Reviews today looks at The End of Everything Everas part of the Dublin Theatre Festival, Kim and the RTÉ NSO under the baton of Minczuk at the NCH ,Jack L in Vicar Street and Opera Theatre Company at City Hall in Dublin.
Dublin Theatre Festival: The End of Everything Ever
The Ark, Dublin
A GROUP of shabbily dressed musicians playing folk music set the mood as we take our seats for the show. As six-year-old Agata (convincingly played by Iva Moberg) introduces us to her extended family, the fears and tensions within Jewish families living in Germany at the beginning of the second World War are poignantly recreated.
For anyone who thinks that stories about how families are torn apart by wars are too serious for 11-year-old children, this production will change their minds. The sheer exuberance of the actor musicians in New International Encounter (NIE) theatre company carries the audience along with this sad story, based on the experiences of 9,000 Jewish children sent from Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria to live with new families in England between December 1938 and October 1939.
Humour and music counterbalance the strong emotion. For instance, as Agata's parents bid farewell to their daughter, their fumbling jokes about the habits of the English are met by loud laughter from the audience. Similarly, when Agata's adoptive parents (David Pagan and Babora Latacova brilliantly play both sets of parents) give her home-made Victoria sponge, her attempts to hide her dislike of this quintessentially English cake are hilarious.
The End of Everything Everis one of a trilogy of stories about survivors of wars and ethnic conflicts in the 20th century. Sharing these stories with young people is what energises this extraordinary multinational theatre company with actors from Norway, Britain, Poland, the Czech Republic, Belgium and France. After infusing such a sad story with humour, NIE end the story realistically when Agata returns to Berlin in 1952 to find out that her family are dead and her home destroyed. This reviewer is left hoping that the international diplomats of the future are among the audiences that see these shows as they travel throughout Europe and beyond. SYLVIA THOMPSON
Kim, RTÉ NSO/Minczuk
NCH, Dublin
Edino Krieger - Passacaglia for the New Millennium; Prokofiev - Piano Concerto No 2; Rachmaninov - Symphony No 2
THERE WAS not much in the way of subtlety on display at Friday's concert by the RTÉ NSO under first-time guest conductor Roberto Minczuk.
Minczuk, who is music director of the Calgary Philharmonic as well as the Teatro Municipal Rio de Janeiro in his native Brazil, opened the evening with a piece by his fellow-countryman Edino Krieger (born 1928).
Krieger, whose early career involved both romantic and 12-tone periods, has long adopted a more all-embracing approach, His Passacaglia for the New Millenniumof 1999 seemed to find him trying too hard to be all things to all men. From the lugubrious opening to the absurdly affirmative close, Minczuk worked hard at conveying the many stylistic lurches that Krieger chose to load into this quite short piece.
The soloist in Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto was Kyu-Yeon Kim, whose appearance at this concert was her reward for winning the concerto prize at the 2006 Axa Dublin International Piano Competition.
Kim's playing of this daunting work was unfailingly athletic. But her tonal and expressive reach was too limited to get far beneath the surface. Hers was a performance that had something of the excitement of perpetual running on empty, a dangerous feeling of always being at the limit. In spite of some lapses in co-ordination, she managed to hold her nerve, and kept to her task with steely determination.
Minczuk was not the most sympathetic of accompanists, though when the orchestra had the field to itself, the playing blazed with impressive colour.
In the broad expanse of Rachmaninov's Second Symphony he lurched from emotionally fraught climax to emotionally fraught climax. It was a frustratingly episodic approach, lush and full in tone, and unfettered in emotionalism, as if he saw the piece as the musical equivalent of a Hollywood tear-jerker. This performance sounded best in the rhythmic business of the second movement. MICHAEL DERVAN
Jack L
Vicar Street, Dublin
LIKE A cross between a young Bruce Springsteen, Nick Cave and Billy Idol (without the botoxed sneer), Jack L had his audience in the palm of his hand from the minute he loped on stage, propelled by a light show worthy of Caesar's Palace.
Lukeman's voice can tackle anything: torch songs melt in its velveteen caverns; cabaret classics bask in its uncompromising cockiness; revival songs revel in its redemptive qualities. Trouble is, Jack L alights upon them all with equal fervour, never quite sure of where he's most comfortable.
With a new CD of Randy Newman covers, Burn On, Jack L opted to almost bury them in the melee of his eclectic back catalogue. At first it seemed that I Think it's Going to Rain Todayheralded a canny shift in emphasis: from the Brel bequest of Jackyto the subterranean subtlety of Newman's dry wit. But in the blink of an eye, he returned to familiar terrain, interspersing occasional - and well-executed - covers such as In Germany Before the Warwithin a set list that owed as much to show band gimmickry as it did to the artists he lauds.
Jack L's repertoire contains some big songs which he handles with brio. His voice is a perfect foil for the big-screen emotions of Little Manand Georgie Boy. But even as he boldly picked his way across the crowded audience, there was little evidence of any real connection between singer and listeners. His cover of The Eels's I Like Birdswas curious, a crowd-pleaser that obliterated the song's emotional vulnerability within its cartoonish couplets.
Jack L is still in hot pursuit of his own musical identity. This performance was a tincture of the panoply of choice he's got at his disposal, which is probably not a bad place for any artist to lurk - for a while at least. SIOBHÁN LONG
Opera Theatre Company
City Hall, Dublin
Debussy - Pelléas et Mélisande
OPERA THEATRE Company's latest move away from the traditional theatre stage is to the Rotunda in Dublin's City Hall. That space can present all the challenges and gratification of singing in the bath. How would two pianos sound? Surprisingly well, it turned out. So did the singing.
Marius Constant was the musician behind this trimmed-down version of Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisandewhich, as with the well-received La tragédie de Carmen(1981), was born out of collaboration with the director Peter Brook. As in all successful arrangements there are gains as well as losses, the biggest of the latter being Debussy's voluptuous orchestration. But most of Debussy's orchestral music sounds complete on one or more pianos, and throughout this performance, the alert and colourful playing of Hugh Tinney and Mairéad Hurley vindicated Constant's decisions.
Thanks to well-paced direction (Annilese Miskimmon), and unfussy design (Neil Irish) and lighting (Tina MacHugh), and to the near-invisibility of the music director Tecwyn Evans, emphasis was on the dream-like sequence of scenes and music. There were no obvious weaknesses among the six singers: Jonathan Best as Arkël; Deirdre Cooling-Nolan as Geneviève; Thomas Walker as Pelléas; Robert Poulton as Golaud; Eoin Dexter as Yniold; and Claire Booth as Mélisande.
Dramatically, this adaptation retains just enough of the original. With five acts cut to 15 continuously running scenes lasting around 100 minutes, the story seems tighter, a bit less dark, lighter without being lightweight and, perhaps, a little more accessible. Yet there is enough of the sometimes abstruse aspects of Maeterlinck's story, and of Debussy's adaptation of it, to sustain the mysteriousness. MARTIN ADAMS
