Busy Week-End: "The Magic Flute" and "Ann"

In a rare coincidence, I had found some time ago two attractive performing arts events on this week-end's Austin calendar, and I decided to attend both.

"The Magic Flute" is a ballet by Stephen Mills, based on a compressed version of Mozart's opera. In fact, the score was written specifically for this piece, cutting the length in half and incorporating some of the sung parts into the orchestral suite. This was rather well done — the Queen of the Night's famous airs, for instance, were "sung" rather well by a trumpet.

I wish I could be as positive about the staging and the choreography. Mr. Mills, who spoke with the audience after the performance, said he was inspired to use shadows projected on a backdrop by something he saw at the Biennale in Venice a few years ago. The idea is okay... but leaves you to imagine what he could have done, for example, if Tamino and the dragon had danced their fight, instead of the lame shadow dragon we saw instead. Or if the water and the fire, through which Tamino and Pamina have to pass as their final induction rites, had been dancers in appropriately colored costumes, evoking flames and waves. There were tons of creative ideas that were just reduced to nothing through the limited and repetitive gimmick of this screen projection.

During his interaction with the audience, which he kept disappointingly short, Mr. Mills said that he "wanted to depart from the Egyptian and Masonic settings imagined by Mozart." I didn't think he got away from it at all, and indeed how could he? The story itself, even without any representation of a temple, implies a search for truth and purification, and a set of rites of passage, that clearly represent the Masonic traditions more than those of a traditional church. This is reinforced by the costumes chosen for Sarastro and his priests. As for the Egyptian references, they are, in most productions of the Flute, already limited to the minimum demanded by the libretto ("O Isis und Osiris," etc.) and since this production is voiceless, there wasn't much else to avoid.

But in fact my main criticism of the piece was that the costumes were overdone and did not serve the dancers or the work itself well. Schikaneder's libretto says that Papageno is dressed in the plumage of birds. That's fine for an opera, where the key artistic exploits are going to be first and foremost the singing, and then the music and the acting. In fact, a "busy" costume like Papageno's will be very good if the singer, instead of being a thin young man, is a bit older and corpulent. But this is dance. We're supposed to be fascinated by the movement of human bodies (none of which is going to be old or fat), not by the movement of layers of feathers!

In fact, I was reminded of Trey McIntyre's Peter Pan, created in 2004 for the Houston Ballet, in which I had also found that there was too much emphasis on complicated costumes. Note to choreographers: we are in the 21st century, and your predecessors started showing off the human body, with the minimum amount of costume needed to create visual harmony (and pass whatever decency standard seems currently applicable). There are lots of ways to suggest that Papageno is a birdcatcher, Tamino a prince (and the dragon a dragon, if there had been a tangible one) without covering them in things that hide their movements.

When Mr. Mills explained how the ballet came about, it was clear that he had spent months identifying and working with the people who could create the backdrop shadow effects, and he only started on the ballet five weeks before the first performance. This speaks a lot to the skills of the dancers, but unfortunately it doesn't say much about the choreographer, and I'm afraid it showed in the results. It was entertaining, it felt like a good family evening that would amuse the kids a lot, the orchestra and the score did an excellent job of reminding the people who know the work of all its superb musical moments... but this work seriously needs to be redone by someone in the tradition of the great choreographers of the last decades... a Stephen Morris, for example, or a Paul Taylor.

The next evening, I went to see "Ann," subtitled "An Affectionate Portrait of Ann Richards," a monologue written and played by Holland Taylor, a mostly TV and screen actress (Two and a Half Men, The Truman Show, etc.). At two and a half hours, including a fifteen-minute intermission, this one-woman show is quite a tour de force. Taylor has the accent, the mannerisms, and renders the often acerbic humor of the Governor. She had access to a lot of friends and colleagues of her subject, which gave her tons of materials to work with in order to tell the life, the challenges, the victories, and ultimately the gracious defeats (to two versions of hell: George W. Bush, and cancer) that marked her remarkable life.

The play was actually performed in several other Texas locations before hitting Austin for five sold-out performances in the last few days. It will be heading north later this year — it runs for three weeks in Chicago from Nov. 13 to Dec. 4. If it happens to be playing near you — and I assume that it will be back in Texas some time next year, unless if moves to Broadway or off-Broadway and stays there — don't miss it!