Among the many brilliant theater productions that actor-pianist-playwright-producer Hershey Felder has created in which he incarnates famous composers—in the Bay Area he’s been Gershwin, Tchaikovsky, Leonard Bernstein and more—this latest, “Rachmaninoff and the Tsar” at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley, stands out for several reasons.
For starters, it’s not a solo show as his others are (except for one, which includes a small walk-on). It’s a two-hander in which Russian-born composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, dying of melanoma in 1943, conjures up a morphine-fueled visitation from the last czar of Russia, Nicholas II of the Romanoff dynasty, played by British actor Jonathan Silvestri. The czar and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks in 1918; in actuality, composer and czar met only briefly, once, in formal circumstances.
And because it’s a two-hander—not just the character confiding in the audience—there are many new opportunities for conflict, for surprising secrets to be revealed and for personal confessions to enhance the script, which is based on historical facts.
Plus, more than ever in Felder’s work, there’s a whole range of naturally occurring emotions, unleashed throughout Rachmaninoff’s fever dream, that animate these two characters: guilt, shame, yearning, despair, rage.
Both Felder and Silvestri, directed with great sensitivity by Trevor Hay, are well up to the challenges of expressing those emotions.
The set, rather dreamy and designed by Felder, represents Rachmaninoff’s verdant garden in Beverly Hills, where the composer ultimately ended up after leaving Russia (in self-imposed exile) in 1917. It includes a Steinway and black-and-white videos on an upstage screen that occasionally project images of Romanoff and his family (actually Silvestri’s own family) and some historical footage (video design by Stefano DeCarli).
Rachmaninoff’s feelings about the czar are complex, contradictory, full of both love and fury. Very specifically he wants something from him.
So too does he have deep and confused feelings about his homeland, and about America, and about his own prodigious talent. (He suffered from composer’s block.)
“Composing is when I come closest to seeing God,” he says. And elsewhere, “I am 85 percent music, 15 percent man.”
At two hours without intermission, the play is full of Felder’s sly humor as well as drama and virtuoso piano playing (most importantly to the plot, “Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini”) and only gets more exciting as it goes on.
Finally, what makes this latest Felder work different, is that it is the last of the specific type of musical play that he is known for. He’ll continue working as a filmmaker, theater producer and more in Italy where he lives.
TheatreWorks Silicon Valley presents “Rachmaninoff and the Tsar” through Feb. 9 at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, 500 Castro St., Mountain View. Tickets are $34-$115 at theatreworks.org or (877) 662-8978.
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