Front Row

The playwright tells about the staging of his work in translation. What is gained? What might be lost going from English to Mandarin? He details working with a director and explains the relationship between a playwright and the one who controls what happens on the stage.

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Continuing the tradition of providing sacred music to Malaysians, Elaine Pao will be conducting ‘Elijah’ an oratorio by Felix Mendelssohn. She explains the challenges, especially after undertaking ‘The Messiah’ last year up north in Sitiawan; and she details the joys of this celebration. The conductor points to the history of the composition and underscores its place in the classical canon.

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In this special year, the fourth production of a Shakespeare play but in our vernacular, and so it become ‘Tragedi Hamlet’. This staging is Faridah Merican’s fourth outing because she’s interested in the mother-and-son relationship. Find out what she thinks of this relationship which in Olivier’s version has the son kissing the mother Oedipus-like.

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Adam Hall sings and plays Trumpet, Trombone, Alto Sax, Piano, Euphonium, Mellophonium and a little bit of bass and drums for good measure. And he will show-and-tell what it means to be proficient in so many different kinds of instruments. He will be with some of his band-members, the Velvet Playboys which was formed in 2005. 

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The Damansara Performing Arts Centre is holding a festival this month and several of the performances centre in celebrating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. The first of these is ‘Shakespeare in Songs’ to be performed not by pop-groups but classically trained singers who have come together as ‘The Song Weavers’. We find out about their programme and what they know about the plays in which these songs appear.

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For the most part, Hands Percussion is often seen performing with the traditional theatre space. It is undertaking its first site-specific performance and adding to that, a collaboration with French artists: a singer, a musician and a visual artist. Bernard and Mathilde tell about "Opium", and the artistic expressions of perspective and choices which “are presented through visual and installation art, dance, calligraphy, singing and collaborative music.”

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‘Titus Andronicus’ is a rarely performed play, and one hardly assigned to students. It is a play for die-hard Shakespeare lovers and perhaps young men who have grown up with Hollywood gore. A director who has undertaken this play, Jim Helsinger, calls it  “the 'Friday the 13th' of 1598." Today’s Front Row offers an opportunity to hear from both the dramaturg, from KL Shakespeare Players;  and the director, from TheatreThreeSixty, what this early play offers and how it is also the beginnings for some later Shakespeare works like ‘Othello’ and ‘Macbeth’. 

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More than a decade and a half ago (in 2001), a local production company staged ‘Nunsense’ an American musical-comedy about nuns. But the production was tweaked to fit local circumstances. The musical is back perhaps with more topical references beyond the tropical setting in Balakong for the habit-wearing celebrants to sing, dance and make merry.

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 Very rarely is a Greek tragedy performed on Malaysian stages that we invited Kelvin Wong, a director with a newly minted MA in directing to talk about the production. In this play, ‘Antigone’, we see a young princess challenging her King-and-uncle when she wants to bury her brother against the wishes of the King. This play explores the theme of individual action and fate, about power which both corrupts and blinds.

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The photographer-and-artist, takes us on a journey looking at what performers wear on their heads. And he talks about an exhibition of his works in  ‘The Crowning Glory’, where he pictures himself  decorated with the theatrical headgears of therukothu, Chinese Operas, makyong, menora and Javanese dancers and the glorious crowns of different nations and nationalities.

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