{"id":1001,"date":"2012-08-25T10:41:41","date_gmt":"2012-08-25T14:41:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=1001"},"modified":"2012-08-27T13:31:15","modified_gmt":"2012-08-27T17:31:15","slug":"theres-no-problem-like-maria","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2012\/08\/theres-no-problem-like-maria\/","title":{"rendered":"There’s No Problem Like Maria"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Deborah Lohse smokes while the von Trapp kids put on a puppet show in Doug Elkins’s Fr\u00e4ulein Maria<\/em>. Photo: Taylor Crichton, courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival<\/p><\/div>\n

So long, Fr\u00e4ulein Maria. <\/em>Also farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye. Not au revoir, but (gulp) adieu.\u00a0 I\u2019m not talking about the heroine played by Julie Andrews in the film based on the Broadway show, The Sound of Music<\/em>; I refer to Doug Elkins\u2019s fabulously funny and adorable, gender-corkscrewing take on Rodgers and Hammerstein\u2019s beloved creation.\u00a0 Fr\u00e4ulein Maria<\/em>\u2019s touring days are done. It will disappear after its last performance (Sunday, September\u00a0 26th<\/sup>) during the final week of Jacob\u2019s Pillow\u2019s 80th<\/sup> Anniversary Season (sniff).<\/p>\n

Elkins once told me that the process of making Fr\u00e4ulein Maria<\/em>, after several years of not choreographing, was akin to the collecting mania that drove Renaissance men of wealth to create \u201ccabinets of curiosities.\u201d\u00a0 Back in 2006, watching the movie over and over with colleagues yielded not just an affectionately outrageous deconstruction of an icon, but shards gathered during Elkins\u2019s travels through hip-hop and postmodern dance, his students days, and fleeting references to remembered images from popular and classical artworks. His piece doesn\u2019t follow the musical\u2019s entire plot, but traces elements of it through the songs, which the audience hears through the original-cast recording.<\/p>\n

For three Decembers (2006-2008), New Yorkers crammed into Joe\u2019s Pub to see Fraulein Maria<\/em>, part of DanceNOW\u2019s\u00a0 Dancemopolitan\u2019s Holiday Series. Two Marias climbed over tables and patrons to get to the tiny red stage. We fell in love.<\/p>\n

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The von Trapp children line up to meet Maria, with Michael Preston standing in as little Gretl. Photo: Christopher Duggan, courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival<\/p><\/div>\n

Elkins kept tweaking and expanding the piece within that confined and intimate club space. By the time it made its Jacob\u2019s Pillow debut in the summer of 2009, it was ready to tour as a down-home spectacle.\u00a0 In 2012, as then, a comp\u00e8re, the tireless Michael Preston, cajoles the audience into singing the notes, \u201cDo re mi,\u201d in three antiphonal groups as a lead-in to the show. And whaddya know?\u00a0 Minutes later, he gives the barest of signals, and we\u2019re off: \u201cDo, a deer, a female deer. . . ,\u201d launching into the whole educational catalogue that Maria charms the von Trapp kids into performing.\u00a0 As in 2009, almost everyone else in the 13-person cast collaborates to create instant Alps out of strips of fabric that they hold up. Preston brings tiny trees and a tiny Maria doll to simulate the overhead shot that opens the movie, while Andrews\u2019 recorded voice exults that \u201cthe hills are alive\u201d (which in this case, they definitely are).<\/p>\n

Several of Fr\u00e4ulein Maria<\/em>\u2019s numbers are wonderfully choreographed. The ten nuns in hoodies\u00a0 with a hint of wimples who deliver \u201cMaria,\u201d the terrific song about the sweet, rebellious novice, are arranged in order of size, and among their patterns is a gesture that travels down the line, \u00e0 la Radio City Music Hall, or maybe channelling Giselle<\/em>\u2019s wilis dispatching Hilarion. In a quintet led by that great dance comedienne, Deborah Lohse, as the Abbess, the nuns grasp one another, hand to elbow, to create a rippling wave that refers both to hip-hop and \u201cHow do you keep a wave upon the sand?\u201d\u00a0 \u201cDo-Re-Mi\u201d is an ingenious visual analogy to the song\u2019s buildup of the children\u2019s individual contributions into a contrapuntal whole.<\/p>\n

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The three Marias, (L to R) Joshua Palmer, Meghan Merrill, Donnell Oakley. Photo: Christopher Duggan, courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival<\/p><\/div>\n

