BAM Presents Moby Dick Review

As we entered BAM’s large hall we hear an imagined whale’s song— soprano and longing—with tide and seabirds here and there. A massive whale is projected on the stage’s large screen. Probably everyone in the theater feels its one eye’s squinting focus to be just on them. The waves crescendo into a super-loud crash that effectively silences the crowd and is signaling the show’s start. This wave is so loud and all encompassing that the audience breaks out in spontaneous applause of appreciation.

All Our Senses on Alert in BAM’s Great Hall

For the next two hours — no intermission— our senses stay on the high alert of that first crashing wave as the rock opera and spectacle of this Moby Dick unfolds. The eleven German actors from Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus are in heavy makeup. An intense roving spotlight feels like the 12th actor, so dynamic and intense that it sometimes seems to make its fellow cast members into 2-dimensional cardboard cutouts. We have the fleeting question mark in our minds as to whether they are the real singers when we see them frozen so. But they are rarely still. Rather, the actors/singers become moving billboards for the production’s Van Cleef & Arpels Dance Reflections co-sponsor. Grainy movie footage of other Moby Dick interpretations sometimes fill a supersized back screen. In other scenes a large Nantucket house floats down this screen instead with windows and doors lighting and dimming. Meanwhile, the score by British singer/songwriter Anna Calvi rolls like waves— sometimes into heavy metal roils, and at other times evoking the stillness of a lily pond with reverie lyrics “…Cause if I can dream it, maybe it will happen…”

Distilling Melville’s Tome Into a Sound and Sight Poem

The classic tale of Moby Dick is more a launch point than a narrative girdle in Robert Wilson’s telling. Relatively early on the screen announces a random string of numbered chapters about to be performed, as if tweaking the more linear storytelling inclined.

We meet Ishmael (Raphael Gehrmann) as an old man poised to begin his tale yet again with Once Upon a Time, to his sprite-like grandson, The Boy, played by charismatic Christopher Nell. The Boy— a character unique to this Moby Dick telling— is ubiquitous, sometimes even popping up aloft stage left from behind the curtain. He seems to have jumped off a page from a Dr. Seuss book, rather than Melville’s dark tale of revenge obsession. Nell glides so naturally in and out of scenes that even the strictest Melville purists in the crowd will likely rejoice—along with this reviewer—in Wilson’s masterstroke to create this character.

The English libretto is projected above and on sidelines— while the 11 actors move back and forth between German and English. Though unhindered by need to convey a linear story, the music has many refrains such as the oft-repeated “…Cause if I can dream it, maybe it will happen…”, which you too might come to relish as oases of soft beauty in the pounding loud rock opera score.

Yes, there are boats and harpoons and of course, the huge white titular whale. Yet, this reviewer suspects that Melville himself might not recognize his story in Robert Wilson’s rendition. Then again, the many permutations in this physical-theater-rock-opera- mash- up that make the novel more a memory of itself, is of little import. We are in a blue tinted black and white dreamscape— (SPOILER ALERT ) with only a blood red wink of a whale eye at the end. This Moby Dick —infused with Dance Reflections’ celebration of storytelling via movement combined with a pounding score— is a spectacle worth experiencing.