I hope everyone enjoyed their snowy evening off!
Just a reminder that we have a photo call scheduled for Friday evening. The call is as follows:
6:30pm - Photo call, actors in costume
7:30pm - Actor 1/2 hour
8:00pm - Curtain
Contact stage management if you have any questions or comments!
Call - Friday, December 14th 2007
Weavers Feature on BU Today
Click HERE to see a slideshow with commentary by Chris Bannow and a brief article.
Wednesday Dec 12th
Brush Up Rehearsal is at 6:30pm at the Wimberly! This will be without costumes and lights, etc. Please be there promptly at 6:30pm, ready to work.
Thanks!
Theatre Mirror Review of The Weavers
note: entire contents copyright 2007 by Carl A. Rossi
These continue to be budget-conscious theatre-days with one-person shows and minimal casts and yet Boston’s Zeitgeist Stage Company recently tucked twenty-three actors into the Black Box Theatre for THE KENTUCKY CYCLE and Jamaica Plain’s Footlight Club grooved with HAIR’s twenty-one bodies “walking in space” --- Boston University currently boasts a body count of twenty-nine with its student production of Gerhart Hauptmann’s THE WEAVERS (1892), based upon the 1844 rebellion of the Silesian peasants against their cruel masters. I read THE WEAVERS in college, three decades ago, and thought it dense and lengthy at the time (one needs a scorecard to keep track of who’s who); seeing it, now, I can better appreciate Mr. Hauptmann’s groundbreaking naturalism, his pre-cinematic long-shots of the masses, and his close-ups such as the finale of one human-tree falling in the collective forest, so akin to the later poignancy of Firs’ fate in THE CHERRY ORCHARD.
THE WEAVERS’s colors are primal; its instruments, percussion and brass, and Elaine Vaan Hogue masterfully conducts, throughout, so that one never misses strings or woodwinds. Her cast’s still-green energy goes hand-in-glove with the characters’ bluntness though Sasha Richter has dressed the downtrodden as Mozart’s Papageno and Papagena, and there seems to be a contest over who can be the most gnarly in posture and strangulated in voice (the evening begins with peasants miming their plight throughout the auditorium --- their plight; my warm-up exercises); elsewhere, Ms. Richter is spot-on: two bourgeois wives’ pigeon-grey hoop skirts, for example, distinctly nail them to the mid-19th century; even a walk-on maid has the proper lace cap with its ends trailing behind her ears…
But, again, the sheer marvel of twenty-nine bodies moving like clockwork, and on one stage, too, the standouts being Chris Bannow and Jessica Kochu in the plum roles of Old Hilse and his blind wife, Alex Mickiewicz’s slim but strapping Jaeger (the closest thing to an individual hero), Tim Spear’s scruffy, operatic Ansorge who, amazingly, never goes over the top; and Geof Borman as a sleek, dandified Traveling Salesman. Out of these twenty-nine students, how many shall remain in the Boston area? How many shall switch Beans for Apples or Oranges? Either way, the future is theirs if not Boston’s, as well.
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