““You know who I am,” he said”
Vanity Fair posted a piece by Michelle Memran today, titled: Tony Kushner Gives Rave Review of Stripped-Down, David Bowie-ized Production of Angels in America.
That pretty much explains the angle of the article, but here’s the intro to further expand.
Tonight Tony Kushner will be seated in BAM Harvey Theater, at the Next Wave Festival, watching a radical restaging of his Pulitzer Prize–winning play, Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes, by the innovative Belgian director Ivo van Hove. Just over 20 years since its watershed Broadway debut, the vast modern classic has been produced and remounted more times and in more cities than Kushner has time to count, but this particular rendering by the Dutch theater company Toneelgroep Amsterdam still astonishes him. The much-lauded—and intensely searching—playwright and screenwriter is now thinking back to 2009, when he first saw van Hove’s dazzling, nearly five-hour Dutch-language distillation, a year after it opened to raves at Amsterdam’s Municipal Theatre (where it continues to run in repertory).
And here’s a bit mentioning the inclusion of the Bowie music.
In fact, the Angel revealed here is a male E.R. nurse who simply walks onto the stage. And not only does the Angel—who is typically female and winged and crashes through the ceiling in a shower of crumbling plaster at the end of Part One: Millennium Approaches—choose to walk instead of fly, but all of its celestial sound effects, and all of the sound cues throughout the play for that matter, have either been dropped or replaced entirely by David Bowie’s music.
“When you listen to [David Bowie] songs, you’ll hear the beginning of the 80s,” says van Hove. “And so many of his songs talk about decay, death, change, transformation. That’s his music and that’s why we used it. I think all art should be subversive. Why go to the theater? To be shocked, to be blown away, to be emotionally touched, to come out of the theater having experienced something. Perhaps you don’t even know what it is yet, and why. But your imagination has been stimulated. That’s what we try to do onstage.”
Raed the full thing here.
This three day run of Angels In America is part of the 2014 Next Wave Festival at BAM and there are just two performances remaining on Friday and Saturday. Visit the BAM site for tickets.
BAM Harvey Theater (651 Fulton Street, New York City)
October 23 and 24 at 7 P.M.; October 25 at 6 P.M.
By Tony Kushner
Toneelgroep Amsterdam
Directed by Ivo van Hove
Set and light design by Jan Versweyveld
Costume design by Wojciech Dziedzic
Video design by Tal Yarden
Music by Wim Selles
US PREMIERE IN DUTCH
RUN TIME: 5hrs 10min (with 45min break)
FULL PRICE TICKETS START AT $40
By Tony Kushner
Toneelgroep Amsterdam
Directed by Ivo van Hove