TAMAR OF THE RIVER
By Joshua H. Cohen & Marisa Michelson
Prospect Theater Company
Sets: Brett Banakis
Lights: Brian Tovar
Costumes: Candida K. Nichols
“The Prospect Theater Company’s alluring and lyrical production of “Tamar,” a full-fledged musical is gracefully directed by Daniel Goldstein.”
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You have to admire the muscular and unapologetic theatricality of Tamar of the River, Marisa Michelson and Joshua H. Cohen's new musical, now making its world premiere at the Baruch Performing Arts Center in a production by Prospect Theater Company. In an age when the stage increasingly seeks to emulate the screen in both form and content, to see a director take advantage of live performance with uniquely theatrical tools is a breath of fresh air. With an excellent cast, director Daniel Goldstein has created some arresting moments on stage. Goldstein fits the huge scope of this play into the space by using every corner of the theater, including the catwalks behind the audience. Unraveling scrolls and multitudes of little lanterns on a hillside make for spine-tingling stage pictures.
– Zachary Stewart, TheaterMania
Director Daniel Goldstein has put together a production that is visually as well as aurally arresting. There’s no masking the formidable talents that have created this work, which, if there’s any theatrical justice, should find its way into adventurous opera houses and regional theatres with the necessary musical chops around the country and even internationally.
– Rochelle Denton, NY Theater Now
The direction by Daniel Goldstein and choreography by Chase Brock are well suited to the piece and to the music, perfectly complementing the strange and compelling tone with strange and compelling staging and movement. There is no question that Tamar of the River is an arresting and sensual threatrical piece. A grand gesture in the greatest tradition of grand gestures.
– Tzipora Kaplan, Theater is Easy
Director Daniel Goldstein and choreographer Chase Brock have molded this uniformly talented band of singer-actor-dancers into a remarkably cohesive band of voices and bodies, making brilliant use of long poles, like those used in stick fighting, to embody multiple images of fluidly dynamic bodies in motion, some of it in perfectly synchronized lock-step formations. There's a pretty moment when the actors manipulate long ribbons of paper, and another when the ribbons are of cloth and wound around Tamar, in her undergarments, to form a dress.
– Samuel L. Leiter – Theater’s Leiter Side