This past month, Peoria audiences were able to see performances from the great powers of the past two centuries and one from the current.

The Bradley theater department produced the 2010 winner of the Olivier Award for Best New Play, “The Mountaintop” by Katori Hall which is a fictional account of the final night of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. set in the Lorraine Motel in Memphis in April 1968. The play was about 90 minutes and performed without intermission by two actors; Aris-Allen Roberson as King and Kiayla Jackson as the fictionalized Camae, a street wise cleaning woman who brings King coffee he ordered from room service. The two actors did a fine job of holding the audience’s attention and guest director Susan Felder is commended for ensuring her actors were well rehearsed for their performances.

Mr. Roberson had a difficult assignment of playing the great man who by 1968 was being denounced on many fronts and under surveillance by J. Edgar Hoover, the closeted homosexual and director of the FBI.  Mr. King had come out against American involvement in the Viet Nam War, as well as agitating for economic justice for African-Americans, and these topics did not sit well with the power structure in the country. He was a marked man and he knew it.

Miss Jackson as Camae is allowed more latitude in her character and her believable portrayal of a smart, informed working class woman was excellent and a good counterweight to the gravitas of Mr. Roberson’s portrayal of King.

Peoria Players produced “The Pirates of Penzance” a Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera starring Lee Wenger as the Pirate King with musical direction by Denise Adams. Whenever we see these two names associated with a show we may assume good humor and musicality, and this production did not disappoint. Mr. Wenger was in good voice and costumed as a dashing comic pirate a la Johnny Depp. Mrs. Adams had her six-piece ensemble of violins, flutes, piano and cello well rehearsed and, aside from accompanying the vocalists, also gave us a wonderful concert of Mr. Sullivan’s music in the overture. It was a refreshing choice of instrumentation that fit perfectly with the lightness of the music. Mina Vogel, a Pekin High School student, played and sang Mabel, the romantic ingénue, very well and is a bright new vocal talent with a lovely trained soprano.

The full title is “The Pirates of Penzance; or, The Slave of Duty” and it was first performed in 1879 at the height of power and wealth of the British Empire. This was the era of “Hail Britannia” and the “sun never sets,” etc. and the work is an example of such confidence and surety that it is able to satirize commonly held assumptions. That we still get the joke of spoofing the Romantic ideal of “duty” is testament to just how deeply those ideals have been planted in our collective consciousness.

This comic opera premiered just three years following the defeat of an American Romantic hero George Custer at the Little Big Horn. Those who saw the original production may have attended a melodrama the night before where those Romantic ideals would have been played sincerely and to strong emotional effect. Gilbert and Sullivan’s parents’ generation may have been scandalized by their poking fun at that generation’s beliefs but the work has stood the test of time and today we don’t remember what all the fuss was about. The play reminds us of how today’s avant-garde becomes tomorrow’s de passé.

The Chinese dance company Shen Yun brought “5,000 years of civilization” to the stage at the Civic Center for two performances. The performances culminated several months of publicity and promotion including mass mailings and on-air advertising. We met with the group’s advance team in September, but Community Word declined to run advertising because the organization wanted us to print stories provided by them, and we thought it a conflict with our journalism. The auditorium was about half full for the Sunday matinee, and those in attendance seemed to enjoy the performance. The glossy program does not list all the performers, but I estimate a company of 50 dancers, singers and musicians.

I have briefly studied Chinese opera and attended performances, and to my limited understanding this group seemed an amalgam of western dance and music. There was one duet of piano and “erhu” a traditional two-string instrument which was very enjoyable, but the two vocal soloists sang in a western style although in Chinese with English sub-titles. The lyrics of one song can only be described as didactic, claiming that evolution, atheism and science were paths that lead us astray from our divine purpose. Shen Yun is the performing arts arm of Falun Dafa, a Buddhist sect in North America and affiliated with Falun Gong a much suppressed and persecuted sect in China.

Two of the dance numbers portrayed peaceful students being beaten and even killed by communist ruffians wearing red sickle and hammer insignias on their black shirts. It reminded me of the brutal treatment received by opera performers during Mao’s cultural revolution in the 1960’s. Unfortunately this type of political, social and cultural suppression continues today as was recently witnessed by the demonstrations for independent candidates in Hong Kong.

I have never seen such a flawless use of live dance and computerized animation which was accomplished by an upstage ground row platform where dancers could exit and at the same time the animation took over for the character to take flight up to the heavens. All of the scenery was idealized “Disneyfied” projections of various Chinese landscapes and was very effective.