We’re seeing the biggest swings of reactions we’ve ever witnessed, the widest range of yeas and nays in the press, in our audience, in our circle of council members and friends. Passion, Passion: We’re all about that at Theater J, and it’s the leitmotif of DAVID as well. So much darkness amid so much light!
So how fitting it is that this amazing Georgetowner review by longtime critic and features writer Gary Tischler should tap into the new/old, avant-garde/traditional dialectic that makes DAVID so big, so challenging, so confounding to some, so thrilling to others. We received The Georgetowner notice, together with another rave in the DC Examiner by Barbara Mackay, on Wednesday. We include them in full below:
“DAVID IN SHADOW AND LIGHT”
BY GARY TISCHLER
MAY 28, 2008
http://www.georgetowner.com/performance2.shtml
There are a lot of strains and strings being played and pulled in the often audacious, world premiere production of “David in Shadow and Light”, a genre-defying new musical play based on the story of the biblical giant-killer hero who became a powerful and tragic king of the Israelites.
For all the winking nods to today’s political and post-modern climate, the striving to be cool, this genre-defying project is at its heart something very old-fashioned. It sucker-punches you in the heart, and in reaching for a big-sized theme in the end actually grabs it and shakes it like a bible story teller.
“David in Shadow and Light” is also the most ambitious project ever taken on by Theater J. Artistic Director Ari Roth sees David as a natural subject for our contentious contemporary political world. “He was the biggest celebrity to ever walk the face of the earth. He had the greatest gifts, the highest charisma quotient he was wildly popular, wildly romantic, rapacious, God fearing, flesh loving, a bollix of contradictions, how contemporary is that?”
Well, this David sounds like a phenom, who could resemble Barack Obama, but he sounds as if he has more Clintonian qualities, Bill that is, in his appetites. This production, directed by Nick Olcott, has a libretto by Yehuda Hyman that veers from the text-messaging age to a truth-telling, raw biblical style, and original music by Daniel Hoffman which verges wildly along atonal, risky contemporary styles, to primitive, passionate surges of near-melodic feeling. Perhaps even more critical is the choreography of Peter DiMuro and Shula Strassfeld of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange. Dance figures strongly in this play, movement as a signifier of events, character and personality every bit as much as dialogue. And that’s not counting the conceit that David’s life is played out like a life film in front of an angel and Adam the father of us all.
That’s a lot of chefs and cooks sharing responsibility, but then you need almost every bit of the ingredients, the music, the whirling dancing, the words both profound, funny, touching and way cool, for a play that features David, the young shepherd boy as a magnetic natural. Everybody’s drawn to him: his sheep whom he treats as individuals, King Saul, who sees him standing in the light of God, and therefore a threat to his rule; his son Jonathan who loves him immediately and deeply; Saul’s daughter Michal, who swoons like a teenager in hopeless love. the prophet Samuel, who anoints him, even Goliath, the punked-out Philistine, who turns out to be David’s cousin. (It was a small world even then).
For all the claims of contemporariness made for this David, a ravaged, bone-weary Adam, played from a wheelchair in wise, funny, wounded style by the superb Norman Aronovic, gets David right away and in a nutshell. “Look at his heart,” he says when he and the angel Metatron (Helen Hayes Award winner Donna Migliaccio) discover David as a baby. “He has the heart of the world.”. That’s the big idea in the play, and its smartly, sometimes heart-breakingly illustrated in the play with brilliant casting doubling.
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