REVIEW: Felder's uneven 'Beethoven' play on the gloomy side

By ANNE MARIE WELSH - For the North County Times | Wednesday, May 14, 2008 9:11 AM PDT ∞

No sing-along encores or step-lively Polish dances animate Hershey Felder's latest look at a beloved composer. But then again, Ludwig van Beethoven is not George Gershwin or Frederic Chopin, the subjects of this ingratiating showman's previous strolls down a musical memory lane. For the Beethoven piece, the third and least effective of his living history exhibits centered on popular composers, the chameleon Felder doesn't impersonate Beethoven either. Given the great composer's deafness and late-in-life personal slovenliness, maybe that's a good thing.

Instead, Felder adopts a gnarled German/Viennese accent and dresses up as a family friend writing his reminiscences decades after Beethoven's death in 1827. Gerhard von Bruening was a boy when he met the intimidating composer, a child whose father's close friendship with the volatile Beethoven was sorely tested over the years.

Writing in his journal, crossing the stage to retrieve a notebook, or addressing the audience directly, Felder-as-Bruening also sits at a concert grand to play sections from Beethoven's greatest hits ---- notably, the so-called Moonlight Sonata, and all of the Pathetique with its rumbling passions and lilting lyricism, its fearsome contrasts proving the evening's best vehicle for Feldsher's piano skill.

Like his previous roving memoirs, "Beethoven as I Knew Him" ---- now in its world premiere at the Old Globe Theatre ---- is an uneven hybrid, as much arts education as theater, and a spotty, gloom-filled lesson at that.

With Bruening as the evening's thickly accented tour guide, audiences learn the basic outlines and sad details of Beethoven's life: his adoration of his mother and Mozart; his cruel treatment by his father and brother; his contentious relationship with his nephew Karl, and the internal tempests caused by the steady deterioration of his hearing.

Onstage, such extreme experiences sometimes project as melodramatic, sentimental, or in the case of Beethoven's final illness, riddled with pathos. But the real man is in the music; and Felder's script, based on von Breuning's recollections, doesn't go deeply enough into the man's character or his art to illuminate the obsessions that made Beethoven so personally unstable, yet such a musical revolutionary.

Still, several of Felder's wild-eyed rants are persuasive, whether he's speaking as Breuning imitating the composer or as Beethoven himself.

Felder's no virtuoso, but he is a competent and passionate pianist and a highly dramatic interpreter of the more programmatic of Beethoven's piano pieces. This may explain the absence of some of the most challenging ---- and also more abstract and angular ---- works such as the Diabelli variations, which formed the core of Moises Kaufman's exploration of Beethoven's creative genius in "33 Variations" at La Jolla Playhouse last month.

Beethoven is admired for his symphonies and chamber music as much as for his solo piano pieces and concertos, however. Thus, when Felder wants to illustrate the first four notes of the Fifth Symphony, we hear a blast of recorded music, the "fate knocking on the door" theme. There's a fair amount of other pre-recorded music here ---- fragments from the Fifth and Ninth symphonies and a swath of the Emperor Concerto, with Feldsher playing the piano passages karaoke-style.

As ever, the recordings, though high-quality, deaden an already bleak evening. Movie maven Joel Zwick directed the piece, which doesn't lack for variety in the physical staging and which includes a few humorous bits and one-liners. Still, the somber atmosphere is mostly unrelieved, the melancholy tone further sustained by designer Richard Norwood's murky lighting.

Chalk drawings projected onto a stage-filling, book-shaped screen behind the piano conjure environments such as a concert hall or city street. But they do little to enhance Felder's running monologue. "Beethoven as I Knew Him" might be better served by nimble and inventive lighting that took its cues from the music's shifting moods.

Such presentational miscues may get worked through as Felder performs the new piece during his Globe run. The opening-night audience, like those who have cheered his "George Gershwin Alone" and "Monsieur Chopin" through extended sold-out runs here and elsewhere, loudly applauded this one as well.

Felder remains a charming and seductive performer whose sheer stamina is impressive. But Beethoven may prove an intractable subject for the ham-and-hokum method this writer-musician-actor has developed.

The Globe show is part of a Beethoven mini-trend here. Aside from last month's "33 Variations," John Lill, a true virtuoso, will kick off the 20th-anniversary season of the Mainly Mozart Festival with a rare program of all five Beethoven piano concertos at the Balboa Theatre next month.

"Beethoven, As I Knew Him: A True Story"

When: 7 p.m. Sundays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays; 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 2 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays; through June 8

Where: Old Globe Theatre, Balboa Park, San Diego

Tickets: $52-$79

Info: (619) 234-5623

Web: www.theoldglobe.org

First name only. Comments including last names, contact addresses, e-mail addresses or phone numbers will be deleted. Attempts to misrepresent your identity or impersonate any person will not be approved. All comments are screened before they appear online, so please keep them brief. Comments reflect the views of those commenting and not necessarily those of the North County Times or its staff writers. Click here to view additional comment policies.