As in previous years, David Sefton, executive and artistic director of UCLA Live, is once again claiming the new UCLA Live season to be the finest one the organization has ever put together, and once again, he may be right.
Take for example, the impressive lineup for UCLA Live’s Sixth International Theatre Festival, which boasts a U.S. premiere, two U.S. company debuts, multiple West Coast premieres and exclusive engagements from theaters based in Scotland, the Netherlands, Poland and England.
“Every year, I seek to surpass any previous theater experience that we, or any other organization, has yet presented. I want to open this world up to audiences and let them know they can look to UCLA Live to see things that they won’t find anywhere else,” said Sefton.
The festival showcases a compilation of cutting-edge pieces featuring some of the world’s great actors, directors and writers. The extraordinary repertoire mixes the most talked-about new works on the international circuit with radically reinvented classics.
The festival opened on Sept. 18 with the National Theatre of Scotland’s widely acclaimed “Black Watch,” written by Gregory Burke and directed by John Tiffany. Performed by an eight-man cast, the politically charged production focuses on soldiers in Scotland’s legendary 300-year-old Black Watch regiment, which was ironically disbanded in 2004, the very week its battalion replaced some 4,000 U.S. Marines in one of the bloodiest areas of Iraq.
“It’s very serious business ““ there are people being killed but at the same time there is this sort of garrulous humor, and it’s funny. But there’s a point when you stop laughing,” said Burke of his script.
Magnified by current events and based on interviews with former Scottish soldiers serving in Iraq, the piece opens a theater season in which the discussion of contemporary issues will be a recurring theme.
“What “˜Black Watch’ is not is a straight piece of anti-war polemic … it’s so much smarter than that,” said Sefton.
The day after “Black Watch” opened, Amsterdam’s Dood Paard (Dead Horse) began “medEia,” a thrilling postmodern interpretation of the ancient Greek tragedy “Medea” that ran Sept. 19-23.
The poetic and oftentimes humorous script interlaces lyrics from American and British pop songs by groups ranging from the Beatles and the Doors to Public Enemy and Madonna.
“It is a story about how love and pop songs are a very modern way of thinking about the feeling of love, and everybody in the Western world has a common memory, a common background, that tells the story of love,” said actor Kuno Bakker.
In October, one of the year’s most anticipated events brings Sir Ian McKellen (known to many for his memorable performances in “Lord of the Rings” and “X-Men”) and director Sir Trevor Nunn to Royce Hall to lead the Royal Shakespeare Company in Shakespeare’s “King Lear” and Chekhov’s “The Seagull.”
“Quite simply, Ian is an actor of genius … The demands of the role are beyond the reach of most actors. The character is 80 years old, but (McKellen) combines frailty with dangerous robustness and temperamental rages,” said Nunn, McKellen’s former Cambridge University colleague.
McKellen will perform in both plays but will share the role of Sorin in “The Seagull” with William Gaunt.
“The (company) has always presented its work in repertoire, and as an audience and actor, I know the thrill of seeing the same company playing in different plays on adjacent nights or, best of all, on the same day,” said McKellen.
From traditional theater to unconventional puppetry, “The Fortune Teller,” coming this October also, features former Lounge Lizards bassist Erik Sanko and his macabre puppet show for grown-ups. Sanko’s 15 handcrafted figures unravel a twisted tale of the seven deadly sins, who all convene at a dead millionaire’s estate to claim their inheritance as forecasted by a fortune teller.
The marionettes dance against the set of an exquisite Edwardian mansion to the gravelly recording of Irish vocalist Gavin Friday and an eerie musical score by Sanko and Grammy-winning composer Danny Elfman.
In November, Teatr Zar of Poland debuts in the U.S. with its performance “Gospels of Childhood,” a whirlwind of acting, chanting, movement and polyphonic funeral songs from Georgia, Bulgaria and Greece.
Jaroslaw Fret directs a group of extraordinary actors, the successors of the late Polish director Jerzy Grotowski, in a deeply moving and meditative experience drawing upon texts from Christian mythology. The artists strive to communicate on a primal, non-spoken level to lure the audience into a subliminal realm teetering between the worlds of the living and the dead.
But for those who just want to have fun, the festival’s playful family-oriented performance “Aurelia’s Oratorio” will leave audience members smiling when it headlines next April.
Hailed as the most entertaining show of the Spoleto Festival 2007, “Aurelia’s” star, Aurelia Thierree, is cast in a dazzling theatrical spectacle of circus acrobatics under the direction of her mother, Victoria (daughter of Charlie Chaplin). The final show of the International Theater Festival, it will help round out another full season for UCLA Live.
“The companies in the festival are beyond the ordinary, with the very best artists, the highest quality work and the most compelling plays that span the spectrum from historically excellent to remarkably innovative,” said Sefton.