Media Archive

“At minimum, the recipe for a good party includes a hearty stock of friends and acquaintances, stirred with liquor and topped with tunes. But what if your hosts’ idea of a party playlist is two-dozen somber, chilly songs by Franz Schubert? That’s the unlikely starting point for Three Pianos…” – Time Out New York 

Three Pianos, a theater work inspired by Franz Schubert’s song cycleWinterreise, brings together three friends for song, contemplation, and wine.  Lots of wine.

In a season that’s notably short on Christmas shows compared to recent years, it’s actually pretty incredible how the three polymath players behind Three Pianos have turned Schubert’s melancholy and heartbroken song cycle Winterreise into a warm and jocular testament to music, music making, and friendship.

A wild and informal romp through Schubert’s song cycle,Winterreise (Winter Journey), with three pianos, three pianists and a good sense of fun to balance the beautiful but melancholic music.

“Three Pianos” is an awesome party for music nerds. 

At a Valentine’s Day party several years ago, three friends — Rick Burkhardt, Alec Duff, and Dave Malloy — discovered a shared love for Austrian composer Franz Schubert’s song cycle “Winterreise.”
As they played the music, drank and debated, an idea was born: to create a theater piece that incorporates Schubert’s music.
The result is “Three Pianos,” and it takes place both in Schubert’s time and today, at an all-night party where pianos are not only played but used as props– they’re sat on, spun in circles, used as a bar and a bed. Even the audience gets to drink wine and take part.
The Village Voice describes the show as “like being cozily tucked away with a clutch of nerdy music-loving friends.”
“Three Pianos” won an Obie in New York and is currently playing at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge Massachusetts. Here & Now‘s Robin Young met with all three performers there. They told her that the show is a recreation of something called a “Schubertiad,” a type of party that Schubert held with poets and composers where they would make art.

“The American Repertory Theater (A.R.T.), under the artistic direction of Diane Paulus, is pleased to announce the productions that will be part of the A.R.T.’s 2011/12 Season.” – BroadwayWorld.com 

“…the ART’s 2011-12 season, Paulus’s third as artistic director, shows another way in which she’s setting the company apart: The lineup features a bounty of female playwrights and directors.” – Boston.com 

“Suzan-Lori Parks, the Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright of “Topdog/Underdog,” and Diedre Murray, the musician and composer, are developing a new version of “Porgy and Bess” that features rearrangements of George Gershwin’s famed score and plays down its roots as an opera. The show is scheduled to debut in September at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where it will be directed by Diane Paulus, the theater’s artistic director.” -The New York Times 

A re-imagined Porgy and Bess will open the A.R.T.’s 2011-2012 season. “ ‘Porgy and Bess’ has this incredible place in our lives as a classic opera now,’’ Paulus said. “The idea here was to give it a life on a musical stage.’’ -The Boston Globe

So shoot me, Porgy purists. To my mind, the retooling of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess for American Repertory Theater, intended to make the iconic folk opera work as a Broadway show, is compelling enough to push past quibbles. And in Audra McDonald it boasts a Bess as pained as she wrestles her devils as she is languorous and melodious in her delivery of the music. When on opening night she and Norm Lewis entwined their voices around “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” toward the end of the first act (there are only two), I thought I’d died and gone to some auditory equivalent of the Promised Land those denizens of Catfish Row keep singing about.