Imagine this: 19th-century revolutionary
Russian tale meets 20th-century Soviet
musical imagination. Furthermore, the tale is
completely portrayed through mime! What do
you have? Gogol meets Shostakovich, in The
Canadian Stage Company's production of
Gogol's short-story, completely set to the
music of Dmitri Shostakovich.
Originally premiered at the Vancouver
Playhouse in 1997, CanStage's production of
THE OVERCOAT was co-created and directed by
Morris Panych and choreographer Wendy
Gorling. The result is a theater piece that
is part dance, part drama, and part mime, and
is Panych and Gorling's vision of
dramatically exploring non-verbal ways of
setting stories to music. The production was
critically well-received and has since toured
throughout Canada as well as America,
Australia, Europe, and New Zealand. The most
recent production was mounted in August 2005
at the American Conservatory Theater in San
Francisco.
---------------------------------------------
"...Shostakovich's music is very adept in
telling stories...And, because we have added
very haunting music and been very specific
about which piece of music goes with a
particular part of the play, the music is
really the third author...We built the play,
movement by movement, with the music...The
music breathes in and breathes out."
— Wendy Gorling
"Once the main idea is set, we allow, as much
as possible, for the music to tell us the
direction the story will take...The choice of
music was easy...First, the dramatic Slavic
character of [Shostakovich] really fits, but
as importantly, the many layers of the
orchestration allow for lots of movement
interpretation..."
— Morris Panych
---------------------------------------------
Mark Your Calendar:
Shostakovich Centennial Birthday
25 September 2006
