For more than fifteen years, Teatro Zinzanni has been a fixture in Seattle. There’s simply nothing like it. It’s a cabaret and interactive show, with dinner served. The show changes three times a year, with the latest called When Sparks Fly, an interpretation of Frankenstein that involves grants from the Gates Foundation, illusions, a reenactment of Godzilla, acrobatics, and more.
Sparks Will Fly features a cast that includes Dreya Weber, a singer/actress/choreographer/aerialist who has choreographed nearly everyone in pop music, including two of Pink’s Grammy performances. Another star, Elena Gatilova, is a world champion rhythmic gymnast. There is also Russian magician Voronin, a Teatro Zinzanni fixture.
Teatro Zinzanni is never on anyone’s “cheap things to do in Seattle” listicle, but it’s definitely an evening worth saving for, when possible (tickets run about $100 each, but there are discounts available).
I met up with its Founder and Artistic Director Norman Langill for an interview a few weeks ago to talk about all things Teatro Zinzanni.
Let me with the show that’s going on right now, When Sparks Fly, an interpretation of the Frankenstein story. Can you talk a little bit about how this show came to be?
The shows are built on the cast. We have a conceptual idea for a show and then cast around that. We have notions of what we’re going to do, then the stories are written in collaboration with all the artists, what they want to do and what they’re great at. We develop stories and characters out of that, with me steering the ship.
Frankenstein was interesting because we took it more from the idea of ten years after he made the bride. Then the questions are why did he make the monster and why did he make the bride? People talk about him wanting to be God, but he didn’t want to be God, he’s a scientist. Why did he start this project? Did he have a bigger goal in mind? I proposed that he was trying to make a family. He wanted a son and he wanted a daughter to marry the son. In the book, he married his sister, so that didn’t seem so far off. Every experiment he did usually had gone wrong, usually with the assistant giving him the wrong brain or somebody telling him what to do. This time, the Igor character, which is Dreya (Weber), she was in “Gangsters in Love,” she tells him that he still looks unhappy with his results and maybe he needs a mother for his children and a wife, so he makes himself a wife. Again, his assistants make an error and break that heart that was supposed to be inside. At the end of the show, the family comes together and encourages him to use some of his love voodoo instead of the mechanics.
That’s a very loose interpretation, but there are so many versions of Frankenstein. I was sort of stunned. I had seen all of the movies. There have been dozens of them, including Andy Warhol’s Flesh for Frankenstein. There is some Russian version called Frankenstein’s Army, which is when the Russian army was crushing the Germans, the Germans took their dead soldiers and reanimated them.
It’s a really common notion these days because it’s close to cloning. You can make a human being, but the question is “what kind of human being will they be?” The big question is always “Will the monster love you?” You can’t make love in a laboratory. Those are the themes we play with. Each show has a theme and we play with those ideas.
What about Teatro Zinzanni as a whole, which now has been in Seattle for more than fifteen years?
It started because, twenty-two years ago, we produced a show for the Cultural Olympics in Barcelona in 1992 called Gumbo YaYa. It had a Japanese/French/Cajun/English cast. It was about rice farming. When I was doing advance work in Barcelona, I saw this tent, an actual tent. I went inside and was transported because I didn’t expect it to look inside like what it looks like on the outside. It’s best when you do theater, or any kind of event, that the environment you put the audience into is magical because then they’re ready for anything. If you go to a standard theater with a standard seating, you’re sitting next to a stranger that you’re not going to meet, then all you can do is laugh and clap, everything else is forbidden. This environment, which was really a nightclub when it started, starts with the audience already being off their feet and floating. The question is, “How do you take them to another world?”
It took me about five years to locate a tent that was available. This one was in an Antwerp amusement park. I met the owner, who had been making these for five generations, and convinced him to let me have it. It came over in 1998. I put together this show based on my work at Bumbershoot and seeing all these street performers and comedians all over the world.
It started as a ten week project, after the summer. But it took it off and that was over 7000 shows ago and about eighty different versions of the cast. Now we have a company. Everybody in Frankenstein has been in the show before. The guy, Voronin, had has done eight years of performances with us off and on. It’s down to a fine science now. The differences become the stories.
