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"Much Is Blue About Nothing"
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"The Mysterious Messenger"
(1 hour and 35 minutes)
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(Reviewed By Chuck Klaus Contributing writer
in The Post-Standard,
Saturday, March 24, 2007)
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Open Hand shows firm grasp of quirky comedies
Open Hand Theater is best known for its gigantic puppets, as well as its ongoing series of collaborations with many of Central New York's best-known performance organizations, such as Syracuse Opera, the Society for New Music, Upstate Ballet and other notable groups.
There are many other facets to the group, including dance, mime and improvisation, and - in their current production - interestingly scripted, undeniably quirky and thought-provoking comedies.
Open Hand Artistic Director Geoffrey Navias has crafted two little comedy plays filtered through a sensibility that includes Shakespeare, Pirandello, Beckett and Jay Ward.
Not content with this realm of achievement, he is also a director, actor, mask creator, keyboard player, set designer, lighting designer and technician.
The first play of the duo is "The Mysterious Messenger," which gives eight roles to four actors, with quick changes by an extremely able cast.
Andrea Martin is just right as the Narrator, Mildred and the Mother; Sean Clark excels as Father, Dudley and Snidely; Leslie Archer absolutely nails the waif/ingenue type as Florence; and Vladimir Vasyagin is riveting as Willy, although his expertly achieved pratfalls raise one's concern for his health and safety.
The entire enterprise has a decided dreamlike quality.
"Much Is Blue About Nothing" maintains this dream aura, although it takes on some large targets, such as the view of the poor from the vantage point of the rich, stage existence versus reality, and other weighty topics that belie the comedic spin of the enterprise.
Martin as Harley is a philosophical funster playing around with the fourth wall; Clark wonderfully dense as Sam; Navias taking the small role of Mr. Big; Archer as the dragon lady Betty; and Vasyagin as old Dr. PHD, pronounced Fudd. He manages to create both laughter and chills in an extensive monologue which must be heard and seen.
Decidedly unusual but intriguing, "Much Is Blue About Nothing" engages an audience with material at once both transparent and imponderable.
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"Mr. Jacobs' Remarcable Snowflake Collection "
(1 hour and 50 minutes)
By Tony Curulla ~ Contributing writer.
The Post-Standard, December 2, 2006
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If you're looking for something different, yet delightful, in a holiday theater experience, then *Mr. Jacobs' Remarkable Snowflake Collection,* produced by Open Hand Theater, might just be the ticket.
Written and directed by Open Hand's artistic director, Geoffrey Navias, the play centers around the commentary, singing and instrumental performances by two lost holiday travelers who are collectors of the fine memories and dreams. Navias plays Mr. Jacobs opposite Leslie Archer as Miranda.
Each of the characters has an interest in related, yet separate, human experiences. Jacobs is a collector of dreams, while Miranda collects memories.
Although comprised of four short acts, the play seems to have three distinct *realities.* There are the somewhat ethereal scenes where Mr. Jacobs and Miranda talk about dreams and memories, and play instruments creating some pretty unusual melodies. The play begins this way as they enter the small stage, playing and singing up the center aisle. These scenes have a dreamy quality about them, and at times are reminiscent in song and style of something from Federico Fellini films of some 40 years ago. In fact, the whole production has interesting, European influences.
A second *reality* occurs as the two travelers are able to see into the memories of a typical American family holiday, which is represented through the use of puppets with the puppeteers visible, but dressed in black. This technique seems to work well as long as the puppeteer retains anonymity by donning the black costume. In a few less effective scenes, the puppeteer was in regular clothing, and this had the unfortunate effect of drawing attention to the operator rather than the puppet.
A third *reality* occurs when the characters interact with the audience for commentary about dreams and memories. Some audience members voluntarily shared their own experiences. This seems to be the least effective part of the production because the wonderful fantasy and other-worldness of the experience is interrupted for seemingly no reason.
Contrary to most holiday productions, this one, although ethereal in style and feeling, delves into current realities such as generational conflicts, dealing with loss and death, growing up and growing old.
The musical arrangements by Archer and Navias that are inspired by the music of Leon Redbone and Bruce Cockburn are filled with unusual tones and instruments, and are a treat to the ear.
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"Tom Jones"
(1 hour and 40 minutes)
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(Reviewed by Neil Novelli
in The Post-Standard, March 13, 2002)
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Open Hand Theater has a habit of creating soaring imaginative effects in its small, relaxed theater, and its adaptation of Henry Fielding's comic novel "Tom Jones" is no exception.
