Signal's take on search for passion comes up solid
"Old Wicked Songs" makes for a pleasant, if predictable duet.
Jon Marans' two-character play about a hotshot American piano prodigy who's lost his passion and the aging Austrian professor who re-ignites it, is a sentimental, formulaic drama about conflict, reconciliation and the redemptive power of music.
Signal Ensemble Theatre's respectful, leisurely revival directed by Christopher Prentice features Shawn Pfautsch as buttoned-up Stephen Hoffman, the arrogant, technically brilliant but artistically bereft young musician. At a professional and personal impasse, Stephen goes to Vienna to study piano with a master. But upon his arrival, he learns that he's been assigned instead to study voice with Vincent L. Lonergan's quirky Josef Mashkan, a professor who possesses the passion and sensitivity of a virtuoso performer but has journeyman skills. Like, his reluctant pupil, Mashkan is battling the same kind of demons confronting Stephen.
Marans sets the play in 1986 Austria during the presidential campaign of Kurt Waldheim, whose participation in Nazi atrocities was revealed during his run (a detail that becomes more important as the play goes on). The action unfolds in Mashkan's comfortably faded atelier against German composer Robert Schumann's "Dichterliebe," a song-cycle set to poems by 19th century German poet Heinrich Heine. Mashkan assigns the songs to Stephen (who finds them confounding) and the play follows their relationship over the three months during which time cultural and generational clashes ensue, life lessons are dispensed, secrets are revealed and conciliation occurs.
The demanding roles require actors who can also play piano and sing. On that account, both men deliver. But of the duo, Lonergan's endearing, nicely balanced performance as the shrewd and wily professor is the stronger. As the appropriately uptight Stephen, Pfautsch handles the lighter moments well, but is less convincing in the emotional scenes and his character's transition from petulant performer to respectful protégé rings a little false. That said, the actors have a nice rapport and some of their scenes are quite affecting. One in particular, near the end of the second act, so engaged the audience they applauded the end of the scene as though it were the end of the play. But unlike the audience that mistakenly applauds between symphony movements, it was a gesture of appreciation.
Ultimately, Signal delivers a solid production of an agreeably conventional play grounded in stereotypes and sentiment and filled with aphorisms like "Art consists of knowing the basic rules and realizing the time to deviate from them," "Silence is the most difficult thing… only in silence do we listen and grow," and "The combination of joy and sadness, this is the core of truly beautiful music. Just as it is the core of drama. Of life."
Marans' play is rather like the composer who looms over it. In describing Schumann, National Public Radio's Ted Libbey called him a "problematic genius (who) wrote some of the greatest music of the Romantic era and also some of the weakest."
"Old Wicked Songs" has some lovely moments. At times, it sings. Unfortunately, the play never really soars.
"Old Wicked Songs"
Two and 1/2 stars out of four
Location: Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division St., Chicago
Times: 8 p.m. Thursdays to Saturdays; 3 p.m. Sundays through Dec. 15, also 7:30 p.m. Dec. 3 and 12
Running time: About two hours, 20 minutes including intermission
Tickets: $15, $20
Box office: (773) 347-1350 or www.signalenswemble.com
Rating: Suitable for teens and older