Bernarda Alba Reviews NOW IN- Page 2

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 8:29pm

Everything dies in commercial off-Broadway these days. Nothing turns a profit anymore. This show would cost nearly a $1 million to mount Off-Broadway and it would NEVER have a chance of recouping. Let it extend at the Mitzi once or twice more (I don't think anything is scheduled for it immediately) and then close.

[BroadwayGirl107]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 8:31pm

*sigh* But I wish I could use student discounts more than once throughout the run of a show at LCT. I can't imagine seeing a LaChiusa show just ONCE.

[BSoBW3]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 8:54pm

I couldn't imagine seeing a LaChiusa show only five times.

But I have.

And it is sad.

::listens to TWP::

[Mr Roxy]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 8:57pm

Saw his Wild Party ( the only show of his we have seen ) & enjoyed it

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 9:00pm

The Hollywood Reporter is Mixed:

"LaChiusa retains Garcia Lorca's plot and characters, but neither he nor director-choreographer Graciela Daniele ("Chronicle of a Death Foretold") infuse the material with musical or dramatic life. Songs are occasionally delicate, occasionally flavored with an appealing flamenco rhythm and a strummed guitar, but rarely do they reflect or accentuate the characters' emotions. Unlike LaChiusa's hot, inventive score for "See What I Wanna See" last fall at the Public Theater, the music for "Bernarda Alba" sounds bland and detached from the action.

As for the performances on the intimate, three-quarter-round stage at LCT's Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater, the black-costumed actors project little characterization and even less sense of the tension underlying the women's relationships. Where is the jealousy, sexual frustration and cruelty that Garcia Lorca intended? They exist in LaChiusa's text, but Daniele has neglected to elicit them in any palpable way onstage.

Even Rashad, usually so affecting, encounters difficulties. Her voice sounds tired, and her Bernarda Alba reaches for a fierceness that Rashad can't support or sustain."


http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr/reviews/review_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1002116854

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 9:14pm

Newsday is Mixed:

"The new 90-minute piece, based on Federico García Lorca's "The House of Bernarda Alba," has been handsomely, but predictably, directed and choreographed by Graciela Daniele. Whatever urgency she and LaChiusa felt about revisiting the rural hothouse of the tyrannical widow Alba and her five sexually repressed daughters in 1930s Spain, however, we are at a loss to know why.

Still, one of the ongoing pleasures of recent theater is Phylicia Rashad, who has emerged from under cover of Bill Cosby's TV wife to reveal herself as a formidable presence on the American stage. Here she commands the center of the horny trauma, commanding her hormone-raging grown daughters to writhe around the sunless prison of a house - designed, yes, in the shape of a bullfight ring by Christopher Barreca. Everyone wears long black dresses (by Toni-Leslie James), with rustling black taffeta for scary mom.
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For all the beauty, we are left with steamy women-in-prison claptrap disguised as serious business. The piece is much tighter and leaner than "Chronicle of a Death Foretold," Daniele's 1995 dance-theater adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez's novella, which had "additional material" by LaChiusa. Again, we are expected to be taken back in horror to society's glorification of virginity. We may now be meant to draw parallels with the plight of women in hard-line Muslim cultures. Or maybe not."

http://www.newsday.com/entertainment/stage/ny-etalba4652585mar07,0,6867651.story?coll=ny-theater-headlines

[BSoBW3]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 9:36pm

Well, at least they are all saying the same thing, huh?

[Borstalboy]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 10:08pm

I'd call Brantley's review more of a pan than mixed. Typical Brantley-esque "Ewwww, this isn't PAJAMA GAME/SWEENEY TODD/WONDERFUL TOWN" dismissal. Saving the raves for the revivals, eh, Benny? Clean up your Pampers, baby, SOUTH PACIFIC is on its way.

BERNARDA ALBA has it's big, big problems but it was infinitely more exciting than alot of what I have seen lately. I think Graciela Daniele's staging cannot be praised enough.

