The Whisper House -- At the Old Globe in San Diego
It’s a Duncan Sheik show, so you gotta compare it to Spring Awakening right? This one was even more of a play with music than Spring was. The show is 90 minutes with no intermission but there was only about 20 minutes of stage worthy material there. With Spring you had the raw energy of the kids sexuality all over the stage to carry through the ‘with music’ part and to make you forget the anachronistic nature of the modern music against the period piece. We don’t have that teen angst in Whisper so the anachronisms are like cymbal crashes at a cello concert. The handheld mics, micstands, and modern day musical styles and lyrics are jarring.
The vocalists were highly stylized with thin and shallow voices amplified to match the volume of the band. They were very good singers for the style of music they were working with but I have to say that when the kid sang his 2 or 3 bars at the end of the show, I wanted to hear much more of THAT voice. It sounded stronger than the two ghosts put together. We had the same quality of lyrics in this show (rhyming ‘Boston’ with ‘caution’) that we had in Spring (where we rhymed ‘jump’ with ‘come’) but again we were able to look past that while experiencing Spring; we just figured we weren’t watching a William Finn show and got over it – cuz there was so much there on stage to keep you there. Whisper however seems like it’s attempting to be real theatre, therefore it can’t lean on the audiences willingness to forgive the raw untrained quality of the piece that was a given for Spring.
You have to earn every moment of stage time. That’s true for the actor as well as the director and the writer. If you are going to repeat lyrics you need a good reason for it. In Pop music it just the style, but the stage requires the performance to engage the audience with each moment, each silence, each note and each lyric. Pop repetitions in the tunes were just repetitious. The songs were good for what they were. They’d likely be very nice in a concert setting or on a recording, they just didn’t do anything to move the story along.
The exposition led us to believe that we were going to learn a lot about these ghosts in the lighthouse. It was a disappointment to find that the exposition of the ghost story was simply there to justify their presence in the play. Their plight and haunting were barely reference in the body of the play.
It wasn’t a BAD night of theatre, but it certainly wasn’t engaging either. I’m glad I went. I like to see lots of different kind of stuff and anything with music is truly my cup of tea. I would recommend it if you don’t have to pay full price.
posted by Tim Heitman @ 5:24 PM
4 comments
4 Comments:
Handheld mics, "jarring?" "Pop repetitions?" C'mon dude, it's 2010 -- and both of the above were heavily present in Spring Awakening.
It was the songs and their contemporary presentations we loved most about this show, and we found it refreshing to see new musical theater that sounded like something we'd listen to outside of it, void of the over-the-top vocalizing we've come to expect on Broadway.
We also appreciated the subtlety with which it handled the anti-war and racism themes.
And we thought it was cool how the ghost story played as subtext to the real-life story. A play about ghosts might be a cool idea, but playwrights like Bill Shakespeare and Thornton Wilder knew to keep their stories secondary to what was happening in real life.
Loved Whisper House and are proud it premiered in San Diego!~
Cool -- different tastes like different things. That makes theatre the joy that it is. You're right to be proud we had this premier in San Diego. We've become a prime spot to try material at the fully professional level. That's a rare and wonderful thing.
You're also right that we saw the same repetitions, mics, and jarring anachronisms in Spring but it was easy to overlook those things for that show. Somehow it all added to the raw in your face tone of the piece. Whisper has a much subtler and more serious tone. It seems to aspire to a higher level of art. It makes that lack of cohesion less forgivable.
Of course the choice of mics, the tone of the music, the use of modern lyrical sensibilities in a period piece -- these are all artistic choices. In the end, the proof of those choices is whether it works or not.
Obviously they did for you. Great.
They didn't for me.
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