It’s a challenge for me and a challenge for the performers to keep creating, but that’s what you’re looking for. That’s the fun part.
How did you assemble the cast and work on developing each routine and sketch?
I guess it started because Voronin wanted to do a show with the Wizard of Oz, Frankenstein, and what we were calling Waiters for Godot. Those were three ideas. We couldn’t do all three, so we picked Frankenstein and started with that.
The first thing you have to is crank up to the ceiling, and having lightning, and creating something. I thought I couldn’t start the show that way because what are you going to do after that? I thought we should put that at the end and make something else at the beginning?
Then I watched a movie by Thomas Edison. He did a movie about Frankenstein. Frankenstein was made in a big pot, in his sort of kitchen. Let’s make him out of an oven.
There’s also a movie called Heart of a Dog, a Russian movie, a sort of Frankenstein movie. He takes a dog, castrates the dog, and puts human genitals on and a pituitary gland in the brain. The dog morphs into a dog-like man, or a man with doggy instincts. That and another Russian movie called Formula of Love, which is about Count Cagliostro. Interestingly enough, there’s a character that is a 17th century, incredibly charismatic magician and hypnotist, a favorite of the French Court and the Russian Court. He was a complete charlatan. Orson Welles made a movie about him called Black Magic.
Americans didn’t really pick up on it, but Russians loved Formula of Love, which has this theme as Frankenstein. He could manipulate anybody and anything, but he made a bet with himself that this beautiful woman could fall in love with him in fourteen days. He got this woman because he was a doctor and told this baron who was sick that he had to leave but would take a member of his family and work with her and make him better. Of course, he picked the beautiful daughter. He goes to his next job, which is a young baron falling in love with a statue. Of course, the young baron falls in love with his protégé. He realizes that she won’t fall in love with him and it doesn’t work. He learns something: that love means that you’re willing to die for somebody. Learning that was enough for him. Man can manipulate anything, but he cannot manipulate love.
Love became an interesting topic. I met a guy the other night who is a professor at the University of Montana and he teaches about Frankenstein. He said that he thought Frankenstein created the monster to kill his family. I took the exact opposite tack that Frankenstein created the monster to create a family because he wanted one of his own. In the book, he does it because his mother dies and he never wants anyone to die again. That was Mary Shelley’s take on it. But with Count Cagliostro, all these directors, Andy Warhol, and Thomas Edison, everybody making their own interpretation, this is a wide-open area and I don’t have to stick to a book. I’m going to make my own interpretation of man’s ability to create life. But can he make the life love him? Cagliostro couldn’t do it. Dr. Frankenstein was incapable of love. It became a really interesting story.
And each time Voronin, the magician, comes back, I build a new magic trick for him. It’s hard doing illusions in 360 degrees. It’s easy when it’s just on stage, but hard when the audience is surrounding you. You have to be able to look ten ways to the jack to figure out how to do that.
There are things that the history of Zinzanni puts in, things that we’ve done before, and things that we’ve been following, and there’s new stuff.
We talk about shows coming up and we communicate and keep talking the ideas through. That’s the fun part.
How have the shows evolved over the past fifteen years?
Just more detail. We’re learning more about how to play with the audience, and how to ask for responses and getting them. If you want a crowd to dance, don’t ask them, tell them. Have them get up, and look at that special someone and tell them to ask that person to dance. With men, they lose the dancing bug at about age twenty. Don’t rely on men to ask. Force them into the decision. People love it. It’s hugging is what it is. You get to hug for three minutes.
We learned how to toast. People love toasts. They feel proud and strong. I think we’re mainly about comedy and being funny. The difference between a comedian and a serious performer is that a comedian is like a doctor with a stethoscope on the heartbeat of the audience. You’re working the whole time, working for laughs and for a good time.
Dreya is always cast as a femme fatale, so how about making her ugly and she’s transformed by love? That was a challenge for her to not be a femme fatale all the time.
Beauty and humor are really close. It’s great when you see a beautiful performer be funny. Let’s face it, are we really thrilled when we see a beautiful person just being beautiful? Do we feel empathy for them? Maybe when you’re a teenager, but after that, it’s like, “Oh please, can you lighten up so I can see your human side?”
{When Sparks Fly plays through September 21. Tickets and more info can be found here.}
