Hans Christian Andersen Tales Real and Imagined Review
Review: In 'Hans Christian Andersen: Tales Real and Imagined,' No Happily E'er After
- Hans Christian Andersen: Tales Real and Imagined
- Off Broadway, Special Event , Play , Puppet Theater
- 2 hrs.
- Endmost Date:
- Duke on 42nd Street Theater, 229 West. 42nd St.
- 646-223-3010
One time upon a time a little boy became a literary sensation. A man with a peculiar take on happily ever later on, the Danish author Hans Christian Andersen wrote tales that have inspired operas, ballets, a couple of Disney movies. His oversize statue — with oversize top hat and oversize cygnet — permanently hogs a granite bench in Central Park. Now Andersen arrives at the Duke on 42nd Street, with the Ensemble for the Romantic Century's "Hans Christian Andersen: Tales Real and Imagined."
Like all of the Ensemble'due south shows, "Tales" synthesizes dramatic narrative with sleeping room music, offering a portrait of an creative person through epitome and audio and here at least, some fantastic puppetry. Eve Wolf's script complicates the sanitized Hans of Andersen's own autobiography and the imagined one of the 1952 Danny Kaye picture, best remembered for Frank Loesser's gentle, irrepressible score. Merely just up to a point. (It doesn't, similar Martin McDonagh'due south viciously provocative "A Very Very Very Night Matter," propose that his stories were really written past a congolese adult female he kept in a cage.) "Hans Christian Andersen" sidesteps and streamlines a lot of what makes Andersen's life and work so discomforting, while too insisting, inflexibly, gawkily, that the life and the work are inextricable.
We get-go encounter Hans (Jimmy Ray Bennett) as a lily-clutching corpse, though he speedily rises from his bier, maxim, "Do not be afraid. I only announced to be expressionless." (Andersen, whose many phobias included premature burial, used to continue this annotation past his bed: "I only appear to exist sleeping.") Later on a quick trot through "The Princess and the Pea" — a story of some other restless sleeper — Hans reappears equally a teenager, the son of a cobbler and a washerwoman, making his way from sleepy Odense to Copenhagen, begging a identify at the Royal Danish Theater. Some of his writings print the theater's director, Jonas Collin, who sends him to schoolhouse and encourages his literary career.
But equally his star rises, his centre breaks. He develops a passion, entirely unrequited, for Edvard (the countertenor Randall Scotting, who alternates in the role with Daniel Moody), Collin'south son. Unswervingly directly, Edvard was also such a snob that he wouldn't even condescend to address Andersen, his lifelong correspondent and eventual benefactor, in the familiar "Du" grade.
I'd been curious to run into "Hans Christian Andersen," because I tin even so call back how much Andersen'due south stories upset me equally a kid, how sadistic I'd plant them, how flimsy the reward of salvation seemed when the Tin Soldier melted, when the Little Lucifer daughter froze, when the Picayune Mermaid died and melted into ocean foam. (Disney went another mode.) I haven't read them to my ain children. Well, O.Thou., we did read "The Princess and the Pea" then talked about whether or not a princess that delicate could maybe be any fun. Consensus: No. I wondered how I would feel re-encountering them as an adult. Would I like them even less now? Would tears warp my notebook?
As information technology happens, the tales, briefly told, burnish "Hans Christian Andersen," showcasing the fix designer Vanessa James'southward playful toy theater and Flexitoon, Ltd.'s squashy puppets and marionettes, manipulated by Craig Marin and Olga Felgemacher. The stories — "The Ugly Duckling," "The Little Mermaid," "The Lilliputian Friction match Girl" — are presented as excerpts with a lot of the awful parts ignored or referred to only elliptically, which may exist confusing if y'all don't know the stories or a relief if you practice.
Ms. Wolf's script has its ellipses, too. The play reclaims Andersen as a queer author and doesn't prettify his shame or his vanity, though it goes lite on his social climbing and assorted hang-ups — dogs, pork, fire, etc. More significantly, it simplifies his life, regarding Edvard equally his merely real dear — though he seems to have had romantic and sexual feelings for women, too, and regularly visited brothels, admitting merely, he claimed, to talk. And it streamlines his work, insisting on biographical readings that position "The Little Mermaid" every bit a one-to-ane allegory for hopeless beloved for Edvard, "The Petty Match Girl" as a tribute to his female parent.
Donald T. Sanders, the director, interleaves Hans's monologues and the puppet interludes with music, more often than not from Henry Purcell and Benjamin Britten, neither an Andersen gimmicky. (One imagines Purcell was called for his love of the fantastical, Britten for the fashion sexuality infuses the work. Neither is a great fit.) Sometimes the music, like a sprig of Britten'due south "A Midsummer Night's Dream," integrates itself into the drama. Sometimes a song expresses an inner country. Oftentimes the action stops while the musicians play, withal feelingly, which gives the bear witness a stuttering rhythm, a mismatched shape.
This story of an ugly duckling, pecker and all, "Hans Christian Andersen" never becomes a swan.
bridgeforthupeor1956.blogspot.com
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/05/theater/hans-christian-andersen-tales-real-and-imagined-review.html
0 Response to "Hans Christian Andersen Tales Real and Imagined Review"
Post a Comment