Come Together - Theater Concert""

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A theatre concert is a concert with added theatric elements, meaning that characters, situations and costumes are a vital part of the show, whereas it contains no dialogue, play-/singback or storyline. Important for a theatre concert are the musicians and actors all performing live and on stage; in other words, nothing is hidden from the audience. The concept appeals to people of all ages, as 8-year-olds will enjoy the music and scenery in their own way just as the original 70-yearold Beatle does.
A theatre concert interprets music just as it has always been done for centuries with Mozart and Shakespeare. The difference is that it is not known how Mozart played Mozart, but it is known how The Beatles played The Beatles. The concept of a theater concert is therefore that this should not prevent dealing with the cultural heritage; on the other hand, it should rather encourage to interpret it.

The people behind Come Together are primarily Nikolaj Cederholm, who is a Danish director, manager and playwright. In his mid-teens he formed the theatre group Dr. Dante, gaining great attention doing a variety of shows. This later lead Cederholm to accept the position of managing a theatre he renamed Dr. Dante’s Avenue and securing its position as the leading theatre in Danish scene art during the 1990’s. After doing the first theatre production ever of Ellis’ American Psycho, Cederholm introduced a new concept to theatres worldwide – the theatre concert. This he did in 1994 with The Theatre Concert Gasolin’, a show about same-titled legendary Danish band of the 1970’s, creating a success so massive that several setups have played since, and a tour is planned to take place in 2011. Cederholm has subsequently created and directed a number of shows, including theatre concerts The Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, and now Come Together.

Musicians and twin brothers Jens & Peter Hellemann recieved public regocnition when they initiated their work with Nikolaj Cederholm arranging the music on the theatre show Simon, a show that tells the story about the legendary Danish multi-millionaire and unconventional airline owner Simon Spies, filled with sex, ladies, booze, drugs, business, and airplanes. Later, they collaborated on the theatre concert The Beach Boys in 2008 and Come Together, the biggest Danish theatrical succes of 2009. Following Come Together, Cederholm and the Hellemann brothers teamed up again when performing theatre concert Bob Dylan, highly praised for its musical compositions.

Australian Brendan Shelper is the aerial director of Come Together. With years of experience, Shelper teaches the actors to defy gravity in countless ways throughout the show, transforming normally earth-bound actors and singers to look like trained acrobats flying easily through the air.
He has also worked on a production of Tannhäuser at The Royal Danish Opera, as well as The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan.

Kim Witzel is a Danish set designer. Working together with Nikolaj Cederholm from the very start of Dr. Dante in 1979, he set the standard of their visual expression in which everything had to be possible with low funding. Witzel was the man behind the set of American Psycho, and has afterwards designed sets for Cederholm’s Simon, Bob Dylan and The Beach Boys amongst others.

Anja Vang Kragh is a Danish fashion designer, illustrator and costume designer. Graduating from the Danish Design School in 1997, she has already collaborated with John Galliano/Christian Dior in Paris as well as Stella McCartney in London. In Denmark, Kragh has produced costumes for Cederholm’s Gasolin’, The Beach Boys and Bob Dylan, as well as sensations Bunbury and Tartuffe produced at The Royal Danish Theatre.

Come Together is a show based on The Beatles. In order to produce a theatre concert, it had to be the trademark of Come Together not to be a regular cover show. Incorporating this premise in every part of the show makes it a unique presentation in every way. The characters are designed based on the universe The Beatles created throughout the sixties, incorporating historical events and contemporary phenomena. The characters are:

Actors:
The Medieval Lady
The TV presenter
The Jester
Napoleon
Voltaire
The Gatsby girl
The Russian
The Red girl

Band:
Cesar, guitar
Faroe Islands woman, guitar
Turkish man, horns
The hippie, drums
The graphic designer, bass
The bell boy, piano and band leader

The elaborate costumes span the history of clothing, some in distorted, dirty and worn colors, while other integrate an ecstatic feeling of flower power full of colors. Feminine, meticulously made dresses with narrow waists and huge skirts fill the stage alongside black coats, uniforms and wigs, and rarely is an actor seen without an extravagant hat to complete the outfit.

Crucial to the show is the element of flying, as what astonishes the audience is the realization, that the people flying above their heads are not acrobats, but musicians and singers performing everything live in mid-air. Two great towers set in each side of the stage are also smoothly utilized to perform free-fall drops, and enabling the actors to walk upwards, downwards and sideways, constantly changing the direction of gravity. Resultant are the set and the flying contributing and supporting each other in a way that heightens both.

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Napoleon, a Victorian prostitute, and a flying piano walk into a theater, where they collide with The Beatles

That’s honestly the best description I can give of “Come Together,” a theater concert I saw in Amsterdam’s Carré Theater last night. I was given tickets to this show for my graduation and really did not know what to expect. Sure, I looked up clips on YouTube, but I still had no idea what I was getting myself into. Theater concerts have been pretty happening here over the past few years, but they’re always done by the original bands/singers in question and there are never elaborate costumes involved.

Not so with “Come Together,” which is made up of Beatles songs performed by an ensemble of excellent Danish performers, and had its first run in Copenhagen at the end of 2009. For a solid 90 minutes, they sweep you up in a drug-addled, uncomfortable, hilarious, alien, wonderful, gravity-defying smoke-filled haze of theatrics and newly-arranged, magnificently performed, musical classics. From the unsettling opening with “Yesterday,” which is sung out of its usual order, through the fantastically gothic incarnation of “Eleanor Rigby” and the contemporary rock-concert version of “All You Need Is Love,” to the intimate, tender rendition of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away,” the audience is swept up in a wave of “I don’t know what the fuck is going on, but I am loving the shit out of it.” When the last song before intermission ended, I turned to my friend and asked “is this the Apocalypse?” To which she replied, “I think it might be.”

I hope that by now it’s become clear there is no way one can truly explain the nature of this theater concert. It is big and bold on some occasions, sparse and alien on others, yet can also be lovely, friendly, intimate. It does away with our ideas of what musical performance should look like, especially during numbers like “I Am The Walrus,” which is sung by Napoleon while he stands on a wall at a 90 degree angle to the rest of us and “Across the Universe” which is sung, bafflingly and fantastically, completely upside down by a performer floating through the darkness, suspended from his feet.

“Come Together” is a great many things (as evidenced by the fact that I’ve run out of adjectives to describe it), but it is most emphatically not a musical. There is no narrative structure. There is, most certainly, a structure to the complete performance, but is not something that can be retold. It’s a structure which builds, but which must be experienced. It is, then, perhaps most like a dream – or what I imagine a trip on certain hallucinatory drugs is like.

Here’s where I would usually link you to upcoming shows, but I’ve run into a slight snag, which is that I can’t find a performance schedule anywhere online. Their final performance in Amsterdam is tonight, so if you’re in the area I highly recommend that you contact Carré to inquire after tickets, but beyond that, I have no clue when (and if) this show will be performed again. So I’ll just send this blog post into the ether, hoping that it will one day reach someone who, like me, considers going to see this show, but has no clue what she (or he) is in for. To that person I say, go. It doesn’t matter that you don’t understand what you’re going to see. It doesn’t matter that after you’ve seen it, you still don’t truly know. But you’ll be happy you went. I promise.


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