Thomas Hampton Reviews AND GOD CREATED GREAT WHALES
Photo by STEVEN GUNTHER
Receiving its Los Angeles debut before returning to New York for an eight week run, REDCAT is hosting Rinde Eckert’s contemporary opera AND GOD CREATED GREAT WHALES through the weekend.
This rework of the production that toured in the early aughts is a streamlined success featuring several incredible duets between Rinde Eckert as Nathan and Nora Cole as Olivia, both his internal muse and real life ‘favorite’ retired Opera star.
Eckert treats its audience to a peak inside a crumbling mind as it reaches the ecstatic heights of a creative journey. His opera is a stunning, poignant dramatization of the decline of a man fighting back against his degrading memory long enough to complete his magnum opus, an opera based on Melville’s Moby Dick.
The conceit that pushes the plot forward is simple, and ingenious. Before his neurological issues progressed too far, Nathan has recorded specific instructions and reminders for himself on cassette tapes. Each day, Nathan listens to his instructions and continues to write, noting thoughts and ideas in several color coded cassette recorders strewn about his workroom.
By dramatizing Nathan’s struggle to work in his incapacitated state, Eckert is able to boldly wink at the audience while sending up long standing operatic/ symphonic traditions. Nathan’s explanation to himself of how woodwinds are used to play the part of different birds, and what Sopranos and Altos (singers) should be used for, are quite hilarious bits of ochestrational instruction.
Nathan straps his instructional cassette recorder over his jacket like a life preserver, in the hopes of rescuing this recluse from his wild, open ocean of a lost mind. Eventually Nathan straps on one over another, an operatic Frank Black bulking up on armor to keep the perilous world at bay. Instead of guitars, he layers himself with the comfort of a familiar voice intoning instructions meant to incite the completion of our hero’s quest for his own white whale.
AND GOD CREATED GREAT WHALES asks us to face up to our own mortality and the fragility of our human condition. “Nature is a bitch,” and it does not let us escape from our personal horrors and terrors, nor the prison of our ever rotting body and mind.
TICKETS AND PRICING
GENERAL ADMISSION: $25.00
DATES AND TIMES
This show runs: 01/25/2012 to 01/29/2012REDCAT | Roy & Edna Disney CalArts Theater: 213.237.2800 MAP
OR BY PHONE
213.237.2800
ADDITIONAL INFO
REDCAT | Roy & Edna Disney CalArts Theater631 W. 2nd St
Los Angeles, CA
90012
213.237.2800
213.237.2800
ADDITIONAL INFO
REDCAT | Roy & Edna Disney CalArts Theater631 W. 2nd St
Los Angeles, CA
90012
213.237.2800
213.237.2800
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