Jon Robin Baitz's Three Hotels—of which there were many—and the evening gave me a more tangible idea of what such a deflation might actually be like: the show steadily kept on losing energy, until it finally collapsed.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International journal for the Arts!







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Diane Arbus at the Tate Modern by Huntley Dent

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Camera obscura. Despite its conversion into the hippest museum in London, the Tate Modern's massive ugly building, unmistakably an old power station, could otherwise be one of Blake's dark Satanic mills. In that guise it's the perfect setting for three rooms lined with photographs by Diane Arbus. There would seem to be nothing new to say, or think, about Arbus's scalding vision. She roamed the ordinary New York of commuters and shoppers, and yet somehow simply to have her eye settle on strangers transformed them.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an international journal of the arts!

Alan Miller

Marlboro Music 60th Anniversary Season Opening Programs Announced, with other news and an update to our retrospective “Marlboro at 60″


Persons Auditorium at Marlboro. Photo © 2010 Michael Miller.

Marlboro Weekly Concert Programs

Download a Printable Copy of the Programs
Purchase Available Tickets to these Concerts

Marlboro at 60, by Michael Miller

Saturday, July 16, 8.30 pm

Schumann - String Quartet in F Major, Op. 41, No. 2
Michelle Ross, violin
Ida Levin, violin
Michael Tree, viola
Paul Wiancko, cello

Spohr - Octet in E Major, Op. 32
Charles Neidich, clarinet
Benjamin Jaber, horn
David Cooper, horn
Bella Hristova, violin
Mark Holloway, viola
Hanna Lee, viola
Paul Wiancko, cello
Tony Flynt, double bass

=Intermission=

Brahms - Piano Trio in B Major, Op. 8
Richard Goode, piano
David McCarroll, violin
Andrew Janss, cello

Sunday, July 17, 2.30 pm

Brahms - Zwei Gesänge, Op. 91
Jennifer Johnson Cano, mezzo-soprano
Hélène Clément, viola
Mitsuko Uchida, piano

Shostakovich - Piano Trio in E Minor, Op. 67
Bruno Canino, piano
Ying Fu, violin
Matt Zalkind, cello

=INTERMISSION=

Zemlinsky - Maiblumen blühten überall
Susanna Phillips, soprano
Nikki Chooi, violin
Danbi Um, violin
Hélène Clément, viola
Sally Chisholm, viola
Angela Park, cello
Andrew Janss, cello

Mendelssohn - String Quintet in A Major, Op. 18
Bella Hristova, violin
Nikki Chooi, violin
Hélène Clément, viola
Vicki Powell, viola
Peter Wiley, cello

Marlboro Music—once again—is celebrating its 60th anniversary, which I have already celebrated in an extensive retrospective article last year. The revered summer music school and festival has a peculiar double anniversary, because its inaugural year was very small indeed, and rather precarious. In the second year, everything was more organized, both in scheduling and financially, and the cherished summer event took off, to become what it is today—which, miraculously, is not terribly different from what it was sixty years ago. It is larger and more professionalized, but it still retains its original feeling of intimacy. The younger participants—they are not called students—still have the same extensive rehearsal time with their mentors. And the public can still look forward to concerts of the highest quality, in which seasoned masters and their less-experienced colleagues make splendid music together.

Read the full report on the Berkshire Review, an International journal for the Arts!







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A Streetcar Named Desire opens the Nikos Stage at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, by Michael Miller


Ana Reeder, Sam Rockwell in a scene from A Streetcar Named Desire at Williamstown Theatre Festival. Photo T. Charles Erickson.

A Streetcar Named Desire
by Tennessee Williams
Williamstown Theatre Festival
Nikos Stage, June 22 – July 3, 2011

Directed by David Cromer

Cast:
Eunice Hubbell - Jennifer Engstrom
Blanche - Jessica Hecht
Stella - Ana Reeder
Stanely Kowalski - Sam Rockwell
Harold Mitchell (Mitch) - Daniel Stewart Sherman
Steve Hubbell - Lou Sumrall
Pablo Gonzales - Luis Vega
Doctor - Kirby Ward

Does it imply too much complacent comfort that I, only a few minutes into WTF's compelling production of A Streeetcar Named Desire, leaned back and said to myself, "This is it. They're on track. I'm just going to follow this along." The first bit of business between the Negro Woman and Eunice, vividly played by Crystal Lucas-Perry and Jennifer Engstrom,  was magical, and it stayed that way throughout the entire production. The Williamstown Theatre Festival, under its new Artistic Director, Jenny Gersten, could not have gotten off to a better start: a great classic play in a great production. It was clearly intended to be a revisionist effort, with Sam Rockwell's entirely un-Brando-like Stanley, and its claustrophobic set, crammed with the banal accoutrements of American life in the late 1940s. But after Omar Sangare's treatment only a few months ago on the same stage, it seemed conventional, not to the detriment of either production.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International journal for the Arts!







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Celebrations in Song: Christine Brewer and Craig Rutenberg at Tannery Pond, by Seth Lachterman



Composers: Gian Carlo Menotti, Alan Louis Smith, Virgil Thomson, Charles Ives

"When I have Sung My Songs to You"
An Evening of American Music
Tannery Pond Concerts, Season 2011, Concert III 

Gian Carlo Menotti: Canti Della Lontananza
Alan Louis Smith: Vignettes: Letters from George to Evelyn based on correspondence of a World War II Bride

Virgil Thomson: Piano Portraits (solo piano),”My Long Life
Charles Ives: Circus Band, At the River, Memories
Ernest Charles: When I Have Sung My Songs To You
A. Walter Kramer: “Now, Like a Lantern
Harold Arlen: Happiness is a Thing Called Joe

Christine Brewer, soprano
Craig Rutenburg, piano

A vague sense of déjà vu pervaded the evening.  A little more than a year ago, I attended a Memorial Day concert at Tannery Pond (reviewed here) to hear the remarkable Brentano Quartet perform Britten, Schumann and Beethoven.  Later on that season,mezzo- soprano Vivica Genaux with Craig Rutenberg performed the little known works ofPauline Viardot.  Tannery’s Independence Day concert seemed to conflate those experiences with a suite of reflective and commemorative American offerings, some of which being quite obscure, with a reappearance of Mr. Rutenberg this time featuring Christine Brewer, one of the great operatic  voices of our time.  Remembrance, subtly woven throughout the program, began with a celebration of the centenary of Menotti’s birth. Later, Ives’s songs captured the passing of small-town American innocence. Virgil Thomson’s witty caricatures remind us of our friendships; and finally, in Alan Smith’s song cycle, the loss of life and love in the time of war is vividly portrayed.

Read the full review on the Berkshire Review, an International journal for the Arts!







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