Wozzeck

Music by Alban Berg
Libretto by Alban Berg

production:
Opera Festival of New Jersey

David Agler - Artistic Director
Douglas Rubin - Executive Director

Cast:
Hauptman: John Easterlin - Wozzeck: Daniel Sutin - Andres: William Ferguson - Marie: Marjorie Elinor Dix - Margareth: Alexis Barthelmy - Doctor: Dale Travis - Drum Major: Jason Collins - First Artisan: Robert Pomakov - Second Artisan: Keith Phares - Fool: Mark Shockey - Soldier: Lawrence Reppert - Marie's Child: Victoria Gebert

Conductor: David Agler
Director: Wim Trompert
Set and Costume Designer: Leslie Frankish
Lighting Designer: Robert Thomson
Chorus Master: Richard Tang Yuk

McCarter Theatre Princeton USA

'Stunning Wozzeck'

'Impressive'

reviews

Albert H. Cohen in 'Home News Tribune'
Opera Festival of N.J. presents stunning 'Wozzeck' at McCarter

Berg's 'Wozzeck' is an opera written in a mood of unrelieved tragedy. It is given its relentles force by a brilliant, atonal score. The Opera Festival of New Jersey presented this 1925 classic with stunning impact Tuesday before 700 in Princeton's McCarter Theatre. [...] The direction of Wim Trompert was inspired. On a bare stage that varied slightly trough the work's 15 scenes, the unrelieved, somber mood was always mantained. Dark and dramatic lighting added to the effect.

Nothing in the director's wonderful concept would mean much without the kind of performances seen here. Daniel Suttin was Wozzeck, portraying a paranoid, schrizophrenic man's deterioration into the abbys with great effect. [...] Marjorie Elinor Dix was equally brilliant as Marie, the unwed mother of his child. [...]

This is a great work that challenges the listener almost as much as it does the performers. To be privileged to see and hear a 'Wozzeck' of such towering inspiration is something to keep in one's memory for a long time.

saturday July 13, 2003

Anne Midgette in 'The New York Times'
 

[...] The production, by Wim Trompert, a Dutch director, started out feeling frantic, caricaturing all of the figures in its bleak and black Expressionistic interpretation so that even Wozzeck and Marie, the complex protagonists, tended towards two-dimensionality. But it hung on and continued to develop its themes - from sinister Futurist smokestacks and Otto Dix-like grotesqueries in the orgy of the second act to overtones of Edward Munch in the birch-tree lakeside of the third - with a conviction that ultimately became compelling.

July 10, 2003

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