Play Time

ATTPAC sets play date with new family-friendly show series

Doktor Kaboom is bringing his Wheel of Science to the Winspear.

Photo courtesy of Doktor Kaboom

In addition to the big Broadway musicals and celebrity speakers coming to the AT&T Performing Arts Center, there will also be a flying reindeer, wacky German scientist, masked superhero trio, impressive drum corps, luminescent ducks, and a time-traveling magic tree house.

It's part of the inaugural Family Entertainment series, sponsored by Children's Health, which is bringing in six family-friendly shows featuring music, animation, science, and puppetry.

"We've curated our programming with our community in mind, including more opportunities for families to experience live performances here together," says Debbie Storey, president and CEO of AT&T Performing Arts Center. "We're grateful to Children's Health for their collaboration in staging the amazing for our families in our community."

The new season starts during the holidays, with two performances of DrumLine Live Holiday Spectacular on November 19, 2019, at the Winspear Opera House. Holiday favorites get the gospel, jazz, soul, and Motown treatment, all mixed with a hip-hop beat and the driving force of a Historically Black College and University (HBCU) marching band. The show comes direct from the team behind 20th Century Fox's hit movie Drumline and VH1's Drumline: A New Beat.

Two performances of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: The Musical are next at the Winspear, at 1 pm and 5 pm on December 15. Based on the beloved 1964 stop-motion animated television classic, the stage show follows a young Rudolph who, because of the appearance of his bright shining nose, is excluded from the Reindeer Games. He flees Christmastown and meets up with new friends Hermey the Elf and Yukon Cornelius. After finding The Island of Misfit Toys, Rudolph journeys home, where a snowstorm of epic proportions is threatening Christmas (yes, there is also a 12-foot-tall Abominable Snowman).

The show is also partnering with PACER's National Bullying Prevention Center, offering a free toolkit to teachers that leverage the powerful messages from the Rudolph story to teach important character values. In addition, a portion of proceeds from venue sales of the book, T.E.A.M. Rudolph and the Reindeer Games, will be donated to PACER.

The popular masked crimefighters Catboy, Owlette, and Gekko are teaming up with their new friend PJ Robot in PJ Masks Live!. For two shows on January 20, 2020, at the Winspear, watch as they try to save the day from the sneaky villains Romeo, Night Ninja, and Luna Girl.

Magic Tree House: Showtime with Shakespeare will have four shows, two on January 30 and two on January 31, 2020, in the Wyly Theatre. This new hip-hop musical is based on the Magic Tree House adventure Stage Fright on a Summer Night by New York Times bestselling author Mary Pope Osborne, where Jack and Annie are whisked back to Elizabethan England and meet William Shakespeare himself.

Also enjoying four shows at the Wyly is Doktor Kaboom and The Wheel of Science, a unique, interactive presentation that is different every time. On February 3-4, 2020, find out if he's going to turn a water bottle into a rocket, catapult bananas across the stage, electrocute a pickle, or create artificial gravity.

The first season closes with one performance of Lightwire Theater's The Ugly Duckling on March 1, 2020, at the Winspear. Lined with electroluminescent wire, the beloved story of the ugly duckling plays out onstage through a cutting-edge blend of puppetry, technology, and dance. With dazzling visuals, poignant choreography, and the creative use of music that ranges from classical to pop, this production brings the classic story into a new and brilliant light.

To celebrate the new programming, ATTPAC is offering a 10 percent discount with the purchase of three or more Family Entertainment shows, excluding Magic Tree House: Showtime with Shakespeare and Doktor Kaboom and The Wheel of Science (which are already at a low ticket price of $10).

Six-show packages are on sale now and range from $113 to $301.

Tickets may be purchased online, by calling 214-880-0202, or in person at the AT&T Performing Arts Center Winspear Opera House box office.

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A good listen

Dallas Symphony and Fabio Luisi release landmark Wagner 'Ring Cycle' set

Fabio Luisi conducting the Dallas Symphony Orchestra

Photo courtesy of Dallas Symphony Orchestra

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Fabio Luisi wanted his Ring Cycle to be heard and not seen.

Wagner’s four-opera epic Der Ring des Nibelungen, approaching the 150th anniversary of its premiere in 1876, has been reinterpreted and deconstructed by directors finding various meanings in the conflicts among gods, humans, giants and dwarfs.

While most new recordings are on video, Luisi led his Dallas Symphony Orchestra in concert performances that were released on 13 compact discs by Delos on May 22 and are available on streaming services.

“Wagner conceived this as a total immersion in visual and acoustic, but I could focus really only on the music, and this was the point actually — not to be distracted by staging and not to have to cope with maybe strange ideas of staging,” Luisi said. “I think the music tells everything.”

Luisi became DSO music director in 2020 and broached the idea while dining two years later with (the now late) Morton H. Meyerson, a longtime board member.

“Fabio came back from lunch sort of giddy but sort of sheepishly saying: `Do you think that this would ever be possible?” recalled Kim Noltemy, the Dallas CEO at the time. “So, I said, well, let’s give it a try. So, we called around to see if there were people who wanted to support it and did a budget.”

After securing a waiver from the orchestra allowing for the needed rehearsals and performance length, recordings were made during four concerts from May 1-5 and six more from Oct. 5-20. Each opera was performed two or three times.

Americans in cast fill big roles
American singers featured prominently, with Mark Delavan as Wotan, Lise Lindstrom as Brünnhilde and Sara Jakubiak as Sieglinde, part of a cast that included Christopher Ventris (Siegmund), Daniel Johansson (Siegfried), Deniz Uzun (Fricka), Tómas Tómasson (Alberich), Michael Laurenz (Mime) and Stephen Milling (Hagen).

Delavan sang Wotan at New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2013 after Luisi took over from an ailing James Levine in Robert Lepage’s much-maligned production staged on a 45-ton set of 24 rotating planks.

“We’re accessible and they know that we’re hungry and we have a chip on our shoulders,” Delavan said. “What conductors like about American singers is their technique is sound. Even a European conductor would say: Well, I’m going to give up some of the communication skills, only one degree of separation with the language, but I’m going to get a solid technique, and I’m going to get pretty good acting chops.”

Lindstrom has been in Atlanta to sing in its production of “Götterdämmerung,” the concluding night of the tetralogy, leading to what is being billed as the first complete Ring Cycles in the America South in 2029.

“The wonderful thing about it is the intimacy between the orchestra and us, because we’re not separated by a chunk of stage or a chunk a scenery or a chunk of concept,” she said of the Dallas performances. “And for people like me, who have had the opportunity to perform the role before, I have all those iterations to rely on for my portrayal that I can sort of filter myself through.”

A younger Luisi listened to famous renditions
Luisi, 67, first heard a Ring recording in Georg Solti’s famous studio set with the Vienna Philharmonic from 1958-65. He also admires Karl Böhm’s live recording from the 1967 Bayreuth Festival and Marek Janowski’s 1980-83 studio version with the Staatskapelle Dresden.

He first conducted Ring when he was music director of Dresden’s Semperoper from 2007-10. Luisi’s Dallas performances include more legato and softer sound than his rendition a decade earlier at the Met. He tries to keep an arc from the first notes of “Das Rheingold” to the final strains of “Götterdämmerung.”

“I have a deeper understanding about the meaning of this piece,” he said. “I consider the ring to be a big Bruckner symphony. So we have the introduction, then we have the first movement, this is “Walküre,” which happens to be a slow movement, and then we have the scherzo, which is “Siegfried,” of course, and then the long, long, last movement. There is a unity.”

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