The original production featured two Marias (one the incomparable Arthur Aviles), who could embody the heroine\u2019s shilly-shallying about her potential job with the widowed Captain von Trapp and his seven children\u2014one of the Marias worried, one trying to be bold. Megan Merrill and Donnell Oakley roughhouse their way through this, the springy athletics of hip-hop mating with the free-flow of postmodern dance. But it\u2019s a third Maria (Joshua Palmer), who\u2019s pushed out of the nunnery and provided with vest, hat, and valise by Preston.<\/p>\n

The costumes by Barbara Karger and Robin Staff are key, especially since most of the performers play several roles. The three Marias wear identical blue-gray dresses and white aprons. When one of them eyes a trundled-on window with flowered curtains, the children instantly reappear in variously cut garments of the same material (a cleverly engineered joke about the film heroine\u2019s amazing overnight stitching job).<\/p>\n

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Alexander Dones as Rolfe and John Sorensen-Jolink as Liesl in “Sixteen Going on Seventeen.” Photo: Taylor Crichton, courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival<\/p><\/div>\n

Gender-role switches and cross-dressing are crucial to Elkins\u2019s vision. In the original production, the eldest daughter Liesl was played by David Parker and her budding Nazi boyfriend by that master of voguing Archie Burnett\u2014both of them mid-sized, solidly built guys. The 2012 Liesl is John Sorensen-Jolink, a tall red-head; her Rolfe, Alexander Dones, is considerably smaller \u2014Brandoesque in his swagger and nimble in his hip-hop moves. They make a comical pair and Sorensen-Jolink in his pink dress delivers the fairly coarse crotch jokes about his partner\u2019s equipment with a mixture of innocent curiosity and wink-wink bawdiness.<\/p>\n

When the paterfamilias (Daniel Charon) and Merrill finally declare their love in a rapturous duet, he duplicates her earlier maneuver and takes a flying jump into her arms (the audience gasps; he\u2019s no flyweight), and she hoists him into their kiss.<\/p>\n

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Love at last! Meghan Merrill as Maria and Daniel Charon as von Trapp. Photo: Taylor Crichton, courtesy of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival<\/p><\/div>\n

One of the highlights of Fr\u00e4ulein Maria<\/em> is Elkins\u2019s solo to \u201cClimb Every Mountain.\u201d He performs it in non-descript dark clothes topped by one of those sacerdotal hoodies. It\u2019s a marvel of slippery movement. He stays in one spotlight and moves as if he\u2019s caught in a never-ending hip-hop routine that he\u2019s dreamed into lyricism. Certain gestures alluding to the song\u2019s words slip by, and the Pillow audience finds the dance funny. Although Elkins performs it slightly less introspectively than he used to, it still seems like a liquification of a personal struggle, marvelous in its concentrated evasiveness, its search for new paths.<\/p>\n

Lohse plays the haughty Austrian noblewoman that von Trapp is thinking of marrying in her best Carol Burnett manner, and the nuns and rambunctious children are brought to life by Hilary Brown, Krista Jansen, Kellie Ann Lynch, and Cori Marquis, in addition to Sorensen-Jolink, Palmer, and Dones.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s lovely about Fr\u00e4ulein Maria<\/em> is that it isn\u2019t really a satire. It\u2019s hilarious without bile. Elkins loves The Sound of Music<\/em>\u2014a film that he and his young children used to watch, a record they used to listen to. The absurdities point no fingers, and the joys and worries are touchingly real.<\/p>\n

Addio Maria. <\/em>It\u2019s been a delight.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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So long, Fr\u00e4ulein Maria. Also farewell, auf wiedersehen, goodbye. Not au revoir, but (gulp) adieu.\u00a0 I\u2019m not talking about the heroine played by Julie Andrews in the film based on the Broadway show, The Sound of Music; I refer to Doug Elkins\u2019s fabulously funny and adorable, gender-corkscrewing take on Rodgers and Hammerstein\u2019s beloved creation.\u00a0 Fr\u00e4ulein […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1006,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[99],"tags":[401,402,404,403],"class_list":{"0":"post-1001","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-dance-theater","8":"tag-doug-elkins","9":"tag-fraulein-maria","10":"tag-rodgers-and-hammerstein","11":"tag-the-sound-of-music","12":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1001\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}