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<b>by Serge Denoncourt & Pierre-Yves Lemieux, directed by Serge Denoncourt
Mirvish Productions, Canon Theatre, Toronto
September 10-October 20, 2002
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"A One-Man Cirque du Soleil"
Arturo Brachetti is a one man Cirque du Soleil. That’s how I felt after seeing his self-titled show that kicks off the 2002-03 Mirvish season. We often hear that something is “unlike anything you’ve ever seen before”, but “Brachetti” is a show that really does live up to that description. We may dimly remember that there used to be people called “quick-change artists” on the bills of old variety and music hall shows, but how many of us have actually seen one in action? This charismatic young Italian with the Tintin quiff, now a star in Europe, has revived this nearly-forgotten art and thanks to a slick, eye-poppingly imaginative production looks set to dazzle North America as well. The show comes to Toronto direct from an eight-month-long sold-out run in Paris, where it won a Molière Award.
The formal term for a “quick-change artist” is a “transformationist”, and transformation is what every aspect of “Arturo Brachetti:The Man With a Thousand Faces” (to use its full title) is all about. Foremost are Brachetti’s unbelievable split-second costume changes, over 80 of them, shifting from one persona to the next right before our eyes. In the first half Brachetti plays all six characters in a recreation of a black-and-white television Western. The shifts from character to character, including a gunfight with himself, are so rapid you’d swear he had an identical twin. He doesn’t. In the second half, in the pièce de resistance of the evening, Brachetti takes us on a tour of Hollywood movies from Charlie Chaplin in “The Great Dictator” to Darth Vader in “Star Wars”, not chronologically but associatively with an emphasis on surprising contrasts. King Kong fend off airplanes descends and becomes Esther Williams who floats upwards to perform an aerial water ballet. His impression of Liza Minelli in “Cabaret” is astounding. The second half starts off with the James Bond theme during which Brachetti slips suddenly in costume from Sean Connery to Roger Moore.
The theme of transformation does not stop here. In the first half Brachetti quickly folds a simple, donut-shaped piece of felt into 27 different hats and become the 27 different people who would wear them. In the second half he shows how he used to make his own movies and proceed to make the most convincing series of hand shadows you’ve ever seen. Anyone can make a dog, but different breeds of dog? I found it heartening that this sequence, one of the simplest and most ancient forms of theatre, won the most resounding applause.
Such simplicity is surrounded by far more high-tech elements. The throughline of the show is Brachetti’s narrative of his own life from growing up in the small village of Corio near Turin to leaving home at age 18 to fulfil his dream of performing his own “spettacolo”. To illustrate various stills of Brachetti’s family and friends (All played by Brachetti) are projected on the set till some of the still slip into motion, some change into home videos and one, the seminarian who taught Brachetti magic, bursts through the screen as a live character.
Guillaume Lord’s motorized set picks up this theme by looking like travelling crates stacked in the form of a cube. The cube also tansforms itself, rotating, opening up in various configuartion and eventually splitting in half to allow Brachetti to play on the actual stage beneath.
Though the show begins with famous quotations from English and French autors about role-playing, fiction and reality (“All the world’s a stage, etc.”), the underlying theme, made clear in Serge Denoncourt and Pierre-Yves Lemieux’s script, is the Pirandellian notion that identity is an illusion. Every person has a thousand different identities, one for every role in life. When Brachetti is first introduced, he stand before us removing mask after mask after mask. Alain Lortie and Bruno Rafie draw on all manner of light effects from computerized banks of lights familiar from rock concerts to roving spotlights and numerous form of still and animated projections. Each of Brachetti’s set pieces is performed in synch with a soundscape including everything from gavottes to Glass designed by Larsen Lupin. Curiously for a show built around costume changes, there is no credit for a costume designer, so we will assume they derive from Brachetti’s private collection of over 350.
Director Serge Denoncourt, who along with Pierre Bernard created the piece as a showcase for Brachetti’s amazing talent for the Just for Laughs Festival in Montreal. , has ensured that the high-tech surround never overwhelms the human element. If it did the theatricality and human scale of the magic would be lost. Rather he keeps the focus on the chameleonic Brachetti himself and the people who inspired him. In his narrative Brachetti pays tribute to the monk who first taught him magic and his mother (a very funny imitation with voice alone) who was alarmed by her son’s insatiable need to change his appearance. “Who are you?” she constantly asks, “You can’t be all four seasons at once.” In a beautiful segment inspired by paintings from Van Gogh to Mondrian he does just that.
Brachetti pays particular homage to two Italian influences--the last famous transformationists, Leopoldo Fregoli (1867-1936) and the surrealism of film director Federico Fellini. The segment in the style of Fregoli is not only charming in itself but fills in a background most of us won’t have by showing how the transformationist’s art relates back to the commedia dell’arte. The segment on Fellini that closes the show is perhaps the loveliest, capturing the mixture of humour and poignancy that characterizes that master’s films. Brachetti metamorphoses into characters various scenes from Fellini films, from Giulietta Massina in “La Strada” to Donald Sutherland in “Casanova”. The trouble is only those who have seen a wide range of Fellini films will get the references and that Denoncourt has place this sequence immediately after the satiric Hollywood romp, making Fellini homage feel like too much of the same thing.
That quibble aside, “Brachetti” should, like the early Cirque du Soleil shows, appeal to the widest possible audience—from theatre buffs who want to a se a show that really is “pure theatre” to kids who like magic shows to ordinary folks who want two hours of jaw-dropping entertainment. See it soon because you’ll want to see it again.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a <i>Stage Door</i> exclusive.
Photo: Arturo Brachetti. ©2002 Joan Marcus.
<b> 2002-09-12</b>
<b>Arturo Brachetti: The Man With a Thousand Faces</b>