What People Are Saying
📣
What People Are Saying 📣
“The Tom Patterson Theatre’s thrust stage is a dancefloor and, as the bassline thumps, Richard gyrates across it, with swinging pearls, bare midriff, outsized crown and frou-frou trousers (hat tip to Bretta Gerecke for the wild costume designs).
The only orb for this Richard is a disco ball and he leads a posse of shape-throwing angels, many in hot pants, who function as both flatterers and enablers, a permanent reminder of his divine right. In a play of stinging betrayals, it is affecting to see the angels eventually abandon him when he loses the crown. ”
“Bretta Gerecke’s production design is appropriately conceptual. Her set of sliding panels aids in the rapid scene transitions. Gerecke uses a shrewd combination of lighting and sheer walls to create the show’s spookier moments, when dark figures and nightmarish creatures flow in and out of the shadows. Her costumes, hair, and makeup wouldn’t look out of place in an early tim burton film… ”
“The Tempest, staged by the festival’s artistic director, Antoni Cimolino, is an elaborate production, with eye-popping costumes by Bretta Gerecke and plenty of magic.”
“...Which makes “American (Tele)visions” an acrobatic work of storytelling… Bretta Gerecke’s set design elicits the immersive feeling of living in a world of screens: the stage is a colossal box, inside which there are four towering cubes, two stacked on each side, that swing open to reveal micro-settings…”
“The experimental nature of the performance provides a deeply intimate experience... The marriage of music, vocals and visuals creates a sensation of grief that is heavy like a lead blanket…”
“The beauty is the telling of the story: the minimal set, the gorgeous costumes, the exquisite acting and singing by the extraordinarily talented cast.”
“Bretta Gerecke’s scenic design is an intricate marvel of modular efficiency. (Gerecke also designed the costumes, with Mondo Guerra.) The strangely simple set consists of two stacks of two big rusted cubes. They look like Richard Serra sculptures lost in limbo, but they open up to reveal fragments of the family’s reality… The contrast between the mute, modern-art aloofness of Gerecke’s cubes and the liveliness of the scenes that play inside them fits with a doubleness that characterizes the whole play. ”