Director Geoffrey Navias succeeds in concentrating Fielding's epic-length masterpiece into two short acts - with the help. of course, of four veteran Open Hand actors, Leslie Archer, Andrea Martin, Vladimir Vasyagin and Brian Goldblatt. As an acting ensemble, their work gets richer and more varied with each new challenge. This is a sophisticated piece of grown-up theater, not for kids. The puppets are about 3 feet high, dressed in 18th-century clothes, and pretty soon you begin to think of them as people. Kindly Mr. Allworthy is raising two parentless boys. Good-hearted, reckless Tom - supposedly a bastard - is misunderstood and always winds up in a bad light. Blifil, a smarmy hypocrite, somehow always looks good to grown-ups. Tom is a dashing lad with crisp, curly hair, wihile Blifil has a bulbous face that practically asks to have a pie thrown in it. Molly - with whom Tom first goes astray - is a bosomy, dar-haired gamekeeper's daughter. "I'm lonely," she tells Tom. "Come inside with me." Sooner or later, after wild adventures, long-hidden secrets come out, and all ends happily. The show has one serious problem. Instead of Fielding's armchair narrator, it uses four angels, - nice idea! But the first five minutes are interminable, as the angels told about some dumb mission they're supposed to be on. Meanwhile, Fielding's brilliant story stays on hold. Open Hand doesn't hide its effects. It puts them into the open and turns them into powerful dramatic assets. You see the puppeteers moving the puppets and saying the lines (these people have great voices), and at the same time the puppeteers are acting the roles (along with) the puppets. Sometimes the puppeteers are deliberately overacting, and the puppets are underacting, sometimes the reverse. So you're always seeing at least two ways of looking at the characters, usually with a lot of irony. And then, quite freely, the puppeteers exchange puppets. Vasyagin's Russian-tinged baritone might be speaking for a woman. Martin's voice might be speaking for Tom. And the voices matter. When Tom and Molly first succumb to passion, they vanish behind the stage to a cacophony of wild cries. At the inn, where somehow all the characters arrive at the same time, there's another bubbub of sounds with the landlady's voice rising above all: "I run a decent house!"
- Archer's lively musical designs match the show's visual attractiveness, with the actors singing "doo-ba-doo-ba-doo" to tunes by Handel, Bach, and Vivaldi.
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"Frankenstein"
****
4 stars out of 4
(1 hour)
Reviewed by Neil Novelli
in The Post-Standard, Nov. 1, 2002
("Post-Standard" "Family guide"- Adult themes, suitable for middle teens and up.)
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Open Hand Theater's production of "Frankenstein" is not a high-tech, high-polish show. And it's hardly just another re-telling of Mary Shelley's classic horror story - now some 180 years old - about a driven scientist and the monster he creates. Instead, using apparently simple means, this "Frankenstein" adaptation written by Geoffrey Navias takes the imagination on a wild ride that links Shelley's story to modern technology and to the mysteries of ordinary life, like childbirth. And along the way, it tells a sort of ghost story that may or may not be true. I don't want to give away too much about the plot, but the separate story lines gradually come together in chilling, thought-provoking fashion. There's no preaching or underlining of lessons. And with stunning, understated theatricality, the whole show coalesces with a single sound effect just at the end. This is not, by the way, a show for young children. The lights come up on two women in separate prison cells. On the left is Vicki (Leslie Archer), who also calls herself by other names. On the right is Roberta (Andrea Martin), a new prisoner convicted of killing the man who raped her. Vicki tends to avoid explaining why she's in prison, and she is by turns stand-offish and friendly toward Roberta. But clearly, Vicki is obsessed with the lives of women whose children have committed monstrous acts, for example Hitler's mother. "How could they go on living?" she asks. From time to time, the scene cuts to Open Hand's colorful puppets, dressed in early 19th century garb and enacting the story of Dr. Victor Frankenstein, his beloved fiancee and the huge monster that the doctor brings to life. The we're returned to the women in the cells, and their unfolding stories. When Vicki finally tells her story, you don't know whether it's fact or her fantasy at work. Archer and Martin convincingly portray two women put behind bars by circumstances they probably couldn't control. They speak in the ordinary language of our time, but Navias sometimes lets their speech turn melodramatic, creating a link with the highly melodramatic language of Shelley's novel. As always with Open Hand, the puppets, here worked by Navias, Archer and Vladimir Vasyagin, get maximum effect with a minimum of means. Vasyagin is a regular performer with the company, and his work as a puppeteer has to be seen to be believed. He can take any puppet and give it a realistic, warmly human life of its own. Vasyagin is largely responsible for creating the monster as a lonely, vulnerable outcase - a monster close to Shelley's version, in fact, rather than the stereotyped bogeyman of some later versions. The script could use some honing. For example, the device of having Roberta write letters to her sister, with voice over, wears thin after a while.
