A play broke out in the middle of the Tucson Symphony Orchestra‘s season finale on Friday, April 8.
Just as the two women sitting a few rows from the stage were settling into the orchestra’s performance of Mendelssohn’s incidental music for Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer’s Night Dream,” UA acting student Ashling Shockey and her professor, Kevin Black, burst onto the Tucson Music Hall stage in search of young lovers who had lost their way.
One of the women gasped; she wasn’t expecting that.
The idea of having actors act out scenes from Shakespeare’s famous play about a magic potion that would make young lovers fall for one another was a first for the orchestra. And it was a fitting ending to a pretty remarkable coming-out-of-the-pandemic season.
The students from the University of Arizona School of Theatre, Film & Television — Shockey, Tess Dinerstein, Max Murray, Sydney Townsend and CJ Barbosa — earned a rousing ovation from Friday’s audience, some of whom were pretty impressed at how the students seamlessly navigated through the maze of musicians taking up the bulk of the stage.
Gomez even got into the act, pointing to Shockey’s hiding spot near the cellos and basses in the opening scene and shrugging his shoulders in response to a character in another scene.
When the orchestra played the finale, Mendelssohn’s famous “Wedding March,” the actors marched toward the exit arm in arm as if they were heading to the nearest preacher man to say “I do.” Shockey, in the role of the dutiful Puck, completed the wedding scene, tossing confetti flowers behind the young couples.
Friday was the first time since 1954 that the orchestra performed the Mendelssohn, which was an appetizer for the concert's main event: Schubert's Symphony No. 9 "The Great."
Under Gomez’s baton, the symphony was indeed great.
Schubert’s No. 9 is a monster of a symphony and not just because it lasts nearly an hour.
There’s no down time. It opens with a burst of energy that swells and contracts with crashing timpani and frenetic strings calmed by bursts of brass and the interplay of the flute and clarinet, and it never lets up.
When the orchestra got to the final movement, Gomez got his jam on. He was bouncing and twisting and waving his arms toward the strings, then back to the winds and brass with a quick jerk to the timpani. For a moment, it looked like he was rocking out to some 1980s big hair band who was playing his favorite song.
