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Culture Stage

Einstein On The Beach

EINSTEIN ON THE BEACH by Philip Glass and Robert Wilson, choreographed by Lucinda Childs (Pomegranate Arts/Luminato). At the Sony Centre (1 Front East). Saturday (June 9) at 6 pm, Sunday (June 10) at 3 pm. $25-$175. 416-368-4849. See listing. Rating: NNNN


Watching Einstein On The Beach feels, at times, like being on a long, night-time flight.

There are, after all, plenty of lulling repeated sounds your fellow passengers walk up and down the aisles to stretch their legs and go to the washroom (some ducking out for more than half an hour at a time) and – because of the hypnotic nature of the opera’s visuals and music – there’s the occasional sense of wondering if you’re sleeping or awake. (A few were doing the former on opening night.)

Anyone expecting a traditional operatic ride, though, will leave disappointed. If this show were an airline its tagline might be: “Air Einstein: it’s the journey that matters, not the destination.”

Several people tweeted me afterwards, asking if I “liked” it. I’m not sure words such as “like” or “dislike” can apply. It’s simply something to experience. I probably wouldn’t want to see all four hours and 20 minutes of it again (I didn’t take a washroom break), but I’m glad I saw it. Even now, its imagery (which includes, as a matter of fact, a few airplanes) feels seared into my brain, and I expect it will stay there for some time, haunting my dreams and waking life.

Originally written in the mid-70s, Einstein became the first of Philip Glass’s Portrait Trilogy of operas, devoted to men who changed the world (the others were based on the lives of Gandhi and Akhenaten).

Don’t look for a clear biography of the theoretical physicist in the work, however. Photographs of him crop up now and then a bit of mathematical formula appears scrawled on a screen and there are sections in the “Knee Plays” (which act almost like intervals between the longer scenes) where the performers read or sing numeric sequences.

Overall, the piece resists narrative explanation, but you can discern themes about technological progress and nuclear annihilation: the final three words of the title kind of spell that out.

It’s impossible to separate Glass’s music and lyrics from the other elements: director Robert Wilson’s production includes stunning tableaux – a fairy tale-like creature stuck up in some cold modernist tower a courtroom a lonely compartment in a train, the ground swirling with fog. Lucinda Childs’s choreography helps create a sense of balance and structure. And the text by Childs, Christopher Knowles and Samuel M. Johnson has an absurdist feel that becomes hypnotic in its own way.

Like the music, these other elements – dance, text – repeat with subtle variations in inflection and tone, creating a hypnotic loop. Wilson’s stage pictures might seem static at first, but there’s always something going on – a moon gradually waxing or waning, for instance, or a train inching forward.

What makes Einstein On The Beach so thrilling an experience is witnessing the various kinds of virtuosity: instrumental (Jennifer Koh’s bravura violin playing and Andrew Sterman’s tenor sax solo are simply breathtaking), choreographic (the dance ensemble shows complete concentration and commitment) and vocal (too many to mention, but Hai-Ting Chinn’s vocalise, to what sounds like Glass’s inversion of Bach’s toccata and fugue, is simply unearthly).

And then there’s the iconic Spaceship scene, with its pulsing lights, frenzied score and movement that seems to defy time and space.

Glass, Wilson and Childs may have been avant garde innovators in the 70s, but they are still creatures of the theatre and understand that you need a big, flashy climactic number to rouse your audience.

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