Sublime! Simply wonderful! Absolutely fantastic! Hysterically funny and heart warmingly touching!
Go see Bradley Greenwald and Sonja Thompson in The Longest Night at Open Eye Figure Theatre. It is so, so good. You’ll leave at once happy, a little bit enlightened, and maybe even a bit revitalized. And you have until Sunday 21 December to do so.
This is a two person show: Bradley Greenwald singing baritone and also playing a baritone and Sonja Thompson on piano, but while there may only be two people on the stage, the presence and passion the two have for their craft illuminates and shines and warms the space with the power of the most giant chorus and the most sprawling orchestra.
Through a succession of songs, solo piano instrumentals, and poetry recitations, the show is about how we manage to remain happy and warm as we approach the solstice, amid bitingly cold temperatures, mounds of snow, and less and less sunlight. While its annoyingly warm right now (9 Celsius as I write this on a Sunday evening nearing 9:00pm in mid December) and there isn’t a trace of snow on the ground, all melted since the November storms we had (and I just biked from Lyn-Lake to downtown and back without any fuss, wearing a hoodie instead of a coat and no gloves) the message of The Longest Night still stands despite songs that make fun of people who live in cold places (even though such winters will become more and more rare as the years pass).
And that message is that people everywhere around the world and throughout time have celebrated something during this time of year, whether its disguised as Christmas or Hanukkah or Ramadan or Saturnalia or Yule or Bodhi Day, there seems to be something within us that craves the comfort of something during the darkest and coldest time of the year, and that despite how dark it gets and how cold it gets, we have the light and warmth of some indescribable spirit around us to wrap ourselves in, and whatever form that spirit takes, we nonetheless invite it in to our minds and souls, even those of us who believe our minds are a mishmash of electrical connections and our souls are merely our minds trying to understand and manage ridiculous neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin.
As the evening progresses, you’ll have the chance to listen to a set of tunes with quite a wonderful variety: from Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt’s “Celebration” (you’ll surely want to get up and dance during this one), John Dryden and Henry Purcell’s “The Cold Song” (you surely will laugh quite a bit during this one), to Wilhelm Muller and Franz Schubert’s “Organ Grinder” from Winterreise (because you surely can’t go to a show celebrating the longest night without hearing at least one number from Winterreise). And there are a couple moments where you’ll get a chance to listen to Thompson perform some solo works while Greenwald take a breather off on stage left, including Edvard Grieg’s “Shepherd’s Boy” from his Lyric Pieces and J. Benjamin Druskin’s “Icicles,” and there are a couple more moments where you’ll get to listen to Greenwald recite poems like Ogden Nash’s Word about Winter and Margaret Atwood’s Small Poems for the Winter Solstice.
And it’s all superbly performed. Absolutely brilliant. And it’s all wrapped up in a wonderful message from Greenwald, that our ancestors had it right all along: that the longest night is to be celebrated as a symbol of infinite cycles, that longer days will return again, that we will part with the past, and that we will move forward into the new year.
I wanna celebrate, indeed!