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Crash Ensemble (photo: Ros Kavanagh)

As a critic, I do my best to find the meaning in art, to deconstruct why something exists, and sometimes that’s tough to answer. Sure, some art is overtly political, and some art can be a triumph of storytelling. Crash Ensemble, the Irish musical group that closed out another stellar season at Peak Performances, may have been both of those things, but I couldn’t tell—to me, the group was simply an aesthetic delight. 

Performing two separate concerts, Strange Folk on May 8 and Bright Visionon May 9, Crash Ensemble brought vitality and excitement to instrumental music that’s eluded my naive, pop-addled ears over my short lifetime. Perhaps I could make allusion to postminimalism or polystylism, but that would be doing a dishonor to the Wikipedia article I road in on. Instead, I’m content to share my delight over the sound that washed over the audience. Read more »

During the first weekend of February, the Alexander Kasser Theater was testing ground for two acts of musical fusion. On Saturday, February 6th and Sunday, February 7th, both Miguel Zenón’s band and Kronos Quartet brought similar recipes to the table—mixing established forms with fresh musical styles. Or, for Kronos, a diversity of styles—and the perils of amplifying a bastion of acoustic beauty, but we’ll get to that. 

Miguel Zenón’s path as an instrumentalist runs deep, with stints in the Mingus Big Band and with bass maven Charlie Haden. He’s an alto player possessed with astounding technique and quicksilver inventiveness. Breathtaking runs were limber at Saturday night’s performance, not agitated. Then in a late solo he briefly burnished his line with a bending Arabian tonality—intriguing, not obtrusive, like a deft, magical tweak. 

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What happens when a cast aims for your funny bone, takes up a tale teasing the preservation instinct’s strange ways, and does onstage gender changes—er, costume changes—to a brash klezmer score? Shlemiel the First, if you can get to the Kasser Theater by January 24 for this rambunctious revival by Peak Performances and the National Yiddish Theatre–Folksbiene.

Shlemiel sports an evening’s worth of pleasures and a lively raft of theatrical wiles. The brainchild of Robert Brustein, the theater Hall-of-Famer who founded Yale Rep and American Repertory Theater, the piece has an astonishing pedigree: adaptation by Brustein from a play by Isaac Bashevis Singer; music by Hankus Netsky, who’s done klezmer with Itzhak Perlman and runs the New England Conservatory’s improv department; lyrics by Arnold Weinstein, librettist for operas including William Bolcom’s A View from the Bridge; and music direction by Zalmen Mlotek, Folksbiene’s artistic director. And with director/choreographer David Gordon at the helm, Shlemiel brims with chutzpah and every other effusive tagline in the book.

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Students from Christopher Parker’s Mythology course at MSU wrote reviews of the recent Department of Theatre and Dance Production Polaroid Stories by Naomi Iizuka. Here’s a sampling of their responses. Take a look—and feel free to add your own!  

“Montclair State University students are in fact high up on a mountain, but in the play Polaroid Stories, which is a newer day Metamorphoses, the actors are on a physical high—snow mountain. A Polaroid is a camera that develops its own film. These people are the Polaroid camera; they create their own stories. All these stories have a similar point that combine together. The actors living on the streets all have hardships. They are acting like the gods in their life situations. They bring the themes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses into situations of our time, as in poverty, homelessness, prostitution, etc.” (Grace Waksmundzki) 

“Any mythology student should see this play. This play shows you that mythology is not just a bunch of old, farfetched, and made-up stories. But, it shows you that mythology has to do with human nature and behavior just like Freud suggested. The characters and events in classical mythology symbolize human actions and emotions. It has to do with love, substance abuse, incest, family problems, personal desires, and many other aspects of the spectrum of humans. Athena didn’t literally burst from her father’s forehead, but perhaps that symbolizes that she thought much like her father and that she had much in common with him in regards to intelligence. Every mythology-interested person should see this play so they will be able to recognize the relevance of classical, ancient mythology and modern life.” (Richard Link)

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As You Like It is most blatantly about love—as [director] Julie Fain Lawrence so beautifully put it in our interview in November: “searching for love, finding love, lack of love, yearning for love, filled with love, absence of love.” But there were a number of other themes that, throughout the rehearsal process, I found underscoring both the play itself and the process of creating the play. 

Transformation is the first of these. In many critics’ and actors’ articles about As You Like It, the Forest of Arden is referred to as almost a land of the imagination, a sort of alternate reality in which anything is possible—a woman may believably pass for a man, social status seems to level out, a clown can conceivably fall in love with a so-called “foul” maid, a man who once plotted the death of his younger brother becomes his best friend, and the “bad Duke” is transformed into a religious man. In Arden, status, societal roles, and gender roles are turned on their head. 

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