Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
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by Howard Koch, directed by Andrew Burashko
Art of Time/Harbourfront World Stage, Enwave Theatre, Toronto
March 31-April 3, 2011
The Art of Time Ensemble is celebrating the centenary of the birth of renowned film composer Bernard Hermann (1911-75) by recreating Orson Welles’s infamous radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. What is the connection? Not only did Hermann write the film scores for Welles’s two masterpieces, Citizen Kane (1941) and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), but is so happened that he was the conductor of the CBS Symphony Orchestra that provided the brief portions of music used in The War of the Worlds. It was because of his collaborations with Welles’s Mercury Theatre that Hermann went to Hollywood, where he began to compose for film.
The War of the Worlds occupies the second hour, exactly, of the the Art of Time programme. Beth Kates has designed a backdrop and stage to make the Enwave Theatre stage look like a 1930s radio studio. She has designed 1930s outfits for all the performers and created lighting that subtly changes to reflect the mood of the drama. Andrew Burashko, artistic director of Art of Time and conductor of the 10-person ensemble, has directed the piece to include onstage smoking, again to enhance the period realism, and to recreate the interactions that might have occurred among the actors, foley artist and orchestra.
Welles’s broadcast on October 30, 1938, about an invasion of the U.S. by Martians is so well known because of the real panic is sparked in the populace. Despite a clear announcement at the very start that this is a Mercury Theatre presentation, the nature of Howard Koch’s script was so realistic that it proved in drastic fashion Welles’s contention that the radio listening public was far too gullible.
Koch’s adaptation transfers the action of H.G. Wells’s 1898 story from the suburbs of London to Grover’s Mill, New Jersey, where the first mysterious cylinder (not flying saucer) of the Martians is discovered. For the first 40 minutes, Koch’s technique is to portray the invasion as if it were happening now in real time communicated to the radio audience through a series of news bulletins, interviews and eye-witness accounts. It is was undoubtedly the novelty of fiction couched as news that caused such panic. Koch also uses the interesting ploy in the first 20 minutes of presenting weather reports and expert interviews that scoff at the possibility of life on Mars and even more of an invasion. The haste of the announcer to cut from the initial new bulletins to the music of a dance band playing at a prominent New York hotel, may strike us as humorous today, although Koch uses this continual assurance that everything is normal as a way of heightening the impression that just the opposite is true. Koch allows us to connect the dots before the newspeople do thus making us co-creators of the illusion he presents.
The actors of the drama are Marc Bendavid, Nicholas Campbell and Don McKellar with John Gzowski as onstage foley artist extraordinaire. Of the actors, Bendavid gave by far the most dazzling performance. As the CBS Radio announcer, he imitated perfectly the emphatic style and diction of announcers of the time. As Carl Phillips, a reporter at the scene of the crash site, he spoke in the cultured New York accent familiar now to most people from Hollywood movies of the ‘30s and ‘40s. Bendavid is excellent at conveying the conflict in Phillips’ voice between trying to maintain an objective tone of reportage in order to suppress the rising personal horror he is experiencing. Besides his flawless delivery, he is also the most adept of the three actors in keeping each of his many roles vocally distinct.
Both McKellar and Campbell made the occasional flub--fatal in any effort to imitate real reporting. Campbell’s Princeton astronomer Richard Pierson (the role played by Welles) sounds no different from any of his others roles except for the local farmer at Grover’s Mill whom he gives a Newfoundland accent. The last 20 minutes of the programme are given over to Pierson’s reflections on being, perhaps, the only human left alive on earth. Here Campbell shines and his old man persona takes on depth.
McKellar, who for some reason is cast as Welles but does not play Welles’s roles, is also less adept at vocally distinguishing his characters. His longest speeches occur as the one man Pierson meets when he makes his way into New York City. While McKellar has the 1930s idiom and diction down, he doesn’t fully convey the mania that underlies the character whose secret goal is to take over the depopulated world.
As one expect, one joy throughout is to see John Gzowski at work. Every time he reaches for an object, you can’t help but wonder how exactly he will use it and what sound it will produce. He creates the sound of the Martian heat-ray and following explosion by striking a strung-out Slinky-like electric coil followed by a bash on a hanging metal sheet. A Theramin made the mysterious humming of the alien machines and blowing over a jug top plus use of sirens and horns conjured up a vivid harbour scene.
The first half of the evening was devoted to the premiere performance of Hermanntology by Dan Parr. The piece is based on an interweaving of themes from twenty films Hermann scored beginning with Citizen Kane (1941) and including his most famous scores for Alfred Hitchcock--The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo (1957), North by Northwest (1959) and Psycho (1960)--along with The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), On Dangerous Ground (1951), The Naked and the Dead (1958), Mysterious Island (1961), Cape Fear (1962), Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Sisters (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976). While the Art of Time Ensemble played, Tess Girard created a live film mix of sequences from the films, sometimes blending two or three sequences at once or doubling, even quadrupling, a single image. Hermann’s music amply conveyed the overall mood of anxiety and danger that roiled overhead in the sequence of images. The performance made clear that Hermann was composing in the mode of classical music of his own time--influenced by Bartók, the Second Viennese School, Prokofiev and Shostakovich--with the use of ostinatos to create a sense of forward propulsion and broken chordal sequences to suggest tension and fragmentation. Today film composers are more likely to hark back to neo-romantic bombast rather than write in the idiom of today’s composers. Hermann’s music, thus, came across as surprisingly daring and advanced not just for his time but for ours.
The two halves--one focussing on film, the second on radio, and both on the growth of fear and hysteria in mid-20th-century America--combined to make an immensely satisfying programme. Let’s hope Art of Time repeats the production at least for the the 40th anniversary of Hermann’s death in 2015, the 150th anniversary of Wells’s birth in 2016 or 80th anniversary of Welles’s broadcast in 2018.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Nicholas Campbell, Don McKellar and Marc Bendavid. ©John Lauener.
2011-04-01
The War of the Worlds