eighth blackbird Pierrot lunaire

Eighth blackbird's new Pierrot with staging by Mark DeChiazza debuted last night in the Harris Theater. DeChiazza is a choreographer, not a director. (This is an opinion, not a statement.) I got wind that some tech'ing problems earlier in the day had caused a bit of concern prior to the performance, and Lucy Shelton mentioned something in the talk-back about not having "lived" with the piece, code for the feeling among performers that things haven't quite got settled. Apart from the lighting, which was shady (no small task, to invent lighting cues for 21 separate pieces unto themselves; there is an opera of lighting in this short little guy), and a couple supertitle snafus, the production itself was slick. The point of the production, however, left me hanging. And the problem may have been that 8bb also felt a bit left out to dry.

Pierrot lunaire is a work all its own. It exists according to its own impenetrable logic, propelled by its own strange momentum. The point of any staging of Pierrot shouldn't be to crack the code and expose the real story because we all know there isn't one but to elaborate on that story in a compelling way. The story has 1 character, the singer, or 6 if you count the instrumentalists as characters. So, 6 characters plus in this case a dancer and a Pierrot. 8 people in a room. Good. Now, what kind of relationship do these people have to one another? It doesn't have to be transparent; in fact, it can change, continuously even. But the characters should know what these relationships are. Do they like one another, or do they not like one another? Does one character adore another who loathes him? And then, what is this landscape? Why are these characters here? Does it feel comfortable to them? Is it a place they like being? Are there memories here? And so on.

There was no text painting per se in this production, and that's fine. But there was also a marked disconnect 95 percent of the time between what Lucy was saying and what the rest of the cast was doing. To the point that the singer could be moaning about blood and gore and the 8bb'ers were simply hauling chairs around the stage. (I'm exaggerating. Somewhat.) I don't expect someone to literally stage "He stuffs a little parcel / Of fine tobacco, with finesse, / Into Cassander's shiny skull." That's not the point. But do stage something that suggests a logic of its own. Do create a stage language that's coherent unto itself and do give the people on stage a deep understanding of how to communicate in that language. Shouldn't that be top priority? Unless you convince your actors of the value of what they're doing, the risk is that they look like so many automata in a series of rotating positions. Lights up, so-and-so moves chair stage right. So-and-so dances with Lucy. Someone climbs up the ladder. No one moves. Pierrot pulls out an umbrella. If you can't convince your cast of the worth of what they're doing, they can't help but show it.

The choreographer emerged after the piece along with Lucy, Matthew Duvall (the percussionist, who had dressed up in an oversize white suit to play Pierrot himself), a single female dancer (Elyssa Dole) and the violinist (the other Matt, Matt Albert), who managed the questions. I floated the suggestion that perhaps matching text to sight had been low on the choreographer's priority list. That instead of mickey-mousing, he'd intended a world apart for the bodies of the musicians and the dancer to live in, a world full of symbols that interacted with one another in meaningful ways, and that perhaps he wouldn't mind explaining the work this world was doing and indeed, what that world was. He seemed very pleased with the question. After listening to the music, he reported, he'd begun "hearing shapes" in the music, shapes which he then translated to stage. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to hear shapes in the music. It's a perfectly reasonable thing to put them on stage. I'm afraid it just wasn't the really the cipher I was looking for to decode this thing.

I got even less help from the rest of the audience who were more interested in noting Lucy's habitation of the role (she did inhabit it, marvelously) or from the 8bb'ers, who were more interested in noting, jovially, that Matthew, the percussionist/Pierrot, had never had so few things to hit onstage. Sigh.

Among other things (George Perle, hallo?), there was a Weill set on the program. Lucy sang "Mack the Knife" very sprech, with an understated and very effective pizz'y arrangement for 8bb by 8bb'ers Lisa Kaplan (piano) and Nick Photinos (cello). The arrangements were adorable. (And thus, alas, perhaps at odds with the original spiciness of Weill, or just an indication of how long ago the firey bite of the Brecht/Weill project actually began to die.) Also on the program, Berg's Adagio from Kammerkonzert for clarinet (Michael Maccaferri), piano and violin, was by far the most enticing part of the evening. These three have done due diligence getting to know one another's musical impulses to the point that they crafted a truly a collective notion of how the piece was meant to go. The beginnings and endings of phrases could not have been better timed if they'd had a metronome on stage. My only complaint, which was foreseeable, is that -- god almighty -- whose idea was it to put these folks in the Harris Theater? I like the hall. But it swallowed this trio alive. I would have liked to hear them in a suffocatingly small space where the pianissimos had a running chance to contrast with the crescendos, and the crescendos could have had a shot at being deafening, as they should.