Masterpiece Theater

Blame the heat, blame the humidity, blame Harry Potter (I'm almost finished with the final book), but no matter who you blame, I've been neglecting this blog. I haven't fallen off the radar completely, however, and I'll be posting reviews of several new shows in the next few days. And with The New York International Fringe Festival looming, you can bet I'll be a theatergoing freak for a couple of days, at least.

But the show that brought me back to the blog is a small jewel of a play called Opus that I reviewed at 59E59 Theaters Friday night. A production of Primary Stages, Michael Hollinger's tense and tantalizing riff on the histrionics of a string quartet is one of the best productions I've seen this year, if not since I moved to the city nearly three years ago. PLEASE go see this show!

Show Business Weekly review: Opus

I had never been to 59E59, and I was immensely impressed with the facility, to begin with. Designer James Kronzer has outfitted it to look like a sleek and spare concert hall (even more than it usually does), and Jorge Cousineau's sound design is absolutely impeccable. Although the actors mime (I hate to use that word, but it's true) their playing, they're so perfectly timed with the gorgeous music that you almost forget that it's not really a live performance.

The story, in brief: When the quartet's violist, a stormy soul named Dorian, goes missing, the other three musicians quickly recruit Grace, a brilliant viola player fresh out of grad school and thunderstruck with her good fortune. They decide to play Beethoven's difficult Opus 131 at their next gig (at The White House), and they begin to practice--and get to know each other.

One of my dear friends, Christine, happens to be a violist who recently played with a string quartet, and her tales of their squabbles echoed through my head as I watched the play. Being a member of a string quartet is like being married to three people at once, she told me, and that truth bore out on stage as well. Hollinger has concocted a spirited verbal shorthand between the characters, and their relationships are at once both extremely intimate and dangerously volatile.

The action flits between the newly formed group's preparations and flashbacks to the scenes that foreshadowed Dorian's departure. Terrence J. Nolen's precise direction brings everything together brilliantly in the end: When all of the threads converge, the results are nothing short of electrifying. Honestly, I can't remember the last time (if ever) I literally gasped in a theater; in this case, my mouth dropped open and stayed that way for at least a couple minutes, so surprised was I by the outcome.

The actors are all outstanding, and they deliver such natural, human performances that you'd expect to be able to walk up to them after the show and ask them more about their instruments. David Beach is particularly splendid as the stuffy, snarky first violinist Elliot--he was, we come to find out, romantically involved with the elusive Dorian, and Michael Laurence turns in an equally fine and complex portrayal of the MIA musician.

Working within a genre that is often drenched with heavy-handed metaphors and forced jokes, Hollinger has created a play that deftly and easily conveys the strife, solidarity, and sauce of musicians in search of the Holy Grail: the perfect performance.