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Posted by Mel on 8/12/2008, 10:16 pm, in reply to "Re: More praise for " Bach at Leipzig" and Stephen's performance"
69.19.14.42
In doing a little checking via google, I spotted another great review for SC and "Bach at Leipzig":
http://www.kqed.org/arts/performance/article.jsp?essid=23118
For starters:
The play opens with 18th-century organist and composer Johann Friedrich Fasch (Stephen Caffrey) standing in a pool of light, reading a letter that he is about to release by carrier pigeon to his wife, Anna. Costumed in a green velvet coat that's richly trimmed in gold brocade, with traditional buckled shoes at his feet and gray hose to his breeches (B. Modern lavished similar detail upon each of the play's seven characters), and crowned with a stunning wig of long curly locks that sits on Caffrey's head like a mane tops a lion's (Jakey Hicks's hairpieces somehow captured each character's personality perfectly), we know from the first words out of Fasch's mouth that playwright Itamar Moses is not going to be playing this one entirely straight. While Moses is obviously serious in his meditations about art, religion, and free will, he also appears to be equally serious about not taking such fraught topics too seriously. "My darling Anna," Fasch begins, "By the time you receive this letter, I will have sent it." Such Marx Brothers-meet-Yogi Berra logic permeates Moses's hilarious and intelligent piece. Before long we will come to anticipate such pronouncements, occasionally they will prompt a groan, but we laugh, sometimes against our better judgment, as if, like the characters in Moses's play repeatedly complain, we had no choice.
And SC is singled out:
Caffrey is commanding as Fasch, the free spirit whose early rejection of the Lutheran principle of predetermination no doubt clouded the affections of his dear Kuhnau. Especially good is his speech early in the second act (a tip of the cap to lighting designer David Lee Cuthbert, who managed to build a prison out of nothing but shadows) when, in encouraging Anna to write a fugue, he reveals to the audience what must have been one of the then-24-year-old Moses's motivations to write a farce about an arcane corner of music history, set in the very quaint-sounding Age of Enlightenment, no less.
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