My overall impression
If like many others this is among your favorite poems, you should take time to check this production out and then talk about it with other people who also know the source material.
It’s so interesting how they did this. I’ve never seen a poem staged before and I don’t know what to compare it to. They leave the text pure, interpreting it for us with knockout acting and fascinating movement that’s kind of like dance, but not really.
I very much enjoyed watching this, but I didn’t always understand what I was seeing, and how the use of prop stuff related to the text or the performance.
That was the only downside. All that prop stuff going on is more distracting than not (especially those lamps clicking on/off/flinging around which got on my nerves after a while). More than once I kind of lost track of where we were in the poem and interpreting their interpretation of it because I was trying to figure out what was inside the balloons, and why there were balloons to begin with, and I wonder what they’re using to pop the balloons and o look Christmas lights this time.
I would love to see this again with more of what they were already doing with performance and movement, and far less use of stuff. The performances were so strong I don’t see what the use of stuff adds to it. But I don’t know.
