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Take a voyage deep inside the world of William Shakespeare. SoBe Arts intimate and "music-saturated" production of Twelfth Night opens this evening (3/20) | |
Posted on Friday, 03.19.10
THEATER
SoBe Arts was thrust upon him
 The Twelfth Night cast includes, from left, Ken Clement, Glen Lawrence, Jody Owen, Andres Lefevre and, sitting, Merry Jo Cortada. MARICE COHN BAND / MIAMI HERALD STAFF By CHRISTINE DOLEN
cdolen@MiamiHerald.com You could call the SoBe Institute of the Arts, which is getting ready to open a music-saturated production of William Shakespeare's Twelfth Night on Saturday, the (almost) accidental arts organization.Carson Kievman, the group's executive artistic director, had been a composer in residence with the Florida Philharmonic Orchestra before moving to the New York area in 1994, where he earned a Ph.D. at Princeton University and juggled teaching jobs at four universities. He moved back to South Florida in 2005, intending to concentrate on a composing career that had already produced operas, symphonies and numerous music-theater pieces, including several that were done at New York's Public Theater during the Joseph Papp era. Then a friend asked him to recommend a good violin teacher.``I said, `Use my living room to teach,' '' Kievman recalls. ``Three months later, we had a dozen teachers and 40 students, so we rented a studio. The demand for high-level arts education was clearly there.'' Five years later, SoBe Arts is a fledgling version of Kievman's grander vision: creating a high-level institute of the arts -- think Manhattan's Juilliard School or the California Institute of the Arts -- that could become the cornerstone of a vibrant South Beach/ South Florida cultural scene.``This wasn't a planned process,'' says Kievman, now 60. ``But when I spent five years here at the Florida Philharmonic, I knew this wouldn't become a cultural center without high-level arts education.''Many of the pieces of Kievman's dream are falling into place, albeit on the modest scale that a $250,000 annual budget allows. The not-for-profit SoBe Arts, based in the quaint 1916-era Carl Fisher Clubhouse just north of the Miami Beach Convention Center on Washington Avenue, employs professional musicians, actors, dancers and others who teach students of all ages, some 200 over the course of a year. Concerts, many of them free, are held there. And after 10 dormant years and $35,000 in renovations, the adjacent Little Stage Theater reopened with an original cabaret in January.This weekend, Kievman debuts yet another facet of SoBe's programming with Twelfth Night, the first in a planned annual Music & Shakespeare series. The production, which runs through April 4, was preceded last weekend by a free SoBe Arts Chamber Ensemble concert conducted by faculty member Robert Chumbley. Chumbley will join Kieveman in a free discussion of the music-and-Shakespeare topic at 6:30 p.m. in the Fisher Clubhouse before Friday's final Twelfth Night preview at 8.Incorporating music written for the 1602 first production of Twelfth Night (``I know how to find things,'' Kievman says), the romantic comedy about misplaced love and mistaken identity features an array of South Florida acting talent.Amy McKenna plays the haughty Olivia, Carbonell Award winner Ken Clement is the larger-than-life Sir Toby Belch, Merry Jo Cortada is Maria, Jody Owen is the scheming Malvolio, Andres Lefevre is the jester Feste, Joshua Ritter is the dashing duke Orsino, Glen Lawrence is foolish Sir Andrew Aguecheek, and Elena Sanchez plays Viola, the shipwrecked lady who disguises herself as a boy, falls for Orsino and attracts the unwelcome attentions of Olivia.McKenna says Kievman's directing style comes from ``a musical point of view.'' Clement, who describes Shakespeare's language as ``normal, except you're talking like Yoda and the jokes are 500 years old,'' finds Kievman's approach ``straightforward, without a `concept.' '' All the actors are itching to get the show up and running.``Doing this is very freeing,'' says Cortada, who has now played all three women in Twelfth Night. ``We don't have to follow anyone's example. We're free to experiment.''``The potential feels great. Something is nascent here,'' says Lawrence, who also teaches at SoBe Arts.Kievman has definite views about the state of the arts in South Florida. He doesn't believe that the kind of arts conservatory he's trying to create exists south of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, and he includes the college program at Miami's New World School of the Arts in that assessment. He thinks South Florida ``doesn't have access to as many great performers as in other cities.'' While he thinks he found ``a lot of great actors'' for Twelfth Night, he calls the acting talent in the area ``sparse.''Still, although he has sacrificed the composing time he came to South Florida to reclaim, he's full of excitement about SoBe Arts' future. He sees it as an incubator of projects, a place where rarely done work does get done, a interdisciplinary complex where all the arts can thrive.``I feel,'' he says, ``I'm the right person at the right time to do this.'' |
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 SoBe Arts' Shakespeare Puts On
Published on March 10, 2010 by Gregory Stepanich.
