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Cleveland Plain Dealer
April 22, 2010
Historic 'Soldier's Tale' weaves emotional magic at FusionFest
By Tony Brown
A capacity crowd of more
than 300 at the Cleveland Play House’s FusionFest Thursday night saw and
heard history being depicted in "A Soldier’s Tale."
They also were present as
history was being made at an evening of music, dance, theater and
anti-war sentiment that dazzled the senses, engaged the mind and both
saddened and strengthened the heart.
"A Soldier’s Tale," a
piece of revolutionary, rarely performed 1918 music by Russian Igor
Stravinsky combined with a 1993 libretto by American novelist Kurt
Vonnegut, tells the story of U.S. Army Pvt. Eddie Slovik, who in 1945
became the nation’s first and only serviceman to be executed for
desertion since the Civil War.
That was the history
being depicted in the steamy, intimate confines of the Baxter Stage.
The history being made
was a collaboration between two of Cleveland’s leading arts
organizations – the Cleveland Orchestra and the Cleveland Play House –
with GroundWorks DanceTheater to boot.
It’s the first
Orchestra-Play House joint venture since 1958, when they appropriately
enough teamed up with Karamu Theatre to produce the original version of
"A Soldier’s Tale," with a libretto based on a fanciful Russian folk
tale.
And quite an ambitious
collaboration Thursday night turned out to be.
The music, once
considered unplayable, is jagged silk, rough-hewn gossamer in the hands
of the seven-musician ensemble led by Cleveland Orchestra assistant
conductor Tito Munoz.
Trumpeter Jack Sutte
leads off with a saucy militaristic solo, and percussionist Marc
Damoulakis beats a defiant tattoo at the end. In-between, Jung-Min Amy
Lee nimbly translates Stravinsky’s virtuosic fiddle passages into
hypnotically unspooling yarns of floss.
Five dancers,
choreographed in circular swoons by David Shimotakahara, weave a texture
inside which four young Play House actors breathe uncanny life into a
difficult text – much of it written in ironic, rhyming couplets by
Vonnegut, who immortalized his own World War II experiences in
"Slaughterhouse-Five."
Led by a playfully
defiant Justin Tatum as Slovik, and overseen by Play House associate
artistic director Seth Gordon, the production elicits conflicting and
wholly human emotions ranging from ecstasy and lust to death and
despair.
And, in the end, tears
for a soldier whose courage manifested itself in an act many would still
call cowardice: He refused to fight.
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