Myths and Hymns
Opening Night: January 31, 2012
Closing: February 26, 2012
Theater: West End Theatre
As a daughter returns to move her ailing mother out of the family home, the two wrestle with the ghosts of their father and husband, brother and son, re-living and confronting their mythologized past. Director Elizabeth Lucas’s original concept brings a character-driven context to Adam Guettel’s celebrated song cycle, illuminating the intricate relationships amongst a single family.
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February 7, 2012
The sound of the ocean lapping at the shore recurs throughout Elizabeth Lucas’s gently luminous staging of Adam Guettel’s “Myths and Hymns,” being presented at the West End Theater at the Church of St. Paul and St. Andrew. The haunting murmur of waves tugging at the sand reflects the unquiet mind of the central character in Ms. Lucas’s dramatization of Mr. Guettel’s song cycle, an elderly woman who has lost the power of speech but is caught in the grip of past sorrows.
READ THE REVIEWFebruary 7, 2012
In a recent interview in "The New York Times," composer-lyricist Adam Guettel described his song cycle "Myths and Hymns" as something that was "always meant to be a lump of clay." When the Public Theater produced it in 1998 under the title "Saturn Returns," director Tina Landau added the subtitle "A Concert" and chose not to impose any narrative thread. The result was a series of semi-staged songs loosely connected by the theme of a search for faith in God. Now director Elizabeth Lucas has taken the opposite approach for Prospect Theater Company, molding the "clay" to illustrate an invented story about a religious family torn apart by contemporary issues. Though Lucas’ work is laudably ambitious and undeniably inventive, the end result is no different: an intriguing but unsatisfying evening of desultory theatricality.
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February 8, 2012
Adam Guettel’s entrancingly ethereal 1998 song cycle Myths and Hymns, now at the West End Theatre, becomes a rather pedestrian affair when matched with the new narrative that writer/director Elizabeth Lucas has created for The Prospect Theatre Company.
READ THE REVIEWFebruary 8, 2012
Everyone knows the three rules of real estate are location, location, location, but the lesser-uttered three rules of musical theatre are context, context, context. Each member of the latter trio is violated time and time again, with good intentions and disappointing results, in the Prospect Theater Company production of Myths & Hymns that just opened at the West End Theatre.
READ THE REVIEWFebruary 7, 2012
Myth and Hymns” is a new version of Adam Guettel’s “Saturn Returns,” his cycle of contemporary art songs that premiered in concert form at the Public Theater in 1998, several years before the composer-lyricist hit Broadway with “The Light in the Piazza.”
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