Recent theater

Saw Songbird at the Kennedy Center, an adaptation of Offenbach's La Périchole set in Prohibition-era New Orleans— in a pre-show lecture, librettist Kelley Rourke explained how the idea had arisen from the constraints of making a COVID-safe production for an outdoor festival in 2021: it had to be 90 minutes max because they couldn't have an intermission, had to have a relatively small cast for on-stage social distancing, and had to be in English because they couldn't project subtitles. (Although this last one was more flexible; it ended up being sung in both French and English, with some songs entirely in one or the other and some swapping between the two languages within the same song, even line by line.) From "bilingual mini-production of La Périchole" came "what if it was set in New Orleans, which still a bilingual city in the 1920s?" and "you know what context might make the Opera Logic of the plot make sense? Mardi Gras!" and thus, Songbird was born.

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The other show I saw somewhat recently was The Lehman Trilogy, at the Shakespeare Theater Company: a three-and-a-half-hour (!) play about the 164-year history of the Lehman Brothers corporation, which actually felt more like a prose poem - or maybe three monologues in a trenchcoat? - than a play, in a way I still can't quite put into words. It's performed by three actors, who practically shapeshift on stage by vibes alone: from the three Lehman brothers who immigrated from Bavaria in the 1840s to open a fabric store in Montgomery, Alabama, to their wives, children, and grandchildren, and anyone else incidental to the story.

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