Frankenstein

[edjames]

Oh God! What a mind numbingly boring production!!!! I left at intermission.

 

On the coldest day in this 13 day arctic blast that has hit much of the United States, I ventured out for what I had hoped to be an entertaining afternoon of theater. All the signs were in its favor. A classic gothic tale of horror, a handsome and talented leading man, Robert Fairchild, who choreographed his role, and a music program including works by Liszt, Schubert, and Bach, I had high hopes that I would enjoy this production.

 

Not so! A boring script and performances that were less than professional, I was bored to death. I can only say that despite terrific effort by the handsome Mr. Fairchild, even he could not say or life this production above the "meh' level.

 

AND, a lady in front of me that whipped out her cell one and began surfing the net 10 minutes into the first act!

 

Here what the NYTimes said:

 

Review: In ‘Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,’ a Monster to Love

MARY SHELLEY�S FRANKENSTEIN

By LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESDEC. 27, 2017

• 
  Robert Fairchild, left, and Rocco Sisto in “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” an Ensemble for the Romantic Century production. CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times
  “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” begins in a gothic-horror rainstorm, with flashes of lightning and the kind of organ music that sends a tingle up the spine. The teenage Mary Shelley lies sleeping, and in her dreaming mind, a monster jolts to life, electrified.
   
  Hooked up to wires, then writhing on the floor, the creature is a nightmare vision. Yet he has the great fortune to be played by the dancer Robert Fairchild, who possesses a can’t-take-your-eyes-off-him eloquence of movement and facial expression. Mr. Fairchild, who created his own choreography, morphs into a monster of delicate, disarming beauty, an innocent perambulating through a world he flounders to understand.
   
  In this “Frankenstein,” the latest multimedia fusion of classical music and theater from Ensemble for the Romantic Century, Victor Frankenstein’s monster is enchanting, endearing, irresistibly alive. He is, startlingly, a monster to love.
   
  He is also trapped, unfortunately, inside an ambitious but awkward production whose elements battle one another more often than not. Directed by Donald T. Sanders on the Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center, the show sounds beautiful. Three musicians perform works by Liszt, Bach and Schubert on oboe (Kemp Jernigan), piano (Steven Lin) and organ and harpsichord (Parker Ramsay), while a glorious mezzo-soprano, Krysty Swann, gentles the anguished monster with song. If this were simply a concert that included dance layered with intricate projection design (by David Bengali) and a moody soundscape (by Bill Toles), it would make quite an atmospheric evening.
   
  But “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” is a play of sorts, created by the ensemble’s executive artistic director, Eve Wolf, using excerpts from “Frankenstein” and Shelley’s letters and diaries. It aims to tell a story whose strands refuse to twine smoothly together: the tragic tale of the monster and the grief-scarred life of Shelley, whose mother — the writer Mary Wollstonecraft (“A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”) — died shortly after giving birth to Shelley in 1797. She lost two babies and a toddler of her own and became a young widow when her husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned while sailing in a storm.
   
  Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” begins in a gothic-horror rainstorm, with flashes of lightning and the kind of organ music that sends a tingle up the spine. The teenage Mary Shelley lies sleeping, and in her dreaming mind, a monster jolts to life, electrified.
   
  Hooked up to wires, then writhing on the floor, the creature is a nightmare vision.
  Yet he has the great fortune to be played by Robert Fairchild
  , who possesses a can’t-take-your-eyes-off-him eloquence of movement and facial expression. Mr. Fairchild, who created his own choreography, morphs into a monster of delicate, disarming beauty, an innocent perambulating through a world he flounders to understand.
   
  In this “Frankenstein,” the latest multimedia fusion of classical music and theater from Ensemble for the Romantic Century, Victor Frankenstein’s monster is enchanting, endearing, irresistibly alive. He is, startlingly, a monster to love.
   
  He is also trapped, unfortunately, inside an ambitious but awkward production whose elements battle one another more often than not. Directed by Donald T. Sanders on the Irene Diamond Stage at the Pershing Square Signature Center, the show sounds beautiful. Three musicians perform works by Liszt, Bach and Schubert on oboe (Kemp Jernigan), piano (Steven Lin) and organ and harpsichord (Parker Ramsay), while a glorious mezzo-soprano, Krysty Swann, gentles the anguished monster with song. If this were simply a concert that included dance layered with intricate projection design (by David Bengali) and a moody soundscape (by Bill Toles), it would make quite an atmospheric evening.
   
  But “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” is a play of sorts, created by the ensemble’s executive artistic director, Eve Wolf, using excerpts from “Frankenstein” and Shelley’s letters and diaries. It aims to tell a story whose strands refuse to twine smoothly together: the tragic tale of the monster and the grief-scarred life of Shelley, whose mother — the writer Mary Wollstonecraft (“A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”) — died shortly after giving birth to Shelley in 1797. She lost two babies and a toddler of her own and became a young widow when her husband, the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, drowned while sailing in a storm.
  

In a program note, Ms. Wolf writes that she wanted to explore “the connections between the author and her Monster from a woman’s point of view” — links that “may have been unconscious to Mary” but are “glaringly clear” to Ms. Wolf. Beyond the obvious one, the motherlessness of both Shelley and her monster, those connections are not, alas, clear in Ms. Wolf’s text. She puts much emphasis on the deaths of Shelley’s children and on a harrowing miscarriage, but most of that pain was yet to come when Shelley wrote “Frankenstein” in her late teens. So the juxtaposition feels forced and unilluminating.

 

Photo

Mr. Fairchild and Mia Vallet. CreditSara Krulwich/The New York Times

Worse, the play’s dialogue has a way of shattering the mood created by the music, Mr. Fairchild’s movement and those projections — falling rain (the monster opens his mouth to taste it) or a swooping bird (he chases it with canine delight) or the roiling waves that swallow Percy Shelley.

 

The production elements that succeed appear to have received more tender care than those that don’t. The acted scenes are so tonally off that they seem like an afterthought. Mia Vallet’s Mary and Paul Wesley’s Percy are jarringly contemporary in affect and lack a vital spark. Rocco Sisto is more solid as Mary’s father, the philosopher William Godwin, and as a blind man who encounters the monster.

 

Vanessa James’s set, too, is puzzling, given that it needs to work with the projections. Instead it works against them, particularly in Act II, when the hulking gateway that stands upstage center casts a giant shadow on the mountains and sea projected behind it.

 

In the program, Ms. Wolf writes that this “Frankenstein,” like her ensemble’s other shows, is intended to be “more than a concert or a play.” It is more than a concert. It is less than a play.

 

In 1831, nine years after her husband’s death, Mary Shelley wrote the introduction to a revised version of “Frankenstein.” In it, she recalled the challenge that Lord Byron had issued to her and Percy in the rainy summer of 1816. “We will each write a ghost story,” Byron said, and from that prompt came “Frankenstein.”

 

But Mary Shelley noted that Byron and Percy, a pair of poets, had experienced trouble assembling their tales. Her husband, she wrote, was “more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery, and in the music of the most melodious verse that adorns our language, than to invent the machinery of a story.”

 

In “Frankenstein,” Ensemble for the Romantic Century is similarly better at poetry than sustained storytelling. For all of the show’s flashes of beauty, it remains a collection of disparate parts, not a whole charged with lightning and brought to animated life.

[craigville beach]

thank you for posting reviews of the shows you see.