Steve Mirsky gets his knickers in a twist about people who call the magazine he writes for Scientific America. Maybe he should talk to the people that used to call a certain ISP American Online, back in the days before it became just AOL.

Of course, what gets my nut is those goofballs on "Car Talk" who refer to the New York Times Review of Books.

posted: 6:46:20 PM  

Dan Hurlin adopts and adapts elements from a wide range of media in his innovative and exciting puppet-based performance piece. It's the story of the two dozen so-called "Hiroshima maidens," their faces disfigured by radiation damage as a result of the 1945 bombing of their city, who were brought to the United States in 1955 for pro bono reconstructive surgery.

First and foremost, Hurlin uses the performance practice of Japanese bunraku—three-foot-tall puppets each manipulated by three puppeteers, dressed in black but otherwise fully visible onstage—but he puts his own spin on the tradition. His puppeteers do not wear the conventional obscuring hood; the performers often directly interact with the puppets (half of the cast are trained as dancers); and Hurlin, as narrator/tayū, does not directly narrate until the penultimate scene, a too-strange-to-be-fiction meeting on the TV show This Is Your Life of one of the pilots of the bomb-carrying Enola Gay and some of the Japanese affected by its last run. Indeed, it is Hurlin's cloying, under-rehearsed monologues in earlier passages, which tell of the archetypal Young American Boy who ultimately watches the televised meeting, that are the least effective element of the piece.

But other parts of this post-modern combine are very strong: paper dolls; lantern slides; props that break apart; a great score by Een for cello, xylophone, voice, and assorted strings and percussion. It's a particularly nice touch to use the clacking of the traditional ki (wood blocks) to simulate a photographer's flashbulb.

Hurlin says that puppetry, to him, has more in common with film than theater, and he makes good that claim, using the form to quickly shift perspective and scale. There are scenes that are viewed from overhead; there are insets (marked by frames and sight-strings held by the cast) that enlarge an important detail. Indeed, there is much in the piece that suggests recent developments in comics as practiced by Chris Ware.

As might be expected, sightlines from the extreme left side of the Kay Theatre's balcony are not always the best for viewing this fine piece.

posted: 5:00:07 PM  

Charles Isherwood previews John Doyle's staging of Sweeney Todd, Stephen Sondheim's musical about a Victorian era barber who cut some corners. Doyle's stripped-down version uses a 10-person orchestra as the cast. Sondheim says:

Doyle has been refining this limited-staff approach to musicals ever since a 1992 production of Candide, and he's tried it as well with The Gondoliers, by Gilbert and Sullivan.

posted: 4:10:45 PM