Photography Courtesy to Allie Magee
Duke Ellington’s album Such Sweet Thunder was inspired by his visit to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival while he was on tour in Canada during the summer of 1956. Infatuated by the words of Shakespeare's sonnets and plays, Ellington even named the album after a line in the playwright's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Now, four St. Louis arts organizations are further intertwining Ellington's music to the theatre with a multidisciplinary production, setting the 12-part jazz suite to its own love story of the same name—comprised of multiple Shakespearean works.
Titled Such Sweet Thunder, the production is "an exciting mix of music, dance, and theatre," says the show's director Bruce Longworth, who's also directed such works as The Winter’s Tale, Henry V, Othello, and Hamlet for the Shakespeare Festival St. Louis. "That’s what excited me about the project, and I think that’s what brought the others into the project. It’s not your usual event."
The play follows two characters Kate (played by Rayme Cornell) and Henry (played by Ron Himes), both created by Longworth, as they play into different scenes from notable Shakespeare works, but set in the 1950s—a nod to the time period in which Ellington wrote his album.
The show is a collaboration between Shakespeare Festival St. Louis, The Big Muddy Dance Company, Jazz St. Louis, and Nine Network of Public Media, and three free performances at Public Media Commons from October 3–5. The plot follows “a tempestuous love story between a couple who fall in love, get married, have some rough times, and come out the other end together,” Longworth says.
Featuring text and scenes from 15 of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets, Longworth says that "98 percent of what you’ll hear spoken [at the show] are Shakespeare’s words; the remaining 2 percent are mine." So, he expects that "Shakespeare aficionados are going to recognize the text and they are going to understand that I pulled text from a whole lot of plays to create a single story."
He feels that the St. Louis rendition—comprising dancing, acting, and the music from a 15-piece band—propels Ellington's music forward. It's the first time the album has been performed in this way. In 1960, French choreographer Maurice Béjart reimagined the 1957 suite as a ballet production.
With a mid-’50s setting, the costumes reflect that era, but, Longworth says, the dance is very modern. Eighteen dancers from Big Muddy Dance Company will perform original choreography by Dexandro Montalvo, a director and choreographer from San Francisco.
“The dance is going to be exciting to watch, the music is just tremendous,” Longworth says. “Shakespeare wrote a lot about love. He wrote about jealousy, betrayal, reconciliation, and forgiveness—that’s basically the arc of this story. It’s a very personal story. It’s a story people will understand and it will resonate.”
