Irish Times writers review Saturday Night Fever at Grand Opera House, Belfast, Once Upon A Barstool at the Granary, Cork, and the Ulster Orchestra and Nicholas Cleobury at the Ulster Hall, Belfast.
Saturday Night Fever
Grand Opera House, Belfast
Jane Coyle
It's bold, it's brash, it's in your face, it's fuelled by testosterone and it has fabulous music by the Bee Gees. But unless we'd been living on Planet Zog since 1978, when the film burst into the world's consciousness, we knew all that already. So one approaches the stage musical version of Saturday Night Fever with high hopes and expectations. It looks fantastic, for sure, with all the glossy production values of a show that has already been a big hit on Broadway and in the West End. The gorgeously lit scaffolding set is dominated by the dramatic outline of Brooklyn's Verrazano Narrows Bridge, which towers over - and ultimately claims - the lives of the young working-class Italian-Americans, who exist only for kicks and dubious thrills, on and off the dance floor, on a Saturday night.
This is the first week of a six-month UK tour and one senses that the enthusiastic, energetic cast has some way to go yet before it fully stamps its authority and ownership on storyline and characters. Essentially this is a dance show and in the big set pieces inside the 2001 Odyssey Dance Hall everyone gets a chance to shine - and does so with huge enthusiasm. Drama fares less well and the focus falls only fleetingly on the gritty human tragedy that gave the film such integrity. Stephane Anelli's Tony Manero is all curled lip, raised eyebrow and swivelling hips, falling short of the steely, sleazy presence of Travolta's original incarnation, but utterly likeable nevertheless. His performance sets a tone of amiable irony, tongue-in-cheek charm and irascible laddishness, which the rest are only too happy to follow. The familiar device of getting the audience to its feet for a high-energy, hand clapping finale, to the strains of those great old Bee Gee hits, has the desired effect of sending the punters out into the night with a smile on their faces and a spring in their steps.
Saturday Night Fever is at the Belfast Grand Opera House until January 31st. Bookings on Belfast 90241919.
Once Upon a Barstool The Granary, Cork
Mary Leland
The Saint Sebastian face of Felix Nobis has a lot to do with the acceptability of Once Upon a Barstool which made its debut at The Granary. He has an expression of epic martyrdom; this, and his command of the space around him (for once, the stage-less Granary is clean) compels attention for a complex monologue weaving through three generations of Irish-Australian interchange. It's not so much the Emigrant's Farewell as the emigrant's hallo, in which young Michael encounters the realities of life in what had seemed a mythical, almost mystical, Ireland, land of his grandparents' birth. In form, delivery and writing - the text is by Nobis himself - the piece is a series of mutations: from rhyming couplets to bar-room crudities, from stories of Ireland, dissolving in antipodean scepticism, to Nordic sagas, from the rhythms of The Ancient Mariner (probably no accident) to anecdotes of location and displacement. These last appease the local audience but disturb the ley-lines of narrative; of course the writer can dismiss his own freight of experience or metaphor, but to do so without risking his purpose requires a skilful balancing act. Although the merging sequences are fluid and managed smoothly by director Thomas Conway, there is bone in the text, the abrasive, glancing observations have authority and even the silences have weight. Once Upon a Barstool makes it clear that it's time for the very talented Nobis to shed his Beowolf affiliation and to claim his unique theatrical territory.
Continues at The Granary until Thursday 22nd. Contact 021-4904275.
Ulster Orchestra/Nicholas Cleobury
Ulster Hall, Belfast
Dermot Gault
John Tavener - Eternal memory. Schulhoff - Scherzo alla Jazz.
Pavel Haas - Study.
Korngold - Cello Concerto.
John Williams - Theme from Schindler's List.
Michael Tilson Thomas - From the Diary of Anne Frank.
Ullmann - Variations and Fugue.
Ravel - Kaddish.
Images on a video screen - Goebbels addressing a cultural gathering (Richard Strauss and Furtwängler in the front row); the face of Anne Frank, whose Diary was read by Stephanie Hughes with an orchestral accompaniment by the conductor Michael Tilson Thomas; and a less familiar face, cellist Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who survived Auschwitz by playing in the camp orchestra. Her son Raphael Wallfisch played the Tavener, Korngold and Ravel works in this concert, held in connection with the fourth UK Holocaust Memorial Day, which is hosted this year by Northern Ireland.
Another familiar image - the offensively racist poster for an exhibition of Entartete Musik (Degenerate Music), a term applied by the Nazis to (among others) the music of Erwin Schulhoff, Pavel Haas and Viktor Ullmann, all of whom died in the Holocaust. The Haas and Ullmann pieces, tough powerful works, were written in Terezin against a background of "starvation and daily death". Ironically their music, too modern for the Nazis, was not modern enough for the radicalised environment of post-war Germany, and only in recent decades has it been appreciated that these composers had developed modernist styles of their own and not quite like anyone else's (although there is a touch of Weill in Schulhoff's Scherzo).
The "degenerate" label also applied to Korngold, whose 12-minute Cello Concerto derives from one of his many Hollywood film scores. It turns out to be emotionally complex work in which an awareness of modernism is combined with a determination to keep it at arm's length.
