CONCERT REVIEW
January 21, 2025
Night After Night: Never Enough — In A Grove
Steve Smith from Night After Night reviewed our production of In A Grove at Prototype Festival:
The curse of any listings editor, avocational or otherwise, is investing time and enthusiasm in recommending all the musical events one might like to go out and see—but then getting tied up with this and that, and thus failing to go out and actually see very much. All of which is to say I once again missed Winter Jazzfest entirely, and saw just one show during PROTOTYPE.
Happily, that show was In a Grove, the opera by Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleishmann I’d wanted to see from the moment its 2022 world premiere at Pittsburgh Opera was first announced.
Billed as “an opera in 7 testimonies” and based on the Ryūnosuke Akutagawa story Akira Kurosawa adapted for Rashomon, this was a hypnotic ritual awash in beauty and tension. Each new soliloquy complicated or contradicted what came before it, with amplification and electronic vocal processing serving as potent mood-altering tools.
The action, directed by Mary Birnbaum, was spare and suspenseful; the physical production – a bare, slender platform bisected with a transparent panel hung from above – showed how much imaginative stagecraft can be wrung from minimal means. Singers Paul Appleby, Mikaela Bennett, John Brancy, and Chuanyuan Liu were sensational; so, too, was the Metropolis Ensemble, effectively and excitingly led by Raquel Acevedo Klein.
Year after year, PROTOTYPE offers at least one marvel like this, and often more. My neighbor in the next seat waxed enthusiastic about Eat the Document (which I was supposed to see but didn’t) and Positive Vibration Nation; elsewhere, my old New York Times comrade Vivien Schweitzer reflected at length about Art Bath, Arooj Aftab, and Black Lodge.
Here’s to trying to see more next time around. Meanwhile, In a Grove is headed to Opera Saratoga, where Birnbaum is general and artistic director, to be staged four times in a site-specific outdoor version at Saratoga Spa State Park on May 28 & 29—details here.