Photos courtesy of Milwaukee Chamber Theatre
Jack Forbes Wilson, Brett Ryback and Elyse Edelman - Milwaukee Chamber Theatre
Left to right: Actors Jack Forbes Wilson, Brett Ryback and Director Elyse Edelman
Stephen Hoffman was considered a prodigy but now he’s older and tired. In Jon Marans’ Old Wicked Songs, the American concert pianist travels to the heart of old European culture, Vienna, in hopes of renewing the inspiration he had lost. He finds himself with a cranky old music teacher, Josef Mashkan. The year is 1986. Kurt Waldheim is Austria’s president, but as it turns out, the respected diplomat has a dubious wartime record during the Third Reich. A large percentage of Austrians are fine with that.
The Milwaukee Chamber Theatre will bring Marans’ Pulitzer-nominated play to the Broadway Theatre Center this month as part of the Violins of Hope Wisconsin project. Framing the dialogue is Robert Schumann’s song cycle Dichterliebe, played by two actor-pianists whose careers began in Milwaukee, Brett Ryback and Jack Forbes Wilson.
Old Wicked Songs will be directed by Elyse Edelman. Known to Wisconsin theatergoers for her work with Madison’s Forward Theater and Milwaukee’s Next Act, Edelman set out to find a play to produce in conjunction with Violins of Hope, a tribute to the survival of the arts during the Holocaust through a set of musical instruments owned by victims of the genocide. In conversations with the Chamber Theatre’s artistic director, Brent Hazelton, she kept saying, “if Violins of Hope is about the instruments that carry history within their very wood and strings, then Old Wicked Songs is about the music that carries memory within the people who play it.”
She was also drawn to the play “because, as much as it is about art, memory, intergenerational connection, and how we listen, it is equally about a teacher and student relationship. In a past life I was an educator, and I would always say my students taught me as much as I taught them. This play beautifully reflects that reciprocal exchange of knowledge.”
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The setting for Old Wicked Songs is Professor Mashkan’s studio, described by the script as Old World Vienna “with high ceilings, an old baby grand piano, and walls covered with Klimt posters. There are other details too—little treasures I won’t give away here—because our scenic designer, Stephen Hudson-Mairet, and props designer, Jim Guy, have brought them to life in ways that deserve to be discovered in the room itself,” Edelman says.
In one of Edelman’s favorite lines from the play, Mashkan says,
“World War II may be ancient history to you in the United States, but we still live with it every day. I have often thought that if Vienna were a piano, World War II would be a delicate piano shawl, lightly draped over the whole city.” That image guided us,” she continues. “Stephen has created a room that feels saturated with character, and outside the window Vienna itself looms, its history lightly draped over everything that happens inside. The intimacy of the studio and the weight of the outside world exist together, just as the play insists they must.”
Milwaukee Chamber Theatre presents Old Wicked Songs, Sept. 19-Oct. 5 at Broadway Theatre Center’s Studio Theatre. For tickets, visit https://www.milwaukeechambertheatre.org/old-wicked-songs
