Oz helmer returns home with 'Lost'
'Echo' draws on 12 stories from Ovid's 'Metamorphoses'
The A$1 million ($750,000) production draws on 12 stories from Ovid's "Metamorphoses" and utilizes 36 thesps, accompanied by singer Paul Capsis and Kosky on piano. Reimagining such mythical stories as Narcissus and Echo, and Orpheus and Euridice, the show combines music, dance and imagery with a score plucked from Cole Porter, Monteverdi and Schubert.
"We're telling people to come and see it in Sydney," STC artistic topper Robyn Nevin told Variety, claiming that the mammoth festival-style piece might never be staged again. The two-part production (four hours each) will have a three-week stint at the 850-seat Sydney Theater.
Kosky, 38, is a producer-director-writer who cut his teeth in Melbourne's theater scene, and drew attention Down Under for his flamboyant, provocative productions of classic plays -- in a staging of "King Lear," for example, his knights sported immense genitalia, and one character smeared his face with excrement.
With works ranging from Moliere's "Tartuffe" to O'Neill's "Mourning Becomes Electra," Kosky developed a rep for radical reformations of his chosen texts, irreverently throwing together high comedy, exaggerated melodrama, manic energy and fetishistic flourishes, often in a colorful Australian vernacular.
In 2000, Kosky left Oz for Vienna; his legit and opera productions for various companies in Austria and Germany since then have garnered equal shares of acclaim and derision.Kosky says his stint in Europe has taught him the importance of music in theater, a knowledge imprinted on his ambitious return to the Australian stage.
STC associate and longtime Kosky collaborator, Tom Wright, adapted the script for "Lost Echo," which has been workshopped over two months with the full cast.
"It really has been built for this group of people," Nevin says. The players are from STC's ensemble and the National School of Dramatic Arts, the Sydney-based academy whose alumni include Mel Gibson, Cate Blanchett and Baz Luhrmann.
STC has kept tix at its usual price, $53, making the show one of the cheapest entertainments in Australia per hour.
"It's heavily subsidized," Nevin acknowledges. "The running costs are equal to a musical."
Considerable funds have been spent on the cast, including rehearsal time, which is extensive for a noncommercial company. In fact, even if "Echo" was considered for a recommission elsewhere in the future, say with a local actors' school, the two-month rehearsal period might render it unviable.
Given the drain on the budget of such a large cast, ADDED: //a single set and no band were essential economies. Creatively, Kosky promises a range of different storytelling styles.
"Sometimes it will be simple storytelling," he explains. "Other stories you want (characters) to tell. And then some stories you can only deal with through abstract images and music, because the story is too complex to involve a literal representation."
"The reason for ("Echo's") length is the musical structure that underpins it," Wright says.
Auds can elect to see the show over two days or in one stretch, from matinee through to evening, as it was performed at the Sept. 9 opening.
Nevin, for one, is energized by the epic length.
"It's a big show; it's an investment," she says. "It's an extraordinary sense of achievement at the end."
