New Worlds Bill Murray and Jan Vogler Review
Can you imagine a bedchamber music concert—a quartet, playing mostly classical piece of work by composers with names like Bach, Schubert and Shostakovich—getting six encores?
And seven—yes, vii—continuing ovations?
That'south what happened the other night when New Worlds—a one-night performance featuring Bill Murray and a trio of string players—took the phase for its Washington, DC premiere in the normally staid Concert Hall of the John F. Kennedy Centre for the Performing Arts.
Murray, who won the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize for American Sense of humour in 2016, has teamed upward with Jan Vogler, the German cellist, for a earth tour that celebrates the link between literature and music in a way that is likely to entreatment to audiences of all ages.
The result is a dazzling form of entertainment, by turns whimsical, passionate, silly, hilarious, joyous, surprising and sorry.
The tone of the show is set right at the first, when Murray, reading Ernest Hemingway, admits to having played the cello at his mother'due south behest. "I played it worse than anything on earth," he says, at which point Vogler cuts in with a Bach prelude so exquisitely composed and performed that it could well have been divine. (Vogler's instrument is a 1707 Stradivarius.)
The strains of the Bach are still lingering in the air when Murray, switching to Walt Whitman, softly asks, "Hello. Who wishes to walk with me?" The words are then musical, there'southward no need for accessory.
Just then, suddenly, cello, violin and pianoforte are all soaring in a Franz Schubert trio as Murray—now wearing a unlike hat—narrates a scene from James Fenimore Cooper's Deerslayer. Schubert and Cooper, he tells us, loved each other's work. (Who knew? And who, among us, has even thought virtually Cooper since grade school?)
Under Vogel'due south invisible baton—the cellist is the concertmeister for the trio—Mira Wang, a former kid prodigy (now turned virtuoso soloist), is the violinist and Vanessa Perez is the very gifted, funny and slightly manic pianist.
The tranquility of Cooper's forests is followed by the excitement of more than Hemingway, this time with tales of women and booze, intersected by a Ravel sonata that hints of jazz and ragtime.
"In Paris, you could alive very well," Murray continues, now reading from Hemingway'southward Moveable Feast. He remembers the stiff appetites of artists and models. One of them, he confides, in a whisper that carries to the back of the hall, was a lesbian who also liked men.
Now the music is past Astor Piazzolla, the passionate Argentinian composer whose tangoes are every bit seductive as the unforgettable models.
Improbably, the violinist—dressed in a shimmering gold sheath—gets upward to dance with Murray, swaying to the sound of the cello and piano playing Piazzolla's incredibly romantic "Oblivion."
Murray is a master of dialect. In his Hemingway vein, he gives us a Bulgarian waiter. In some other segment, he is Jim, the runaway slave who is so close to freedom in Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn. He is also—equally revealed in some of his films—a fine actor and uncanny mimic. His have on Billy Collins, the erstwhile Poet Laureate, is then good that I thought at first it was a recording. The same matter is true of his version of Van Morrison in "When Will I Ever Acquire to Live in God."
One of the saddest songs is "Jeanie with the Light Brownish Hair" past Stephen Foster. It expresses the songwriter's sorrow over the wife who left him. The song did not bring her back, nor did it make much money, but information technology did earn itself a permanent place in the American Songbook.
The pacing of the show is quite wonderful, with some numbers gliding into each other, while others sharply diverge. 1 of the best examples of a quick change is when the violinist and the pianist enter into a mad music competition based on "Chopsticks." (That, too, is music.)
George Gershwin is here, as is Leonard Bernstein, with musical numbers from two of their greatest Broadway hits. In both cases, the literary aspect is literally the lyrics, written past Ira Gershwin for his brother's Porgy and Bess and by Stephen Sondheim for West Side Story.
The Gershwin song is "It Ain't Necessarily So." Murray does a powerful rendition of the testify-stopping number, urging the audience, at one bespeak, to join in, and turning the concert hall audience into a rousing gospel choir.
He pulls off a dissimilar kind of switch when, in the evidence'south "official" finale (before the six encores), he sings the role of Maria in "I Experience Pretty" and "America," both from West Side Story. He brings the firm down when he points out that, contrary to what some people think, "Puerto Rico is in America."
Of course, the finale is just the beginning. Information technology's non until the encores become started that Murray really lets loose. He jumps off the phase and somersaults back. He tosses flowers, one past one, to the audience and more often than not turns into a whirling dervish that threatens to spin out of time and infinite. At i indicate, he tells the audition that he's already checked out of his hotel and since he has nowhere to get, he'd be happy to stay for the rest of the dark.
In fact, there is then much physicality to this evidence that it's hard to believe that Bill Murray is actually 67 years old, and that he got his get-go on Saturday Dark Live more than 40 years ago.
New Worlds owes much of its strength to Vogler, who grew upward in East Berlin in a business firm where there were lots of books, including Hemingway and Twain, simply all in German. He and Murray met on a plane, where the latter was surprised to learn that the cello got its ain seat – in first class, no less, and side by side to a window.
The show—whose levity makes sleeping room music approachable for many who might accept backed off in the past—will continue its worldwide bout in 2018. Concerts are currently planned for other cities in the U.s.a., too as Iceland, Europe and Australia.
Running Time: Two hours with encores, ovations and no suspension.
Bill Murray, Jan Vogler & Friends: New Worlds was performed on March 4, 2018 at The Kennedy Center, 2700 F Street, NW, in Washington, DC. For more data on upcoming shows at the Kennedy Centre, go online.
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Source: https://dcmetrotheaterarts.com/2018/03/05/review-bill-murray-jan-vogler-friends-new-worlds-at-the-kennedy-center/