It’s World Theatre Day, and naturally your thoughts turn to celebration: share your evening with actors. The possibilities abound. At Shadow Theatre, watch an actor play …. an elderly actor struggling to cross the gender divide and play Lear, assisted by a bored teenager (Queen Lear, at Shadow through Sunday). At the Citadel, watch a nanny with a magical touch take charge of a dysfunctional Edwardian family (Mary Poppins, through April 20). At Workshop West, watch an middle-aged urbanite professional freak out when her elderly mom finds something she herself can’t seem to land, romance (Connie Massing’s The Invention of Romance, through April 13).
The city’s two major theatre schools are opening shows tonight, too. At the U of A’s Studio Theatre, it’s Blood Wedding. At MacEwan University, it’s The Light in the Piazza.
The latter, by the team of composer Adam Guettel and the star American playwright Craig Lucas, represents “a full circle” in every way for director Farren Timoteo, as he says. For one thing, the award-winning actor/ director who’s also the artistic director of Alberta Opera, is a Grant MacEwan grad himself. “I remember saying to Tim (Tim Ryan, the late great founder of the theatre arts department who lived an breathed musicals) that I wanted to direct,” Timoteo recalls. “And he said ‘I think you’d be good at it’.”
As well, The Light in the Piazza marks Timoteo’s return to the music of Guettel, whose musical theatre genealogy is blue-chip (he’s the son of Mary Rodgers, grandson of Richard Rodgers). Eleven years ago he was in Ryan’s Leave It To Jane production of Floyd Collins, the boldly off-centre Guettel musical whose hero is trapped in a Kentucky cave in 1925. There is nothing like Floyd Collins in the American repertoire.
Since then Timoteo has become a star member of the Teatro La Quindicina ensemble, he’s created and directed original fractured-fairytale musicals for kids and directed original new musicals (Everybody Goes To Mitzi’s, The Infinite Shiver) for which he’s written lyrics, he’s become an artistic director. Last season, he made a huge splash on the Citadel mainstage in Spamalot! in a variety of comic assignments.
And now this 2005 musical about a mother and daughter duo who go to Italy on holiday, to the dreamy Tuscan city of Florence, in 1953. The mother, whose honeymoon had been in Florence, is disenchanted with her marriage; her daughter falls head over heels in love with an Italian boy…. Timoteo muses on the distinctiveness, and breadth, of Guettel’s musical inspirations. “As much as he’s got a very contemporary sound, his influences extend to Ravel and Debussy, with allusions to the classical musicals of Richard Rodgers. Ah, and a-tonal sideways turns that connect to Sondheim.” In short, Guettel’s “huge vocabulary of music” is enormously challenging. And so is the way it responds to the storytelling.
The musical director, and pianist, incidentally, is Cathy Derkach, a long-time Teatro actor who directed the young — well, even younger; he’s still only 30 — Timoteo in his student days in Titanic The Musical and Promises Promises. “We’re back together!”
“The overture washes over you, sweeping, lush,” says Timoteo. “And as beautiful as it is, Guettel uses that against the drama…. This is all about finding love and losing love, and the sound is the same; you tune your ears to that, to the way he explores that in his music…. I was so attracted to the way Light in the Piazza explores young love, and finds, on the cynical side, love fading away. And the way you hear it. (His music) makes you an active audience….”
“It requires such dexterity, vocal endurance and range. At its most sweeing and grandiose, there’s something unsettling, something cracking on the side….” That’s one attraction. Another is “the high emotional stakes,” and a certain mystery attached to the mother’s hesitation, no, opposition, to the awakening of young love.
Timoteo, whose lineage is Italian, rediscovered his roots in a trip to Italy last season and an Italianate version of Pinocchio that restored the Italianate flavours of Gepetto’s story. Now he’s studying Italian with a tutor. And he got his tutor to coach his cast.
At Studio, Kathleen Weiss, whose bent is toward the experimental, the imagistic and physical, the non-naturalistic, directs the Spanish classic Blood Wedding. Federico Garcia Lorca’s fiery 1933 groundbreaker, the fierce, moody, poetic play that made him an international star, reimagined the real-life story of a bride who disappeared with her lover on her wedding day. Sean McMullen designs Weiss’s production. Check out video footage from Act 2, scene 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7oVXS7Y9qI.
The Light in the Piazza runs at MacEwan’s west end Theatre Lab, in the Centre for the Arts and Communications (10045 156 St.) tonight through April 5. Tickets: TIX on the Square (780-420-1757, tixonthesquare.ca) or at the door. Blood Wedding runs at the Timms Centre for the Arts, U of A campus, corner of 87th Ave. and 112th St., through April 5. Tickets: TIX on the Square, or at the door.
The Light in the Piazza photo credit: Brittany Ayotte. Blood Wedding photo credit: Ed Ellis (AndreaRankin and Braydon Dowler-Coltman).
