MURDERING SOPRANOS RIGHT AND LEFT ON STAGE
                     In the Unsavory Tale of a Modern Jack the Ripper 
                                              By D. Rane Danubian
        artssf.com, the independent observer of San Francisco Bay Area music and dance 
                                                                 Week of June 16-23, 2010
                                                                  Vol. 12, No. 114 
          TORONTO---No arts festival would be complete without a bona fide fiasco. Toronto's Luminato Festival of Arts and Culture fell victim to "The Infernal Comedy," a modern play with old music featuring veteran actor John Malkovich June 11-12.
            The lurid piece was built around the real-life psycopath and womanizer Jack Unterweger (1950-94), who murdered numerous prostitutes before being condemned, incarcerated, and being driven to suicide. Playing Unterweger, Malkovich could not resist swatches of adlibs and self-referential comments, until you were never certain which of the two was being featured. The self-indulgent show fell victim to an ego, which Unterweger also showed to excess. Malkovich’s quetching about his unfortunate Toronto venues moves from humor to tedium almost instantaneously. He can be a charmer when playing Unterweger, but far far less when popping out of it.
            The nub of it was an odd juxtaposition of erratic dramatization with a rather heavenly musical presentation involving a period-instruments  orchestra (Vienna Academy Orchestra) and two lyric sopranos, Bernarda Bobro and Marie Arnet, interpreting Italian dramatic scenes out of Vivaldi, Haydn, Mozart, von Weber and Beethoven. They play out their complex relationship with the modern protagonist, certainly meriting a better finis than Unterweger's strangulations via bras wrapped around the neck.
            If this was conceived as a vehicle for Malkovich, the wheels came off the vehicle early on, echoed by numerous patrons streaking for the exits long before the end.
            "The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer," in its North American premiere, created by Musikkozept and the Ronacher Theatre, both in Vienna. An element of Toronto's annual Luminato festival of arts and culture, given at Massey Hall. For info, go online.

        ©D. Rane Danubian 2010
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        D. Rane Danubian has been covering the dance and modern-music scene in the San Francisco Bay Area with relish -- and a certain amount of salsa -- for years.
    These critiques appearing weekly (or sometimes semi-weekly, but never weakly) will focus on dance and new musical creativity in performance, with forays into books (by authors of the region), theater and recordings by local artists as well.
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