The gigli concert playbill

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PL AYBILL the gigli concert

The Gigli concert tom murphy }{

approximate running time: 2 hours & 30 minutes. there will be one 15 minute intermission

TIDBITS

ARTIST NOTE: STUART HUGHES Imagine you’re a doctor and a stranger walks in and says he wants to sing like a great opera singer in six hour-long sessions. Would you think the person insane, whose mad notion needs to be quelled, or an extraordinary being with an individual passion that needs to be encouraged?

• B eniamino

I think, among other things, playwright Tom Murphy is looking at how extraordinary acts of kindness, beauty, heroism and love might be achieved if only we could throw off the fetters of our self-imposed limitations. Limitations that are built out of fear and calcified wounds. Limitations that allow us to accept the inertia that prevents us from bringing out the strange and wonderful and unique from within ourselves or in others.

• “ Dynamatology”

Murphy’s characters are hilarious, pathetic, and tender. They struggle to be free from their delusions, self-denial and fears. If only for a moment, they stand revealed and vulnerable in front of one another. Maybe it is in the simple act of being witnessed, exposed and vulnerable, that they start to feel their real strength, and believe that “anything is possible.” I hope you enjoy your time with this very special play, as much as I have enjoyed exploring and growing within it. Stuart hughes, Irish Man The Gigli Concert

Gigli (1890-1957) was the most famous Italian tenor of his day. Known for the beauty of his voice and his solid musical technique, some critics felt his performances were over-emotional. He appeared in several films most notably the 1943 drama I Pagliacci. is a science invented by the playwright. In early drafts of the play, the Man consulted a regular psychiatrist but Murphy decided he wanted to question the whole idea of psychoanalysis. His fictional science, it should be noted, is based on verbal exchange, just like psychiatry.

• P atrick Mason, who directed the first production

sums up the play as “...the song of the soul in a contemporary world... the pain of the soul in a soulless world.”

• I n

2001 the Abbey Theatre did a whole season of plays by Murphy, including Gigli, an historical epic called Famine, and the greatly beloved (in Ireland), lyrical Bailegangaire.


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The gigli concert playbill by Soulpepper - Issuu