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Thursday, October 18, 2007
‘Bach at Leipzig,’ at Aurora Theatre
THEATER REVIEW Itamar Moses' “Bach at Leipzig.” Through Oct. 28. Aurora Theatre in Lawrenceville. 678-226-6222, www.auroratheatre.com
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
We tend to think of Johann Sebastian Bach’s music as lofty, sublime, perfect — “an argument for the existence of God,” as one Bach scholar recently put it. To his contemporaries, however, Bach was competent but not great.
After he died, no one bothered to save his music; hundreds of his scores were discarded as scrap paper. During his life, when important jobs came open, he had to audition like everyone else — and he wasn’t anybody’s first choice.
That’s the starting premise of “Bach at Leipzig,” Itamar Moses’ charmingly, maddeningly daffy play that wears its cleverness on its sleeve, running through Oct. 28 at Aurora Theatre in Lawrenceville.
In lucid, precision-timed direction by Danielle Mindess, and with a winning cast, the characters carve for themselves rounded personas: None are especially likable, none are forgettable.
It is June 1722. Leipzig. The revered Johann Kuhnau, music master of the Thomaskirche, dies at the pipe organ. Georg Philipp Telemann, “the greatest organist in Germany” (Jim Adkins, grandiloquent in his silence), is the favorite to capture the prestigious post.
Meanwhile, six nobodies — Moses concocted this cadre, based somewhat on historical figures; Bach never appears — can’t hope to compete on musical merits, so they scheme, swindle, poison, blackmail and counter-blackmail in hopes of landing the job.
All the wannabes are named either Johann or Georg (a point of comic confusion that never tires the playwright). There’s Lenck (Dan Triandiflou), a con man who hopes to restore his reputation through more trickery. Steindorff (Jeremy Aggers) is the pretty playboy who really wants to be a dancer. Kaufmann (Daniel Burnley) stumbles around in a geriatric fog. Graupner (Larry Davis), more talented than the others, still fears the charismatic Telemann.
One by one, each introduces himself by reciting a letter home before joining the thrust and parry of the others. Thus, all of act one is constructed — as we learn at the start of act two — like a six-voiced fugue in music. (The audience is encouraged to applaud Moses’ brilliance.) Act two’s conceit is a play within a play, another opportunity to weave together six or more threads of verbal mayhem.
On occasion, grand ideas about art and society threaten to lift the wordplay and poppycock to a more cerebral plain. Schott (Al Stilo), the traditionalist, argues that Kuhnau had prized craftsmanship, never innovation: “When you deny the musical principles laid down by our predecessors you risk denying their religious ones as well.”
Fasch (Chris Entweiler), the progressive, counters, “That is preposterous! New music might, in fact, reach those who do not like the work of our predecessors …”
But such chewable exchanges go nowhere, evaporating with the next rim-shot gag.
If “Bach at Leipzig” feels a lot like a Tom Stoppard play — think “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead,” about two insignificant characters yanked out of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” — it’s intentional. Although he credits Stoppard as his influence, Moses can’t match his idol’s balance of theatrical artifice with dramatic substance.
Perhaps that explains why there’s hardly any music in this production (Thom Jenkins gets sound design credit), which further reinforces the notion that “Bach at Leipzig” isn’t about the complexities of art and mankind, but merely a crafty play about itself, clever for cleverness’ sake.
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