Word: cantata
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Nightclub Cantata is the title director Elizabeth Swados has given to the 75 minutes of theatre that had just put actors and audience back in touch with their world--not just beneath but above, and even within, themselves. The location has since changed to the Charles Playhouse and the off-Broadway cast will soon be replaced, but Cantata is a hit that likely won't leave Boston soon...
Swados has created, composed and directed 21 musical numbers--each a separate attempt to explore the many levels of human interaction through simple song and melody. Nightclub Cantata is part of her search for "new words for music," words, she says, "that will not make either bad poetry or easy emotions." Playing with a vast range of 'foreign' languages, she has set to music "Avesta," an old Persian cursing language, as well as jungle choruses and a bird lament...
Swados finds the simplest statement of her theme in two works of Nazim Hikmet. "Things I Didn't Know I Loved" opens Cantata, celebrating an adult re-awakening to the fundamental miracle of life bursting with questions for animals and astronauts alike. "On Living" ends the show with a return to general statements on existence: "Living must be your whole occupation... Plant olives at seventy and not for your children... We must live as if one never dies...
Swados also has not overcome the problem of integrating into a whole the varied subjects and formats of the adopted pieces. Blackouts are used too frequently for transition between numbers instead of more refined staging and lighting. At times the structure disappears, turning Nightclub Cantata into Up With People gone disco...
...program opened with the Sinfonia from Bach's Cantata No. 209, 'Non sa che sia dolore', written about 1730 in Leipzig. The cantata itself is based on an actual incident--a friend is leaving Germany for his native Italy, and Bach wants to wish him well, despite the sadness in parting. The Sinfonia, in B minor, sets this tone, and somehow greatly resembles the first movement of the D minor violin concerto...