Adaptations include orchestral reductions (The Clever One by Carl Orff (17 Players), The Perfect American by Philip Glass), the creation of new stories within works (Maria de Buenos Aires), revised or new stories (Winterreise, The Fairy Queen, The Diary of Anne Frank), and new reduced stage versions (Macbeth by Ernest Bloch - 110 minute one act for 7 singers, Medea by Luigi Cherubini - 95 minute one act for 7 singers).
Against every better judgment I could possibly summon under the circumstances, Mitisek has, indeed, worked out a conflation of these two trajectories down the dark road of heartbreak and self-destruction, and played them off against each other without violating the integrity of either.
For staging there was a cluttered attic room, a bedand scattered trash... Unfeeling, rejecting Lotte was done in dumb show by a dancer, Jennifer Hart Jackson. At the very end, when the dead Werther lay in her lap, she extended one hand in a caress – a small directorial touch that I found extremely moving. Michelle Schumann was the pianist, behind a scrim. Midway,...the slow movement of Schubert’s last piano sonata, which, in this context, became the saddest music in the world – and also, at that moment at least, the most beautiful.