Review of concert

The Boston Conservatory Theatre Ensemble presents
All Lost to Prayers

Thursday through Sunday, April 20-23, 2006, 8:00 PM
The Zack Box, Boston Conservatory, Boston, MA

The newly completed stage work All Lost to Prayers intriguingly straddles the genres of opera and musical theater.   With music by Boston Conservatory faculty member Dana Brayton, libretto by Tom Evans, and story by both, it's a harrowingly intense look at the social costs of autism.

Severely autistic and suffering from obsessive compulsive disorder, eighteen-year-old R.J. is fixated with the Weather Channel, knows Shakespeare's play The Tempest by heart, and is increasingly becoming a violent threat to himself and others.   He exasperates both his bratty lesbian sister Miranda and his befuddled, self-sacrificing widowed father Rich to no end.   The plot, based in part on the aforementioned Shakespeare opus, concerns a significant crisis day in young R.J.'s life; he is expelled from school for assaulting a fellow student, wreaks general havoc at home, and proves a significant problem at his sister's evening birthday party, where he ultimately causes grievous bodily harm to two people, leading to his imminent institutionalism.

Musically, the work is scalar in sound, containing both triadic moments and more flinty passages, perhaps best characterized as an updating of such fare as Leonard Bernstein's Trouble in Tahiti .   Brayton here pens well-turned, frequently busy-textured fare that underscores the text effectively.   Dramatically, the unrelieved feel of impending disaster is forcefully and consistently conveyed.   In fact, it becomes almost too much to bear after a while -- which of course suggests that the opera is doing what it should, and doing it very well indeed.   The cathartic final scenes in which Miranda and R.J. are reconciled is a touching exception to the prevailing explosiveness -- a drinking scene in which two teenage party guests ill-advisedly introduce R.J. to the pleasures of liquor seemingly tries to inject some levity into the proceedings but cannot wholly escape either a sense of foreboding dread or the notion that the boys are being cruel to their medically impaired companion.   Ultimately, All Lost is a challenging, trenchant, often riveting selection that is guaranteed to make the listener squirm uncomfortably.

Friday night's presentation was of generally good quality.   From the cast of eight capable student singers, one should cite Rachel Matz (Miranda) for her strong, expansive voice and David Anthony Vogel (R.J.) for his stunningly remarkable acting prowess.   Neil Donohoe's resourceful stage direction made a virtue of the venue's awkward layout and claustrophobic set, while Erik Diaz's props and Sarah Liebmann's costumes succinctly portrayed casual working-class shabbiness.   The perfunctory lighting of Brad Johnson proved serviceable enough, while the amplification system imparted varying degrees of overall effectiveness to William Rauworth's sound design.   Yoichi Udagawa presided over his nine-member pit orchestra (essentially a variant on that of Stravinsky's L'Histoire ) with a strict hand, though his student players demonstrated varying degrees of proficiency.

--David Cleary