BlueSky post: MN Fringe show #19: All Your Shimmering Gold; nuclear arms manufacturers stage a few scenes from Das Rheingold for us, the American public, their very generous customer base; based on details of a real contract we’re really paying for; dazzling and unsettling - 5 stars
Like a lot of the best live theater, “All Your Shimmering Gold” from Michael Torsch’s theater company SUPERMOON, is fairly resistant to being summarized. You really have to see it for yourself, which I highly recommend you do (or, I guess, *very* highly recommend, since this is 5 star review :) “All Your Shimmering Gold” is spectacle meant to be seen with your own eyes, felt personally in real time, not constrained or limited by someone else’s words. But words are all I have so, I’m going to use them to best of my ability to give you some reasons to go see the show in the theater.
“All Your Shimmering Gold” is big, both in literal size, and in its ambitions. It takes some really big swings creatively. As others would say, this show f*cks hard. It’s exactly the kind of crazy risk a framework like the Minnesota Fringe Festival was created to support.
“I curse love.”
The show is presented initially as if it were an investors meeting for shareholders of the defense contractor Northrop Grumman, thanking us (the American taxpayers) for our investment in a new nuclear deterrent force that will cost $1.7 TRILLION over the next 30 YEARS. Some audience members posted about being confused for a moment at actually perhaps having walked into a corporate presentation (the rest of the show makes it clear that’s not the case). Some audience members apparently walked away thinking, “Wow, I’m glad that’s all fictional and not actually true” to the point where now the creators have to state at the end of the show that - no, this is real. This is an actual defense contract that we are actually paying for. The video really is posted on the Northrop Grumman website, and all the details of how it breaks down are the actual line items in the agreed upon defense plan. So… uh, yikes.
“It’s an opera. Nothing happens in it.”
Once the presenter (Torsch) gives his initial overview, utilizing a three-sided screen above the stage (making sure all sides of the thrust audience get a good view), he tells the audience that they wanted to provide some entertainment for us while we’re waiting for our own personal nuclear warhead to be boxed up backstage. (Don’t leave before they come out with your enormous gift bag and receipt at the end - and no, I’m not kidding.) The entertainment decision they landed on was, of course, the operatic works of composer Richard Wagner (If you need a quick explainer for why there was a burst of uncomfortable audience laughter at the announcement - Wagner was German, and Hitler was a big fan. For added fun, Operation Paperclip, and The Manhattan Project.) The Northrop Grumman company reps (Simone Bernadette, Caleb Byers, Mads Granlund, and Genevieve Waterbury, co-creators of the show along with Torsch), will regale us with some select scenes from the opera Das Reingold.
“You cannot escape the curse.”
Short version, three Rhinemaidens are guarding the Rhinegold, which looks really good to a passing dwarf named Alberich (Torsch). But no one can steal the gold away unless they renounce love, which Alberich is more than willing to do. He steals the gold and forms it into a ring of enormous power, but is convinced to give it up by some kind of goddess (?) who comes to talk sense to him. The presentation begins with scenes from a filmed version of the opera, transitioning to onstage Rhinemaidens, in fabulous flowing glittery costumes designed by Granlund, lip-synching to the audio recording of the opera. In a perfect bit of live theater magic, this later elevates to a moment when the actress playing that aforementioned goddess(?) appears and actually sings an aria live with her own classically trained voice. It’s chilling in the best way. (Oh, and don’t worry, you do get supertitles translating the German singing, although these are frequently littered with emojis or abbreviations such as LOL, so it’s clearly not a literal translation, more one for comic effect.)
“Thousands of cascading centrifuges.”
But this is also interspersed with video of the defense presentation from earlier, and a discussion of the process for enriching uranium so it is weapons grade and ready to be used in a nuclear bomb (just as Alberich will need to melt down the gold to make it into a ring). In addition, we get shown a different kind of ring, a set of concentric circles which outlines the blast radius and effects of a nuclear bomb - and they verbally overlay that on top of the whole seven county Twin Cities metro area). All of which makes the show sound much more literal and pedantic than it is. The transitions and overlays between the different threads of information and legend are incredibly fluid, often brief, but they resonate loudly and strongly. Even with all this spectacle, the showstopper might well be the reading of the receipt by Torsch (including poetry from Mads Plonski). There are a lot of line items in the receipt - missiles, silos, trucks, bases, communication grids, etc. - at a cost of $1.7 trillion over the next thirty years of “peace through deterrence” - $56 billion per year, $350 per taxpayer (hey, that’s less than a dollar a day for our nukes, what a bargain). But the cost changes from dollars to everyday things normal people pay for (at the cost of your neighbor’s house, at the cost of paying for a wedding, at the cost of taking your dog to the vet, etc.) to finally things you can’t put a price on (at the cost of your feet in the sand, at the cost of a new idea, at the cost of knowing that things could be different, etc.)
“All that ever was, all that ever is, ends.”
The quiet genius of “All Your Shimmering Gold” is that it doesn’t hold your hand and walk you through what everything means. It merely places all the elements before you, and trusts the brains of the audience to work it all out for themselves. When I first learned about it, I honestly wasn’t at all sure it was going to work. But given the previous theater creations of the artists involved, I should have known they’d pull it off. It’s a stunning, surprising, mesmerizing, unsettling, really wild piece of live performance. You should see it yourself before it closes on Saturday.
5 stars - Very Highly Recommended
Here’s some handy links to coverage of 5 Star and 4.5 Star Shows I've Seen (VERY Highly Recommend), 4 Star and 3.5 Star Shows I've Seen (Highly Recommended), Other Shows I've Seen (3 Stars or Less), as well as my Fringe Top 10, Top 11 to 20 and Returning Favorites lists for this year, and all the coverage of this year’s Minnesota Fringe Festival.
As I’m sure many artists are, I find myself struggling with the idea of
just “taking time off” (what a luxury) and submerging myself in a whole
lot of theater for 11 days while the world is on fire so… I’m going to
put some phrases and links down here (and at the end of each post going
forward) and if you find yourself compelled to explore one or more of
them, so much the better. There’s a lot going on, and it can be easy to
get overwhelmed and tune out, but as Congresswoman Sarah McBride
recently said, “If everybody shows a little courage, nobody needs to be a
hero.” I freely admit this list and these links are hardly
exhaustive. It's just something to get started. Do what you can, where
you can, however you can. Let’s help one another get through this.
Contacting your elected officials about the issues that matter to you (and protesting as necessary)
Starvation in the Gaza Strip
Immigration raids around the United States
Ukraine fighting off invasion by Russia
Trans rights
Climate change action
Housing shortage and the unhoused
Reproductive Rights
Voting rights, and running for office
The courts, from the Supreme Court on down to the local level
Don’t forget to laugh - even gallows humor is still humor
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