One of the things I like best about the Lincoln Center Festival is when these guys dig deep into their pockets to build custom venues from scratch. They did just that for France’s Théâtre du Soleil and Japan’s Heisei Nakamura-za company. Just last year, the Royal Shakespeare Company spent a month in a temporary replica of its Stratford-Upon-Avon theater erected in the Park Avenue Armory.
So I was bummed to see that this year’s edition of LCF, which was just announced, didn’t need to hire an army of contractors. In fact the most high-profile purely theatrical offerings are relatively small scale. Interestingly, they both involve directors working in a language not their own. One is John Malkovich, bringing the French-language production of “Dangerous Liaisons” he directed over from Paris (July 9-14). The other is Complicite’s Simon McBurney with the Japanese-language “Shun-kin,” based on Junichiro Tanizaki (July 9-13).
A third show, “Murmurs” (July 24-28), is by Victoria Thiérrée Chaplin. Her son, James Thiérrée, is becoming a regular at BAM, but it’s his sister Aurélia we’ll see here. I sniff some “new circus” whimsy.
There are a couple of biggies on the schedule, but although they do have strong visual elements, they are more musical than theatrical — and they will play in pre-existing venues, not, say, a 900-capacity yurt by the East River or a geodesic dome in Queens. As I wrote a while ago, the fest’s anchor this year is the Damon Albarn/Jamie Hewlett/Chen Shi-Tzeng opera “Monkey: Journey to the West,”which will have 27 performances at the David H. Koch Theatre (July 6-28). That seems a like a lot, but then I suppose Blur and Gorillaz have many fans. Plus, you know, it’s about a monkey doing martial arts — if the show also had robots, it would play at least through next year.
The other big event is a staging of Stockhausen’s “Michaels Reise Um die Erde,” in which a trumpetist performs from the top of a swinging crane in constant motion. The show lasts about an hour, though it’s part of a cycle that runs for 29 hours — when are we seeing that? What perked my interest is that the director, Carlus Padrissa, is a co-founder of infamous Catalan troupe La Fura dels Baus. Now these guys are totally hit or miss: Their “Suz/o/Suz” in 1991 was an awesome experience — how many times do you have to run for your life during a show? (It was staged at the Kaufman-Astoria studios in Queens.) But their LCF 1998 piece F@ust was just terrible.Curious about the Stockhausen? A live broadcast is on Youtube.