The Hunchback Variations at 59E59 Theater B
The Hunchback Variations
59E59 Theater C
Reviewed by David Roberts, Chief Critic
Theatre Reviews Limited
09 June, 2012
If Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations are thirty-three variations on a Waltz by Anton Diabelli, what would Mark Messing and Mickle Maher’s “The Hunchback Variations” be? When my students grapple with dense text, I remind them to consider the title of the text they are attempting to deconstruct.
Absurdist pieces of theatre like “The Hunchback Variations” do not have to “be about” anything: they can just “be.” However, the carefully constructed chamber opera counterpoints significant meaning throughout its eleven variations (exactly one-third the number in Diabelli’s Variations).
Previous critics who have had the pleasure of seeing this chamber opera since 2001 have presented sufficient evidence of why its premise is absurd: although Victor Hugo, Emily Dickinson, and Anton Chekhov could have shared afternoon tea (if the men could get Emily out of her house), Ludwig Van Beethoven could not have joined all three of them (he missed the opportunity by a mere three years if having tea with the infant Dickinson would be appealing). Quasimodo, being a fictional character, could not have had tea with any of the above and certainly could not have collaborated with Beethoven on finding a sound for the “sound of a string snapping, slowly and sadly dying away” since both were deaf.
That business out of the way, a return to meaning is appropriate. What makes Messing and Maher’s opera brilliant is that the real character Beethoven serves as the foil character for the fictional character Quasimodo. Quasimodo would have loved Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard.” His tale of unrequited love and the loss of Esmeralda perfectly counterpoint Mrs. Ranevsky and her family’s loss of their cherry orchard and estate to a man of the rising Russian middle class. Both fictional characters (Ranevsky and Quasimodo) and their creators (Chekhov and Hugo) experience not only loss but experience the turmoil of political upheaval and change.
So it is not surprise that Quasimodo’s reflections contain references to his “culture’s perpetual murmur of scorn,” class differences (his small and muddy house compared to Beethoven’s “very nice, large apartment), crises of faith and belief, experiences of “ruin, grief, and a vacuum,” and a catalog of existential musings (“Where is the room for keeping all the nothings?”).
Finally, back to the title. In musicology, variations are formal techniques where material is repeated in an altered form. These alterations or changes include melody, harmony, rhythm, timbre, counterpoint, and orchestration – or any combination of these devices. Quasimodo relates his concerns to Beethoven and the audience in eleven unique variations created skillfully by Mark Messing and Mickle Maher, performed flawlessly by Larry Adams (Quasimodo) and George Andrew Wolff (Beethoven) and accompanied perfectly by cellist Paul Ghica and pianist Christopher Sargent. Mr. Adams’ Quasimodo, at the close of the eleventh variation, allows the event of his rehearsals with Beethoven (“true horror!”) to release him from his despondency and grief by saying good-bye to his Esmeralda. When he sings, “Oh my darling, my precious, my beautiful orchard! My life, my youth, my happiness … Goodbye … Goodbye,” Quasimodo has discovered the sound he has been searching for. The sound of the string snapping, as some critics have suggested, is for him the “auditory symbol of forgetting.”
Quasimodo’s discovery of the healing nature of forgetting can be the self-same discovery for the audience. His variations encourage us to examine our own variations, our own retellings of our complex and confounding stories. If Quasimodo can allow the seventy-minute event called “The Hunchback Variations” to teach him the path to redemption and release, so can we who experience this remarkable performance piece.
THE HUNCHBACK VARIATIONS
Based on the play by Mickle Maher, with music by Mark Messing, libretto by Mr. Maher and directed by and featuring George Andrew Wolff and Larry Adams. Produced by Chicago’s Theater Oobleck and Brian W. Parker, THE HUNCHBACK VARIATIONS began performances on Friday, June 1 for a limited engagement through Sunday, July 1. The performance schedule is Tuesday – Thursday at 7:15 PM; Friday at 8:15 PM; Saturday at 2:15 PM and 8:15 PM; and Sunday at 3:15 PM. Performances are at 59E59 Theaters (59 East 59th Street, between Park and Madison Avenues). Tickets are $35 ($24.50 for 59E59 Members). To purchase tickets, call Ticket Central at (212) 279-4200 or go to www.59e59.org.
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