UCF’s Bernstein ‘Mass’ will thrill your weary soul
To quote the late, great George Michael: “Ya gotta have faith.”
Leonard Bernstein’s towering “Mass: A Theatre Piece for Singers, Players and Dancers,” is full of faith — the joy of faith, the mystery of faith, the cataclysmic pain when faith is lost, the sublime peace of faith restored.
At Friday’s opening of the annual UCF Celebrates the Arts, officials may have been praying over more practical matters: That the scores of performers on the Dr. Phillips Center’s Disney Theater stage would all fit; that conductor David Brunner could keep the orchestra on track through Bernstein’s mix of genres, sounds and moods; that among all the lights, smoke and sound, the intimacy of a person’s relationship with God would shine through. Their faith was not misplaced.
The University of Central Florida produced a “Mass” that both stirred the spirit and touched the heart. Even when “West Side Story” composer Bernstein’s complicated music felt a little wrapped up in itself, Michael Wainstein’s stage direction kept the rarely performed piece’s emotion accessible — and made a work some four decades old feel shockingly contemporary.
Written for the 1971 inauguration of the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., “Mass” played to a deeply divided country in which a younger generation had found its voice to question authority. The work is framed by the rituals of the Roman Catholic Mass, where a celebrant sees his young congregants drifting away and so begins to question his own beliefs.
Jeremy Hunt, an associate professor at UCF, was the celebrant — and he mesmerized. His voice maintained its superior quality throughout every section of his impressive range, and his face reflected this man’s inner torment. When he sang a breathtaking Lord’s Prayer, you could hear his very soul trembling.
Other soloists also impressed, none more so than boy soprano Jahdai Figueroa, whose confident, angelic voice ascended to the heavens.
The space was used well — with singers in the theater balconies and trumpet players in the aisles. Choreography by Alaric Frinzi, Elisabeth Christie and Madeline Regier complemented the eclectic nature of the music — everything from hymns to full-on rock — with an energizing pastiche of classical and contemporary styles. (Was that a touch of Madonna’s “Vogue”? A nod to a Ukrainian tropak?)
George Jackson’s bold lighting showered the performers with brilliant beams of violet, aqua, white and gold. But the brightest light of all was how this magnificent work dazzlingly shone into the heart of humankind.
UCF Celebrates the Arts continues through April 14. Get details on “Mass” and other programs at arts.cah.ucf.edu.