Image: Set rendering by Eliot Curtis.
May 17 Only
The Bachs' story doesn't have a murder in it like Mozart's does, but there is more than enough tragedy, triumph, comedy, romance -- and above all, music -- to make their story utterly compelling.
Introduction and Q&A after the film with writer & lyricist William Kinsolving, in conversation with Dan Dwyer.
Music by: Johann Sebastian Bach
Book and Lyrics by: William Kinsolving
Vocal Arrangements by: Bradley Greenwald
This presentation is a truncated concert version (not the full production) of the future full musical originally staged in San Francisco and is introduced on camera by Frederica von Stade.
The Story
That Week With The Bachs draws the family away from the strictures of historical awe to present their humanity as they face the complexities of life and of genius (or lack thereof). Bach, 46, and second wife Anna Magdalena, 30, have eight children in their crowded apartment. Bach faces censure from his employers, obliviousness from the citizens of Leipzig, and undermining by the city authorities working to get rid of him. His eldest child, Catharina, 23, falls in love with a trumpet virtuoso. Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann, 21, covers his terror that he must be his father’s successor with a snobbish conceit. Carl Phillip Emanuel, 17, is frustrated at being overlooked as a composer. Bernhard, 16, sees no future for himself. These three older sons despise their young stepmother. Over all is the pall of infant death, Anna having lost four babies, with two more upstairs, mortally ill. The family confronts with dread Bach’s God-ruled urgency to compose a new cantata, a process they all hate. Even so, each day, a movement of the great Cantata 140 is crafted, each involving the family in startling revelations.
Tickets: $16 / Superstar Members $14
William Kinsolving sang Bach from the time he was six in a lot of choirs. When he was in drama school in London, he wangled his way into a chorale performance of St. Matthew Passion in Royal Festival Hall. He subsequently performed in a lot of musicals and a lot of nightclubs. As a writer, he's published five novels (one a NYTimes best seller), wrote, adapted, and/or doctored some 54 screenplays for every major studio in Hollywood. And he writes plays, one that won him a Ford Foundation Playwriting Grant and was produced by the Shakespeare Festival in Canada. Learn more.
Dan Dwyer is the owner of the rare and collectible bookstore Johnnycake Books in Salisbury CT and he also writes about theater. He is the US reviewer for the German magazine on international musical theatre,
Blickpunkt Musical, and his reviews of regional theater appear in the
Berkshire Edge and other publications. Dan is currently Vice Chair of The Lakeville Journal Foundation.
Read more.