GRAMMY-winning composer Steven Mackey and Obie Award-winning librettist Rinde Eckert have completed a new opera for Opera Theatre of Saint Louis.
The work was written in less than two months and will be entitled “Moon Tea.”
The work tells the story of the historic moment when Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, invited the Apollo 11 astronauts to Buckingham Palace for tea, fresh from their triumphant moon landing in 1969.
During the pandemic, we have seen no shortage of socially distanced dance on screen, some of it intimate and slapdash, some of it panoramic and refined — and all of it, for its sheer collective persistence, heartening. But the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company’s “Breathing at the Boundaries” is the first dance work this year I’ve encountered that both responds to this moment and transcends it.
On Tuesday, December 29, 2020 the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company (MJDC) premiered an extraordinary dance, music, spoken word and visual art film titled Breathing at the Boundaries, choreographed by Artistic Director Margaret Jenkins in collaboration with the MJDC dancers. It is a brilliant example of several incredibly talented artists from four countries uniting to overcome extreme challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic to produce a work that exceeds one’s expectations. This is the best pandemic era dance or art film that I have seen thus far, addressing our current situation while going far beyond its limitations.
“You must watch this. It is mesmerizing, beautiful, emotional, mysterious and so powerful. Margaret Jenkins and her brilliant collaborators - dancers, composers and video artist - have created a masterpiece for our time. And it will stand the test of time.”
“If you’re looking for a way to BREATHE into the new year....this is a gorgeous gift from Paul Dresher Ensemble, Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, Rinde Eckert, and the mind-blowing vision, images, projections, and cinematography of Alex V. Nichols. Watching this felt to me as close to a THEATRICAL experience as I’ve had in these crazy covid-adapting times. It felt like they discovered a new art form altogether.”
“This mesmerizing work is a powerful testament to what artists do - no matter the challenges. Once again, I am gratefully reminded that we are human, we are connected, we falter, we catch one another, we breathe through and beyond.”
“Breathing is absolutely a mature work—that is, full of wonderfully-crafted moments and meticulous attention to form, rather than flashy effects. I jumped up off the couch and shouted at the ending, and I actually had tears in my eyes. That’s not something that happens every day. Or even every year. ”
The sheer magnitude of the concert event was enough to inspire wonder and awe. More than 200 musicians packed the Strathmore stage and a balcony above—two orchestras, three choirs, a rock band—plus animated projections on a widescreen scrim and a stadium-scale light plot flooding the hall. For two nights only, Jeremy Schonfeld’s 2011 rock concept album Iron & Coal got mega-sized. The effect was gloriously spectacular and overwhelmingly beautiful—and also dramatically not quite focused.
Composer/lyricist Schonfeld created Iron & Coal as a tribute to his German Jewish father, Gustav Schonfeld, whose story is gripping: At the age of 10 he was sent to Auschwitz and survived along with his father until liberation. Then, reunited a year later with his mother, who also survived, Gustav grew up in the United States and became a renowned medical doctor, much lauded in his lifetime. (He died in 2011 on the very day his son’s Iron & Coal was mastered.) Portions of his autobiography, titled Absence of Closure, were incorporated into the concert program. He was “the first refuge kid from war to be bar mizvahed” at his synagogue in St. Louis (“The boy who lost his childhood becomes a man today”). He tells vividly of his post-traumatic nightmares. The snippets from Gustav’s memoir make one want to read more.
"Where in God's name is the medic?" the dying hospital patient demands. He's not asking for help for himself. He's frantically trying to save a boy's life. It's a scream, one of the important screams in American history, that has haunted him for 38 years.
Jonathan Berger's opera "My Lai" — written for the Kronos Quartet, tenor Rinde Eckert and Vân-Ánh Võ, a virtuoso player of traditional Vietnamese instruments — takes place during the last hallucinatory days of Hugh Thompson Jr. He was the U.S. Army helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War who flew over the massacre in My Lai. Above the fray, he could see the mass hysteria below that warped the minds of Charlie Company. Those men were infamously commanded to wipe out everything walking, crawling or growing. More than 500 civilians, mostly women, children and the elderly, were slaughtered. There was no evidence of Viet Cong activity.
You would like to think that a soldier who took a heroic stand against evil and managed to save at least a few lives amid a massacre could find peace of mind in his dying days. The creators of “My Lai,” a musical theater work given its premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Wednesday evening, suggest otherwise in the case of Hugh Thompson.
Vietnam is much in the air at the moment, thanks to the PBS documentary series “The Vietnam War,” by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick. But as comprehensive as that survey is, it gives surprisingly cursory treatment to the massacre of more than 500 Vietnamese civilians by American troops in the village of My Lai on March 16, 1968. When it finally came to light, in November 1969, that mass killing proved pivotal in marshaling American fatigue and disgust with the war, which finally led to the withdrawal of troops in 1973.
Harold, a middle-aged, solitary sad sack, earns his living making and repairing clocks. What really consumes him, though, is the children’s book he has been writing for years, about an aging magician who must pass on his Book of Secrets to a receptive child, a magician heir. But before he can do so, the magician collapses and is rushed to a hospital.
How should Harold end the story? And why is he finding it so difficult? He shares his crisis in the poignant, entrancing "Aging Magician," at the New Victory Theater, the invaluable company that presents family-oriented entertainment...
I am sometimes amazed by how brilliant some people in this world are, especially when it comes to bringing exciting and downright mesmerizing pieces of art to the stage - because a production that has the power to make people come together in such unanimous awe can only be described as art. When this can be said of a children's show no less, it is even more admirable, and I have the greatest confidence that all who see The Aging Magician at the New Victory Theater will be shocked by how shockingly beautiful this show is.
And when I say beautiful, it is an understatement to describe what, exactly, makes this so memorable a concept and performance. With a plot as intricate as the gears of a clock and meant for both those who have much or little time ahead of them, The Aging Magician, like a magic trick itself, is a little bit elusive, requires a little bit of personal insight, but does not beg for more than the audience's belief to make it truly something of a wonder.
February 7, 2017
By Susan Galbraith
DC Theatre Scene
"...Just as he defies categorization of music styles or voice techniques, Eckert blurs all lines between creator and interpreter. Many performance artists are known for attempting this, but what makes him exceptional is that he is so darn good in all aspects of music-theatre..."
"...Mr. Eckert’s iconoclastic 'performance art' style always produced the unexpected..."
The acclaimed writer, composer, librettist, physician, performer, and director Rinde Eckert delighted and amazed the crowd on Friday evening at the Kennedy Center’s Family Theater. Eckert allowed the audience to enter his seemingly hermetically sealed world of musical language, comedic riffs, rare instrumentals, and anecdotal tales.
Mr. Eckert is the recipient of the Lucille Lortel Award as well as several Drama Desk Awards. He certainly captured the crowd’s attention with amazing verbal wordplay, singing in the highest of registers and playing several musical instruments...
Rinde Eckert. Photo courtesy of the Kennedy Center.
