RESUME CONTACT CALEB WERTENBAKER

PLAYS

Pericles
Katherine's Colored Lieutenant
Next to Normal
Basetrack
Pericles
Platonov
The Rivals
Cyrano


OPERAS

Don Pasquale
Burke & Hare
Cracked Orlando
Hydrogen Jukebox
Der Kaiser von Atlantis
Rinaldo
Amistad
L’Egisto
Cendrillon
Psyché
Mahagonny



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HYDROGEN JUKEBOX
by Philip Glass
Long Beach Opera - 2015
DIRECTOR:David Schweizer
SET DESIGN:Caleb Wertenbaker
COSTUME DESIGN:The Company
LIGHTING DESIGN:Dan Weingarten
Production Photo

The space LBO appropriated is the Crafted at the Port of Los Angeles marketplace, a warehouse. Chairs surround three sides of a performance space, with a screen for projecting the text on the fourth. The poet, an actor dressed in mufti white and sandals, sits at a typewriter atop what looks like a painter's scaffold on wheels. Six actors in white, who wheel the poet around, portray acolytes. The singers are in black, and they take over the stage floor and three rolling platforms....Would someone please ship this fine production to Connecticut after its final performances in San Pedro next weekend?
-Mark Swed, The LA Times

The production, directed brilliantly by David Schweizer, used the warehouse space effectively, the performers wheeled about the long and broad floor (the audience around three sides of it) on platforms and ladders. The Poet, dressed to look like Ginsberg, appeared atop a wheeled scaffold structure representing the creator of all we see. Sometimes the action had a carnival-like busyness; sometimes it was spastically avant-garde; at others, mathematical, symmetrical. The words to the poems were projected on a giant screen at the other end of the room....the production was right on.
-Timothy Mangan, The Orange County Register

Copyright © 2011-2017 Caleb Wertenbaker