[Editor's note: This is playing in New York until November 16, and also at UCLA in early December. Tamzen and I saw it in London last month and it was incredibly wonderful. Woyzeck is the play that Berg drew "Wozzeck" from. This one, with Wilson staging and Waits and Brennan doing the music is so good that we're considering flying to LA just to see it again. -- jdcc]
<http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/31/arts/theater/31WOYZ.html> See also <http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/27/arts/theater/27KALB.html> for other information and historic notes. THEATER REVIEW | 'WOYZECK' Woyzeck as a Normal Guy Who Gets Jealous By JON PARELES t took crusty romantics like Tom Waits and his wife and longtime songwriting partner, Kathleen Brennan, to bring out the sympathetic side of the director and designer Robert Wilson. Their adaptation of Georg Büchner's strange and fractured 19th-century play "Woyzeck," at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music through Nov. 16, is in some ways a typical collection of Mr. Wilson's geometric stage tableaus and comic-grotesque performances. But at its center is a Woyzeck who looks like a relatively normal guy and keeps coming back to one of Mr. Waits's most deeply affectionate songs. The philosophical debates and demented ravings that figure in more realistic productions of "Woyzeck" and in Berg's opera "Wozzeck" soon give way, in this adaptation, to a tale of jealous love. Advertisement Mr. Wilson's collaborations with rock songwriters have sometimes been more like collisions, as the straightforwardness and concision of rock clash with Mr. Wilson's dream logic and slow-motion timing. But "Woyzeck" is his third collaboration with Mr. Waits and Ms. Brennan, and they have reached a détente that's somewhere near a reimagined surrealist cabaret. Mr. Waits has always had a Kurt Weill streak in his music, subverting pretty melodies with arrangements that creak and clank. Mr. Wilson enjoys the combination of the everyday and the inexplicable, and Mr. Waits's ballads still let him take his time. In the underlying play, poverty turns Woyzeck into the plaything of faith, science and nature. A self-satisfied captain lectures him on morality; a doctor (played, in this production, by an actor and actress joined like Siamese twins, bouncing lines between them) pays him to eat a wacky diet and treats him as a specimen; a friend named Andres, made up as a warped double of Woyzeck, touts the inevitability of instinct. Woyzeck himself, when pressed, envisions conspiracies and subterranean turmoil. But the opening song, "Misery Is the River of the World," simplifies things: with a lurching carnival oom-pah, it contends, "If there's one thing you can say about mankind/ There's nothing kind about man." Woyzeck's worst problem is that his wife, Marie, is cheating on him with a self-satisfied drum major, eventually driving Woyzeck to madness and murder. Mr. Wilson keeps the narrative clear, and the Danish actors from the Betty Nansen Theater of Copenhagen speak English impeccably. For the most part, they also deliver the Waits-Brennan songs with the right combination of tenderness and rasp, and the six-member band has fully absorbed the meticulously disjointed style of Mr. Waits's arrangements. (He recorded his own versions of songs from "Woyzeck" on his album "Blood Money," released by Anti/Epitaph.) As Woyzeck, Jens Jorn Spottag is a stoic, Buster Keaton character. Though he's endlessly running in place, Wilson-style, he speaks and sings in natural tones, lingering over the song "Coney Island Baby": "She's a rose, she's a pearl, she's the spin on my world." But Woyzeck is a man beset by cartoon figures. Everyone else growls and cackles except Kaya Bruel as Marie, a whispery, vampy femme fatale who steals every scene. The sets use German Expressionist angles and a Kandinsky palette, and Mr. Wilson color-codes the characters: white for Woyzeck, his son and Andres; blue-black for the captain and doctor(s); red for the cheating lovers. At times, Mr. Wilson's imagery can be breathtakingly obvious; when Woyzeck decides on murder, a blood-red spotlight illuminates his hand. But as always in a Wilson production, there are moments of eerie perfection, among them a dance hall scene that has the performers slanting and twitching to a subliminal beat. Yet there's more to this "Woyzeck" than eye candy. Between the warped yet homey songs and Mr. Spottag's troubled deadpan, Woyzeck becomes more than a cipher. In a perverse world, he's still oddly human. WOYZECK By Georg Büchner; directed by Robert Wilson; music and lyrics by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan; adaptation and translation by Wolfgang Wiens and Ann-Christin Rommen; sets by Mr. Wilson; costumes by Jacques Reynaud; lighting by A. J. Weissbard and Mr. Wilson. Production by Betty Nansen Theater of Copenhagen, presented by the Brooklyn Academy of Music. At the Harvey Lichtenstein Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene. WITH: Jens Jorn Spottag (Woyzeck), Kaya Bruel (Marie), Morten Eisner and Marianne Mortensen (Doctors), Ole Thestrup (Captain), Ann-Mari Max Hansen (Margret), Morten Lutzhoft (Andres), Benjamin Boe Rasmussen (Karl), Tom Jensen (Drum Major), Troels Il Munk (Carnival Announcer) and Joseph Driffield, Jeppe Dahl Rordam or Morten Thorup Koudal (Christian).
