We sat in the first row for the Robert Wilson/Tom Waits "Woyzeck" last night. We're both getting impatient (at the least) with Wilson, but Waits' raw super-noir keeps him interesting. (This is their third collaboration, after "Black Rider" and "Alice.")

Misery's the River of the World
Misery's the River of the World
Everybody Row! Everybody Row!
Misery's the River of the World
Misery's the River of the World
Everybody Row! Everybody Row!
Everybody Row!

The first row meant we had the wonderful theatre in the pit as well as the fabulous Danish orchestra's scrowling, pluckering, scrinching, smuthering murooning sounds. Waits' music and words stuff is absolutely wonderful and worth the price of admission alone, but the cast was right on, as were the magical mechanicals which sometimes bedevil these Wilson things.

The costumes, the sets, the makeup, and the design conception were all diverting, and I suppose I mean that in the best sense (I did love the Drum Major's devilish red tail/coattails!), and the work was chuck-full of early twentieth-century German theatre references that really work with the 1837 Buechner text. For me, that text seems fresher and less perverse with each visit, whatever the medium.

The choreography (Wilson), especially the trademark stylized limb movements, was absolutely right, when it wasn't slowed to almost a halt. Barry said it hardly seemed right that even Berg's grand opera is shorter than Wilson's production, usually by over forty minutes.

I think there was a moral, but the whole experience was too jaggedly lush to leave any memory of it. Great, great fun.

Oh yes, seen in the audience and again at the reception following the performance: the great Isabella Rossellini and the indescribable (so I'll do lots of links) Slava Mogutin.