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Faust Gets A Remake From HSO’s Kuan, TheaterWorks’ Ort, WNPR’s McEnroe

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You feel you know Faust? Not so fast.

The immortal legend of eternal damnation has taken many forms, including plays, operas and musicals. It’ll take a new one March 10 to 12 at Hartford Symphony Orchestra’s latest Masterworks program.

The concert-with-drama combines a symphony performance of Franz Liszt’s Faust Symphony with a new play by Colin McEnroe, directed by TheaterWorks Associate Artistic Director Eric Ort, that explores themes from Faust in a series of modern-day monologues.

Liszt, like a number of classical composers before and after him, based his Faust Symphony on the poetic drama written by Johann Goethe in the early 1800s. In Goethe’s version of the age-old tale, about a man who sells his soul in order to gain power and fame, he concentrates on Faust’s complicated romantic relationship with a woman named Gretchen. Liszt’s symphony takes Faust, Gretchen and the devil incarnate Mephistopheles and creates a musical portrait of each of them. The composer captures the characters’ moods in orchestral themes and melodies.

Liszt’s music doesn’t tell a story, which is where Colin McEnroe comes in.

McEnroe’s script consists of different monologues voiced by a series of characters, performed by professional actors Crystal Dickinson (from the Broadway cast of “Clybourne Park”) and R. Ward Duffy (who’s done several shows at TheaterWorks, including “Good People” and “Race”).

HSO Artistic Director Carolyn Kuan conceived of the concert and will conduct its three performances in The Bushnell’s Belding Theater.

“I was thinking about ways of creating new experiences for our audience, and introducing music to people who may be experiencing the Hartford Symphony for the first time,” Kuan said in a phone interview last week. “Liszt’s Faust is a fantastic piece. He was a very lively composer. He was probably a combination of Yo Yo Ma and Justin Bieber.

“Audiences don’t know this piece,” Kuan continues. “Adding the play makes it an even deeper artistic experience. We like to surprise our audiences. This is a contemporary modern exploration of the Faust legend. There are many different ideas going on: Liszt’s interpretation of what Goethe is trying to say, and of course Goethe is taking a story from long ago. Then there’s Colin’s take on that, and Eric also has a vision.”

Eric Ort explained in a phone interview last month that “we decided early on that we didn’t want to connect [McEnroe’s script] literally to Goethe’s play. We felt it wanted to be contemporary. Any one individual can be Faust, Gretchen or Mephistopheles in the course of their life. We got Colin on board really early because of his humor, his writing ability and his current events expertise.”

For his part, McEnroe — the WNPR radio host and longtime Hartford Courant columnist — says, “I was the last guy through the door for this project. I was told from the start that they wanted to contemporize this. How they got me was that Carolyn asked me, and I said yes. It immediately seemed like a fun idea.”

Adapting Faust

McEnroe says he’s “a big fan” of “Randy Newman’s Faust” — a concept album and musical from the 1990s in which the songwriter played Mephistopheles to James Taylor’s God.

“I like the idea of writing for Mephistopheles in a Mr. Applegate kind of way,” McEnroe says. (Applegate is the devil from yet another contemporary Faust, the musical “Damn Yankees,” which the Goodspeed Opera House staged in 2014.)

McEnroe says he and Kuan have worked on enough projects together over the years — including a meditation on Mendelssohn’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Talcott Mountain Music Festival in 2011 — that “we’re kind of familiar with each other’s way of working. You can mess around on more of a loose level. For this, Carolyn did some incredibly deep analysis. How does the music flow? How does the music change? She was always looking for points of stoppage, where we could insert the text. I’m amazed at the level of detail.”

In adapting the Faust story for the 21st century, McEnroe says, “The question in everyone’s head was “Why does this stuff keep happening?’ Think about Lance Armstrong, or Bernie Madoff — people who don’t need to succumb to temptation in order to make a small gain.”

McEnroe also challenged himself to see if “this story could be told in a completely secular way,” before convincing himself that it could not. “I decided that it has to have a supernatural angle. It insists on a recitation of the ills of society.”

“Faust stories have a specific philosophical bent,” Ort agrees. “Moments of the dramatic text come at specific moments in the symphony that Carolyn has found. We discussed to what extent the actors are aware of the orchestra and decided that they’re not.” Dickinson and Duffy are not perched at music stands, as is customary at concerts-with-narrative. They wear costumes and move around the stage.

Ort, Kuan and McEnroe all mention that this “Faust” has undergone numerous changes over the past few weeks. There have been major rewrites, and new concepts were introduced during rehearsals.

“Carolyn has been fearless,” Ort says. “She’ll try anything, as long it is serving the music and the story. It’s all about bringing the music to life.”

A FAUST SYMPHONY by Franz Liszt, conducted by Carolyn Kuan, with added text by Colin McEnroe (directed by Eric Ort), will be performed by the Hartford Symphony Orchestra with special guest actors Crystal Dickinson and R. Ward Duffy on March 10 to 12 in the Belding Theater at The Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. Performances are Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m. Tickets are $35-$68. Kuan will give a pre-concert talk one hour before each performance. 860-987-5900, hartfordsymphony.org