If you're not likely anytime soon to fly to New York to see the Monty Python-inspired Broadway hit "Spamalot," you might consider taking in ACT Theatre's closer-to-home "Bach at Leipzig," a remarkably silly yet intellectually stirring comedy by the gifted, 28-year-old playwright Itamar Moses.
ACT's press materials for "Bach" liken Moses' 18th-century-set, fact-based farce to a fusion of the Marx Brothers and the reality-television series "Survivor." But the comic pomposity and extravagance of the play's characters - all well-regarded German composers competing, sometimes nastily, for a prestigious job - plus Moses' insights into sometimes cruel juxtapositions of destiny and talent, actually bring to mind a blend of Peter Shaffer's "Amadeus" and Jon Lovitz's hammy "Saturday Night Live" character, Master Thespian.
Featuring some of Seattle's best-known stage actors, including Laurence Ballard, David Pichette and John Procaccino, and directed by ACT's artistic director, Kurt Beattie, "Bach at Leipzig" is inspired by an actual event. In 1722, Johann Kuhnau, the organist and musical director at Leipzig's Thomaskirche (kirche = church), passed away. A number of organist-composers from all over Germany, including some who had been students of Kuhnau, arrived in the city to audition for the late musician's coveted post.
"Bach" freely imagines an encounter among six of Kuhnau's would-be successors, all based on real composers, and the lengths most of them go to sabotage the others' prospects. (The less conniving artists in the group have different issues, such as cluelessness and impractical visionary tendencies.) Over the course of Moses' comedy, we see the more unscrupulous characters engage in blackmail, collusion, double-crossing and worse, while others fret over armed clashes coincidentally unfolding outside Leipzig's gates.
Whether or not any of this actually happened, or if there's reason to believe these historical figures bear resemblance to "Bach"'s portrayals of deviousness and haplessness, the result is frequently laugh-out-loud hilarious.
Johann Friedrich Fasch (Ballard), Kapellmeister at the court of Zerbst, proves the most outspokenly thoughtful of the group, yet also a man easily broadsided by his own clumsiness. (Several of the others frame Fasch by making it look as if he laced another composer's drink with opiate powder he carelessly carries with him.) Johann Christoph Graupner (Procaccino), a respected composer even today, is drawn by Moses as a man obsessed with his perennial, second-best ranking relative to another composer named Telemann (wordlessly but flamboyantly played by Todd J. Bjurstrom).
Georg Friedrich Kaufmann (R. Hamilton Wright), organist for the Merseburg cathedral and court, is a nervous, childlike optimist and annoying reductivist who prattles on about form and content in art. Georg Lenck (Daniel Rappaport), a little-known individual (no compositions of his have survived), is conveniently conceived as a likable hustler. Georg Balthasar Schott (Pichette), another vague personage, is a wheeler-dealer forging competing, secret deals with the others. Finally, Johann Martin Steindorff (Max Gordon Moore), organist at another Leipzig church, has a few aces up his own sleeve and isn't afraid to use them.
Half the fun of Beattie's production is the cast's masterly physical comedy, particularly the way their characters' self-conscious staginess translates into melodramatic shudders, epic gestures, exaggerated turns, enigmatic gaits and sudden halts, all dense with conspicuous subtext. In what is likely to be "Bach"'s most celebrated scene, Fasch, briefly incarcerated for the aforementioned drug offense, dictates a letter to his wife, an aspiring composer herself. As Fasch extensively, compellingly describes the structure of a fugue - essentially defining it as an overlaying of unique themes or "voices" - the other five clowns in this story rush and prance around, interweaving, violently separating, flowing and then counterpointing one another's energy.
The scene is a joyfully ridiculous, histrionic metaphor for Fasch's tutorial about fugues. But it also subtly introduces "Bach"'s deeper theme about the ironies of flailing about for relevance in one's era, grasping for epochal significance and fearing unrewarded ambition - fearing that one will leave no footprints in history. (Perhaps the fact that no trace exists of the work of several of these composers partly inspired Moses to write "Bach" in the first place.)
Not surprisingly, it is Fasch who recognizes that the group's collective desperation to replace Kuhnau, understandably, is a human instinct to close one chapter in an industrious, driven life and ascend, deservingly, to another. Yet Fasch is suspicious of any notion that an individual's life has perceptible, compositional structure. The unexpected ending of his reflection on fugues is a rejection of the form as contrived. Fasch is haunted by a desire to write music that doesn't allude to structure, that reminds us instead that we live in a constant now-ness, with no ability to recognize a beginning, middle and end.
Fasch's suspicion turns out to be prescient. The offstage arrival of a certain genius of the age, a twice-married father of multiple children and no stranger to personal tragedy, a man by the name of J.S. Bach, changes everything about this competition for Kuhnau's seat. In an instant, nature or God or a laughing universe or somebody consigns Fasch and the others to becoming footnotes in history instead of kings.
"Bach at Leipzig" never stops being funny, but it certainly gains in poignancy in its closing minutes. The final scene reaches for an ineffable beauty and mystery that is hard to shake long after seeing this play. With its clockwork comedy and unexpected glimpses of something rare and eternal, "Bach at Leipzig" deserves to be a minor classic.
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