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"Don Quixote"
(90 minutes)
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Reviewed by Walt Shepperd
Syracuse New Times, May 9-16, 2001.
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As an introduction to his interpretation of Cervantes' classic novel "Don Quixote" for Open Hand Theater's new series (which premiered with last fall's "Beowulf"), director Geiffrey Navias scripts a play within a play, creating a relationship between two actors which mirrors that of the title character and his faithful flunky in the story they will tell. Drawing loosely on their own identities, Brian Goldblatt and Vladimir Vasyagin use their real names as auditioners for the roles of Quizote and Sancho Panza. Vasyagin plays a romantic Russian, trained as a puppeteer, suffering a request from the director to mentor the wide-eyed novice Goldblatt through his first acting experience. Explaining that the play will include elements of an experimental puppet show using historical and contemporary puppets, Vasyagin reflects, "Being a puppeteer in Russia was important, but you couldn't say anything you wanted. Here you can say anything you want, but nobody is listening." Responding to ruminations on the lack of importance of art in America, Goldblatt says all he knows is the Muppets, but pledges to take full advantage of his opportunity as the two use lines from the play to talk to each other while searching for a way to begin actual rehearsing. The 31 rehearsal sessions depicted supply the show's real drama and almost a laugh for each of its 90 minutes, with a brief intermission occasioned by Vasyagin's deportation and a fulfilled promise to return. When a quick scene in black offers an exchange between actors about the size of the opening-night audience at the International Mask and Puppet Museum, 518 Prospect Ave., a sense emerges that Navias' script has added layers of fantasy to those already made famous by the man of LaMancha's tilting at windmills and defending the honor of the nonexistent Lady Dulcinea. For the two actors, opening night and a performance run are only as real as the monstrous giants, demons and castles encountered by the Don and the Squire who affirmed his aberrant knighthood. The chemistry between Vasyagin and Goldblatt is infectious, especially when audience members are pulled on stage to provide testimony for the need of chivalry. A hilarious Angela Lansbury moment, provided by Andrea Martin as the Cleaning Lady, enables Vasyagin to explain how easily Dulcineas can be created. And masterful manipulation of four venues of puppetry transforms Vasyagin and Goldblatt into the characters the play has them auditioning to become. A sound design featuring Villa Lobos provides an alternatively strident and dreamy flamenco ambiance and the minimalist sets and the scenery by Leslie Archer enable the actors to make their own windy battlements of stepladders and electric fans. As a character in Don Quixote, Vasyagin's lines bemoan his condition: "Being a puppeteer in America is not considered a real job." As a puppeteer in Don Quixote, however, he shows that wherever he gets to practice his craft, it's a real art. |
"Beowulf"
(One hour, with intermission.)