Thomas Morley (1557-1602).
Starting Friday, Carson Kievman's SoBe Institute of the Arts plunges audiences into the world of Shakespeare, and not incidentally, the world of English Renaissance music. Kievman's production of the Bard's Twelfth Night previews March 18 at the newly rehabbed Little Stage Theater, then runs for three consecutive weekends, closing April 4. But this Friday, Robert Chumbley of the SoBe Institute faculty hosts a free event with the SoBe Arts Chamber Ensemble that will explore the music of the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
I was pleased to learn that the production of Twelfth Night will feature period music by composers such as Thomas Weelkes, which I'm sure will make the play much more coherent. It brings up an interesting sidelight of theater: So many Shakespeare plays with music have been done with either too little attention or too much of the wrong kind of attention paid to the music.
In the former, I've seen versions of Shakespeare in which actors ad lib tuneless melodies to the words of the songs, and these were songs that were well-known to Shakespeare's audiences (I doubt he wrote any of them; I think they were well-known ditties of the day). Or in other cases, there will be some new music to go with the lyrics, mostly somewhat folk-sounding, but not very persuasive.
Some of the plays had songs specifically written for them by some of the ablest composers of the day, and if no music is known for some of the lyrics, something from that rich trove of song can surely be found. The music of the English Renaissance has its
own specific flavor and style, and it reflects the words and actions of the play in a way that no modern music truly can.
I think that's true largely because of the rhythms; it seems to me that the syncopations of Renaissance songs must somehow echo or complement the sound of the language as it was spoken in Shakespeare's day. We don't know quite what that was, and most modern performances of these plays are acted with the dialogue as though it were straight text,
though in many cases (Richard II, for instance), it's verse, and must have sounded as such when first performed.
It's all one piece, really, song to word to action, and in a play like Twelfth Night, which has the love of music as a key element of the play's mental world (starting with its very opening words), it's important to pursue the actual music of the time so we can get a better idea not just of how it sounded, but how the play itself sounds.
Here is a link to Now Is the Month of Maying, a madrigal by Thomas Morley, to get us all in the mood for Shakespeare.
To buy tickets for SoBe's Shakespeare fest (which range from $12.50-$25), click here.
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Shakespeare's consummate romantic comedy takes wine, women, and song to unexpected extremes, upending a stately Elizabethan garden in a raucous midwinter feast of language, love, illusion, and the original Renaissance music.
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SoBe Institute of the Arts 2009/2010 season is sponsored in part by the State of Florida, Division of Cultural Affairs, the Florida Arts Council, and the National Endowment for the Arts, Miami-Dade County Tourist Development Council, the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs, the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners, the City of Miami Beach, as well as private foundations and individual donors. Series sponsors and individual matching contributions help us to keep our events free or low cost to all. Please consider sponsoring one or more events or making a tax deductible donation to SoBe Institute of the Arts, a 501 (c)(3) nonprofit arts education and performance organization. For more information contact (305) 674-9220.
_____________________________________ SoBe Institute of the Arts
Carl Fisher Clubhouse / Little Stage Theater Complex
2100 Washington Avenue
Miami Beach, Florida 33139
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