absolute storm as intellectual manqué Johnny Inkslinger. Martin Dablander’s witty Western Union Boy wins most of the laughs, Markus Pol’s guitar-strumming narrator suffers awful memory lapses. Go back just a few years to 1941 and you’ll find Paul Bunyan the oversized skeleton in Britten’s. Helmut Kruass provides the sonorous off-stage voice of Paul Bunyan, Gillian Keith is his dulcet-toned daughter, Juan Carlos Falcon the dashing cook who wins her heart, Roberto Gionfriddo the intellectual bookkeeper Johnny Inkslinger, who does not. It’s all good, clean fun, pert yet innocent, entertaining but clever.Ī big young cast throws itself into the piece with energetic competence. The Quays have provided giant sets that play with the similarity between the rings inside tree trunks and modern day barcodes, Timo Dentler and Okarina Peter’s costumes leave the lumberjacks in checked shirts but turn the wild geese into Pan-Am hostesses, the cats into cheerleaders, and Fido the dog into a little boxer. Nicholas Broadhurst has worked together with the Brothers Quay to make a staging that looks and feels like a musical without neglecting the work’s many subtleties. Britten: Paul Bunyan Peter Coleman-Wright (Narrator), Kenneth Cranham (Paul Bunyan), Kurt Streit (Johnny Inkslinger), Susan Gritton (Tiny), Timothy Robinson (Slim), Jeremy White (Hel Helson), Francis Egerton (Sam Sharkey), Graeme Broadbent (Big Benny), Roderick Earle (John Shears), Henry Moss (Western Union Boy), Lilian. This Bunyan, a co-production with Vienna’s Volksoper, the Lucerne Theatre and Oper North, amply rewards the effort. Is still excellent, and Nicholas Broadhurst’s new production is fast-paced and fun.īregenz pours the money it makes from its popular floating stage productions laudably back into the loving airings of neglected gems. Today, it’s possible to appreciate in Bunyan all the echoes of what was to come in Britten’s operas, along with the work’s beguiling combination of youthful exuberance, formal experimentation, stylistic eclecticism and charm.
It premiered at Columbia University on, to largely negative reviews, and was withdrawn by the composer. Auden, designed for performance by semi-professional groups. Opening night audiences missed the point completely, perhaps because of an abstruse staging, perhaps also because Britten’s blend of Brechtian epic theatre, music-hall levity and hauntingly reflective modernism was a little beyond them. Paul Bunyan, Op 17, is an operetta in two acts and a prologue composed by Benjamin Britten to a libretto by W. Auden’s libretto is a witty, savvy summons to a brand of American patriotism so savvy and self-critical that it holds up after all that the intervening decades have done to the country. World and the personal struggles of the central character Johnny Inkslinger. Britten wrote it for Broadway, at the time a highly politicized theatrical context. Images from the production of Paul Bunyan by Anglia Ruskin performing arts.
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