Musical Exorcism

NETHER A HONGKONGgirlie show on its way to New York or a cultural embassy from the PRC, Chinese Cabaret is the latest brain child of peripatetic director Paul Warner '84 and his musical cohort Peter Melnick '80 Taking 10 Bronze Age Chinese poems and one by William Blake-all scored in Melnick-musical-Warner has created a musical exorcism of doomed love.

Andrea Burke '85-'86 is the Woman, L.G. Ubieta is the Man, or rather the memory of the Man who has died and left the Women alone and broken hearted. The II songs portray the struggle between the woman and her bittersweet memories, from the recollection of their first meeting to her attempt to forget him.

In the opening tableau the Woman genuflects in the best Oriental fashion in front of the shrine she built to the Man's memory, as mellow jazz washes across the basement of the Chinese Cultural Center. The man stands on the red draped dais that engulf the Woman.

On a superficial level Melnick's music is reminiscent of the Tim rice-Andrew Loyd Webber "Broad way Rock" that influenced shows like the "Rocky Horror Picture Show," but closer listening reveals the music's deeper roots in more sophisticated jazz styles, Melnick said "I wanted to avoid the ellcbe of quoting from Chinese music, but I wanted none of the tunes to be self-consciously commercial."

The cross-cultural juxtaposition of music and poetry complement each other surprisingly well. Rock lyrics are rarely known for their intricacy, and neither are Chinese poems. As Warner commented, the poems "imagery is very simple and direct and beautiful. It's very earthy, it doesn't bullshit around. That's why the Blake poem is in there, to sort of contrast. He's very wordy and his images are very thick." The finest of the eleven songs also has the most stereotypically Oriental source, a mournful pastoral poem botanically entitled "Motherwort."

Good music alone, however, cannot carry a show. And despite a healthy cast, Chinese Cabaret is still in intensive care.

First, the positive signs Andrea Burke is an amazing singer. At her best, Burke's voice has sharp, cutting power of Wynton Marsalis' trumpet. Soaring and dipping to exquisite extremes. At her worst, Burke has the quality of an average Broadway chanteuse, not a bad lower bound considering the exhaustion she must suffer from doing eleven songs in a row. Burke's embodiment of the Woman is occasionally too cocky: she substitutes flip musical-theater poses in scenes which call for something more profound. Due in part to her makeup and in part to her acting. She never quites manages to lose the wild-eyed look of a love-crazed. Amazon that suits the beginning but not the end of the play.

I.G. Ubieta is a fine mime, but pinned to the podium she has great difficulty establishing any dramatic relationship with Burke, and she exhausts every conceivably interesting movement in her small space pretty quickly. Ending up as more of a shadow than an independent character, her talents could certainly be put to greater use.

In football you need a program to tell which players are doing what, but in the theater, most of the information should be accessible in the work itself. But because of the poems' complexity, this does not work for Chinese Cabaret. The imagery of the poems added to the blocking does not equal the total meaning of the piece. Like one of those cubist paintings that is discernable only if you read the title, the work is incomprehensible without the handy notes which explains the context of each song. Warner's intent is too ambitious for his means, though correcting this problem without including text may exceed even Warner's ingenuity.

Warner admits that Chinese Cabaret is very much a work in progress: "I've changed it drastically three times, always trying to hone in on the heart of it. First it was a one woman show about her fantasizing through the Chinese poems. I...changed the blocking and changed the relationship. They only had almost one moment of contact and last week they had lots of contact, and the set was much more realistic...always the same heart, and the same backbone, but at different angels."

Despite the critical condition of many of its vital organs. Chinese Cabaret passes artistic triage. It needs more experimentation with the blocking and set, but the skeleton of an exceptional piece of art is visible under the blotchy skin.