“It’s an exciting time for art-house cinemas,” says Carol Johnson, executive director of the Amherst Cinema Arts Center. What she’s enthusing about isn’t movies, however, but plays.
Valley theatergoers’ access to professional stage productions by global companies is exploding, and as she explains it, it’s all thanks to advances in movie-theater technology.
In the next week the theater will screen no fewer than four high-def performances from three international companies: Britain’s National Theatre, the Stratford (Ontario) Shakespeare Festival and The Bolshoi Ballet. There’s also a movie docudrama about a Shakespeare play performed by prison inmates.
The proliferation of stage-to-screen opportunities is due in large part to NT Live, a program of the National Theatre that began broadcasting live stageplays to movie screens in 2009. The series has been an Amherst Cinema fixture since its debut.
Johnson says her organization “has stayed ahead of the curve with state-of-the-art projection and sound technology.” Those updates are not only upgrading the movie-going experience, but multiplying program options via satellite links to high-def broadcasts of international stage productions.
It’s a “wonderful complement to current-release film,” Johnson says.
It’s no mystery why the upcoming shows at Amherst’s art house are heavy on the Shakespeare: The Bard still packs ‘em in. He’s been the hottest ticket in the cinema’s NT Live screenings since the beginning.
First up in the HD series is King Lear from the Stratford Festival, on March 4 and 14. It stars virtuosic Canadian actor Colm Feore, whose performance, raved the Canadian press, “catapults him into the ranks of the world’s greatest living actors.”
This Saturday, with an encore on the 18th, comes a new stage adaptation of Treasure Island. It’s the latest in the National Theatre’s biennial series of “family spectacles,” of which the War Horse megahit is the prime example. Like its NT predecessors, Treasure Island is a sprawling epic with a huge cast and eye-popping theatrical tricks. It also rings some changes on Robert Lewis Stevenson’s original, most remarkably making its young hero, Jim Hawkins — wait for it — a girl.
This year Amherst Cinema has added a season of performances by Russia’s standard-bearing Bolshoi Ballet company. On Sunday they’ll perform Romeo and Juliet — danced not to the classic Tchaikovsky score, but to Prokofiev’s edgier take on the star-crossed lovers. A lesser-known Prokofiev ballet joins the repertoire on April 19: Ivan the Terrible, set to the music composed for Sergei Eisenstein’s 1944 film.
Completing this week’s Shakespeare circle, on the 11th, is the Taviani brothers’ prizewinning 2012 film Caesar Must Die, about a group of hard-core criminals in a maximum-security Italian prison rehearsing a production of Julius Caesar. It was shot in an actual prison and most of the performers are actual inmates.
That’s followed on the 12th (repeated on the 28th) by an utterly different production from the National Theatre, Behind the Beautiful Forevers, adapted by the political playwright David Hare from Katherine Boo’s bombshell book. Set in a Mumbai slum, it’s about ambition, corruption, desperation, global finance and the economics of trash
“HD productions of world-class artists are quite wonderful and a far cry from the old days of just planting a camera and filming from a static position,” Johnson says. It is, as she says, an exciting time for cinemas — and theatergoers, too.•
Chris Rohmann can be contacted at StageStruck@crocker.com.
