The annual production of “Peter & the Wolf” at the Guggenheim Museum, which launched again last night and is running this year through December 13, has evolved in largely wonderful but also occasionally baffling ways since fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi first began narrating it eighteen years ago.
In the early years, Mizrahi did vocal impressions of all the characters to accompany the instrumentalists playing the score of Sergei Prokofiev’s 1936 musical fable about a young boy who disobeys his grandfather by venturing into the park, where he meets a series of friendly animals (each with its own melody played by its own musical instrument) and winds up heroically capturing a menacing wolf. Mizrahi would honk like a duck when the oboist played the duck’s melody, sneer like a cat along with the clarinetist’s cat-like music, kvetch in an Old World accent as the grandfather in partnership with the bassoon.
The Works and Process production long ago expanded. It now has dancers from Dance Heginbotham accompanying the musicians, and enlivening the action: When Cameron Cullen plays the flute, for example, Paige Barnett Kulbeth does John Heginbotham’s balletic choreography that suggests the fluttering movement of a bird. Mizrahi no longer does impressions.
He still has plenty to do; indeed, his participation expanded as well. He directs the show, and designed both the colorful costumes and the vivid set — the New York skyline as a backdrop to Central Park, which features patches of grass, a park bench, a rock, a NYC Sanitation Department trash can, and an imposing tree with an ambitious branch.
And Mizrahi not only still narrates, he has added ten minutes to the half-hour concert introducing each instrumentalist from Ensemble Connect with jokey commentary. When he introduces bassoonist Marty Tung performing a couple of bars to suggest the grandfather, Mizrahi says “My back hurts just listening to that.” When he introduces the strings, who play Peter’s melody, Mizrahi says “they’re a great ensemble; they’re all very good-looking, I’ll add.” When he introduces the percussionists, who makes the sounds of the hunter and his gun, he jokes about having zero tolerance for firearms. When he introduces the French horn player Will Sands, who makes the sounds for the wolf, Mizrahi says something like (I’m not sure I’ve caught his exact wording): Leave it to the French people to come up with something that terrifies. Huh?
There is also an unfortunate shtick once the story gets underway in which Norton Owen as the grandfather keeps on entering the stage at the wrong time, as if addled by age. Who thought this was funny? It’s just awkward, awkward enough to make one wonder whether the guy’s confusion is for real.
“Peter & the Wolf” is a terrific way to introduce young children to the glories of both classical music and theater, which is surely why it has generated countless recordings and productions over the past ninety years, and drawn in an astonishing range of celebrity narrators (a small sample: Leonard Bernstein, David Bowie, Carol Channing, Boris Karloff, Eleanor Roosevelt, Weird Al Yankovic.) If Mizrahi might consider being a bit more circumspect in his effervescence, he is a worthy inheritor and innovator of the tradition.
Works & Process: Peter & the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev with Isaac Mizrahi
Guggenheim Museum through December 13
Running time: 40 minutes
Tickets: $25.00 – $105.00