Reviewed by Neil Novelli
"Post-Standard", May 18, 2000, D-5 (four stars out of four)
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"Beowulf," Open Hand Theater's new show, is as compact, vigorous and powerful a piece of theater as one could hope for. Performed by puppets, shadow figures, masks and live actors and musicians, "Beowulf" crystallizes - in memorable images - the heroism of a ruler who risks his life to fight the forces of darkness. The show opens with a drumbeat, a chanted dirge and four white-robed figures carrying a king to his funeral ship - "ice clad, outbound" in Seamus Heaney's lucid, swift-moving new translation of the poem. It ends the same way, but the intervening scenes go to the heart of elemental matters like human companionship, happiness, trust, danger, loss and heroism. If you know "Beowulf" via some stilted translation, you'll recognize that Open Hand's version, scripted by Open Hand director Geoffrey Navias, is a wonder of compression and directness. And if you've never read "Beowulf," this show is a splendid introduction for kids as well as adults. From some 3,000 lines of poetry, Navias and his cohorts enact just 10 narrative scenes that last about one hour. But those few scenes, underscored by haunting musical and visual effects, act as a lens to focus the stark realities of the entire story. In the first act, the mead hall - a place of beauty, warmth and camaraderie, - is invaded by the man-eating monster Grendel. Only the young warrior Beowulf can overcome him. In the second act, thenow-elderly Beowulf dies as he defeats a fire-breathing dragon that has been desroying villages. Open Hand's International Mask and Puppet Museum is itself something of a mead hall - a lovely old North Side home with turrets and carved woodwork. As you head up the stairs toward the theater space, you walk under a 15-foot winged dragon puppet that coils along the stairwell, a reminder of the story to come. The intimate theater seats about 45, in chairs set on risers. They were filled to capacity Sturday night, mostly by adults. Open Hand uses rather simple, sometimes even crude-seeming technical effects like shadow figures, but their creative power comes from the force of imagination. Many scenes memorable. The building of the mead hall is shown in stages on a shadow screen, and then suddenly the screen rolls away, and you see the shadowed recesses of the mead hall itself with robed figures moving through it. Beowulf's fight against the dragon creates the illusion of a man fighting against flames. There are wonderful vocal effects as the actors chant the lines together, or say them solo and in counterpart. Leslie Archer handles much of the music, which is adapted from early Scandinavian folk melodies. Others in the ensemble are Geoffrey Navias, Andrea Martin, Vladimir Vasyagin and Paul Barfoot.
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"Amahl and the Night Visitors"
****
4 stars out of 4
(55 minutes, Plymouth Church, 232 Onondaga St., Syracuse NY)
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Reviewed by Neil Novelli
Post Standard, Dec. 4, 1999, E-6.
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Every so often a show lifts script, cast and audience to sparkling new levels of delight and understanding.
The Open Hand Theater production of Gian Carlo Menotti's "Amahl and the Night Visitors" is such a show.
Only about an hour long, directed by Geoffrey Navias, with musical direction by Joseph Downing, it works fresh magic with the journey of the Three Kings. Parts of it are more powerful than anything else I've seen onstage this year.
This production takes a popular work into unprecedented realms, interweaving puppets, human actors and music so that fantasy and reality become one and the same.
We can start with the singers, clad in black and almost invisible at the audience's right. They supply voices for the boy Amahl (Carole Brzozowski Stevens), Mother (Kate McCaffrey) and the Three Kings (Michael Chellis, Maurice Black and Kent Bradshaw).
And then the huge, colorful puppets - kings, lions, high-stepping zebras, a huge rhino, a camel.
And the human shepherds who cavort through a rustic but intricate dance, featuring the lovely sight of youngsters dancing on stilts (Sarah Floyd, Braeden Lentz, Allison Hughes, Betsy Luft).
Amahl is a boy puppet hobbling on a crutch. Mother's hands, on notices, are extraordinarily expressive because they're the real hands of the two puppeteers visible behind her. We can see the puppeteers at work, and that's part of the magic - their movements are too graceful and full of meaning, really part of the show.
The entrance of the gigantic Three Kings, of course, is a spectacular show-stopper, while their chords to "Good evening" sound like a barbarshop quartet.
Kaspar, hard of hearing - "eh?" - is a comic favorite, especially when he discloses what's in the most secret drawer of his box: "Licorice!"
Something incredible happens when the Kings, Amahl and Mother fill the stage for the poignant "Do you know a child the color of wheat?"
Each singer stands before his or her puppet, making the same gestures as the puppet. You suddenly stop trusting your senses. Are the puppetees really working the puppets? Are the puppets singing? Are the bigger-than-life puppets controlling the singers?
A simple device, but it suddenly floods Plymouth Church with mystery, emotion and understanding.
There are more fine skills at work than I have space to credit, but among the fantastic peppeteers are Matt Smyth, Colin Schur, Braeden Lentz (Amahl); Leslie Archer, Allison Hughes (Mother); Vladimir Vasyagin, Sarah Floyd, Betsy Luft (Melchior); Andrea Martiin, Alleigha Hill, Joshua Safran, Rachel Rock-Blake (Balthazar); and Paul Barfoot, Braeden Lentz, Miriam Savad (Kaspar).
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Open Hand Theater
518 Prospect Avenue,
Syracuse, New York 13208
Tel: 315-476-0466
FAX: 315-472-2578
Email: Info@openhandtheater.org
Directions 
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