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 11:25pm

Variety is Mixed-to-Negative:

"New York stages have not been kind to Federico Garcia Lorca this season. First he was summoned from the grave to figure as a spiritual guide in Nilo Cruz's soporific play "Beauty of the Father." Now his simmering drama "The House of Bernarda Alba" has been subjected to an unnecessary musicalization by the ubiquitous Michael John LaChiusa. However, there's less in this stubbornly uninvolving treatment to suggest the hand of the much in-demand musical theater composer than that of a first-year women's studies student, boldfacing the play's themes of female oppression with all the delicacy of flamenco heels pounding a wooden floor.
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The proud, muscular rhythms of the form -- punctuated by claps, clicks and stomps -- together with the jagged, modernist sounds more characteristic of the prolific LaChiusa, make "Bernarda Alba" a dark and intriguing musical score. But the droning, atonal songs, with their ponderously literal lyrics, are too fragmented to define character or to build emotion or dramatic momentum.

As a narrative, the adaptation connects the dots of Lorca's plot efficiently enough. But rather than lending fresh resonance to the tragic tale of a tyrannical widowed mother and her five unwed daughters, the musical interpretation chills and dilutes the fiery passions, bristling tensions and caged sexuality so essential to the play.
______________________________________________________________

But while an effective presentation of Lorca's play can generate searing dramatic potency and trenchant political metaphor in this hothouse of women, here there's something distancing and obvious about all the overwrought resentment being spat out onstage."

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 11:28pm

Theatremania is Positive:

"Bernarda Alba is an adaption with truncated title of Federico Garcia Lorca's The House of Bernarda Alba. Directed and choreographed by Graciela Daniele, with whom LaChiusa has collaborated before with mixed results, this 90-minute, intermissionless compression of the hothouse play is absolutely stunning in every possible category, from the stark, dirty-white-walled Christopher Barreca set with 10 straight-back, caned chairs to Toni-Leslie James's primarily black dresses with swirling skirts to Stephen Strawbridge's sometimes blazing lighting to Scott Stauffer's crisp sound. Even the placement of the orchestra, conducted by Deborah Abramson, in a row atop the set -- as if the musicians were notes in a treble clef -- is unusually effective. "
http://www.theatermania.com/content/news.cfm/story/7794

[RentBoy86]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 11:48pm

Yeah, I think this show is sorta like See What I Wanna See. The show's cast is too great to have a big commerical run. I think it will run its current run and then close. It's def. too edgy and absurd for broadway. I hope it gets recorded with this great cast. Seems like LaChiusa is just pumping these scores out. Any idea on what he's working on next?

[BSoBW3]

Posted: 3/6/06 at 11:54pm

I liked the last line in Theatremania's review.

And I like the picture pf Phylicia included.

[CurtainPullDowner]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 12:13am

Well someone is writing and Lincoln Center finds the $ to put em on
I say Go
If they can Find another PIAZZA
keep lookin

[BSoBW3]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 12:23am

BWW gave it a good review!

[MargoChanning]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 12:25am

Is there a reason that the only positive reviews are from the online critics that only message board fanatics read?

[BSoBW3]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 12:41am

Because they are the people?

[Jazzysuite82]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 1:12am

I think it should be required for people who are going to review anything to have some REAL education in musical composition, acting, and general stagecraft. I mean more than just I go to a lot of theatre. Eating a lot of food doesn't make you a food critic. IT shouldn't work for theatre. I think a lot of people review things and they have NO idea what they're reviewing. Most of them are great writers but don't know what a good score would consist of. It's a little annoying for people who have trained and actually know what they're talking about.

[Plum]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 1:22am

Well, okay, here comes some commentary from someone who has no idea what she's talking about. (My only education has been in way out-there performance theory.)

Phylicia Rashad did sound tired, and nearly all the performers did have issues with the style of singing required for the score, which tended to use the same styles too much but had moments of real beauty.

