Stall, Interrogate, Repeat
In one sense, The Composer Is Dead has been around for a while. Originally commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, it debuted at Davies Symphony Hall in 2006 as an orchestral piece with music by local composer Nathaniel Stookey and text and narration by Lemony Snicket, the fiendish children’s author of A Series of Unfortunate Events who lives in San Francisco under the ludicrous alias of Daniel Handler. It has since made the rounds of various symphonies around the country as a humorous Peter and the Wolf-style piece designed to familiarize children with the various instruments in an orchestra, and has also been released as a book and CD.
Chalked up to Experience
Director John Doyle previously came to American Conservatory Theater to kick off the national tour of his acclaimed stripped-down Broadway staging of Sweeney Todd, in which all the instruments were played by the actors. Now he’s back at ACT taking a similar tack with the core acting company and a few ACT MFA students on Bertolt Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, in a new translation by local actress Domenique Lozano.