Changing the name to just Bernarda Alba was a mistake, because with a title and star like that you expect Rashad to be the main character, and this is more of an ensemble piece. Worst of all, Rashad's solos were some of the weakest points of the score. The lyrics needed work all around- there were times when the music was doing well, and the words just needed that bit of poetry, that way of saying so much in a couplet, that a good lyricist has.

I really liked most of the choreography, on the other hand, even if the dancers weren't capable of the rapid taps of true flamenco. I guess something in the overall piece just didn't click- despite the minimalistic staging and nearly identical costumes of all the women, I didn't get the sense of claustrophobia that would have made the explosion of light in the end that much more startling and tragic. Having no intermission was smart, though- this needs to be a piece like Passion, that sweeps you along into a vortex of trapped desire, but the writing just isn't up to Sondheim's level here.

Daphne Rubin-Vega was the highlight of the cast. (I didn't even know it was her, but found out when I checked the Playbill afterwards.)

Updated On: 3/7/06 at 01:22 AM

[BSoBW3]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 1:29am

I hate when people compare him to Sondheim.

He is LaChiusa. Not Sondheim.


But it seems this is going to be a more of a LaChiusa-fan show.

Ugh. He needs another TWP.

[Plum]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 1:33am

I'm not expecting him to be Sondheim. Expecting everyone to be Sondheim can be damn stifling for new voices (not that that he's so new). But the piece is comparable to Passion, in my opinion, in what it's trying to do. It just doesn't do it so well.

[Link Larkin Wanabe]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 1:34am

I'm really interested to see what people around these parts think of Nikki James. She seems so sweet and if she proves she can pull of a show like this as well as All Shook Up that is pretty versatile. I would love to see her in Caroline, or Change.

Akiva

[Jazzysuite82]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 1:35am

well there were plenty of people I respect who hated The Wild Party, I don't know why. People were walking out in droves. I say give LaChiusa about 10 years he'll be iconic. I think the Sondheim comparison is beaten to death. Actually no one is the next Sondheim. If Sondheim were starting out now HE wouldn't even be "SONDHEIM". And really for a long while he wasn't. Even when something's brilliant it's got people walking out of it. I say give it some time.



What does Passion do that is so comparable to Bernarda Alba? They seem totally different in style, story and the use of the score.
Updated On: 3/7/06 at 01:35 AM

[BSoBW3]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 1:35am

Poor MARIE CHRISTINE was compared to SWEENEY TODD.

I don't see it...I mean....Medea had other people boil their father. Sweeney cooked them into pies.

But, the serious tone of the shows...

I don't see it.

People find it much easier to compare to works than to accept them as two different entities.

There are only so many themes.

[Plum]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 1:48am

What does Passion do that is so comparable to Bernarda Alba? They seem totally different in style, story and the use of the score.

You really think so? It's the intermissionless thing that made me ponder the comparison a bit. Having no intermission makes sure the show's momentum is never broken, and I think the intent of the staging in Bernada Alba was to increase the sense of the claustrophobia of the house to incredible proportions, to make it almost as impossible for us to watch is as it was for the girls to live in it. Passion's momentum is used to sweep Giorgio from Clara to Fosca as inevitably as a tide. Obviously that's not the exact same thing, but the tragedy in both cases stems from how the characters fall into self-destructive choices because of a seeming lack of options. If anything, Bernarda needed to be more opressive-feeling, because the lack of options came from the presence of a tyrant rather than the forces of love alone, but it just didn't. I don't know if it's a failure of staging or words or what because (like I said) my training is nonexistent, but I stand by what I felt as I watched the show.

[BSoBW3]

Posted: 3/7/06 at 1:51am

Or maybe it is what the critics have been saying - Phylicia isn't oppressive enough?

I can talk more after I see it this week. But until then....I can speak only for Lorca's play.