Nov. 20 EAST FARMINGDALE -- "Bell, Book and Candle," Second Stage; through Dec. 24; Arena Players Theater, Route 109.
As bassist Senon Williams puts it: 'The underground people are getting hip to world music and the world music side is getting hip to how you don't have to have a dreadlock wig and Guatemalan pants to be cool.' Sometimes Nimol will light a candle on stage to remember those killed by the Khmer Rouge.
Some Jacobean scripts had lighting cues, demanding the best bright-burning wax candles on stage to make the dark denser when they were extinguished.
At the Albert Hall a few nights before, playing alone on a candle-lit stage, Keys talked vibrantly about her feelings for New York: "It feeds me, the streets are so full of life".
"She blows the candles out," the stage directions say.
A scattering of votive candles on the stage underscored a funereal atmosphere, and so did Ms. Anderson's echo-treated violin annotations and organlike synthesizer hum.
With only stage candles for lighting, the theater was too dark for audience members to read programs, which did not include translations of texts (though they are available on the theater's Web site, millertheatre.com).com
The complex had no generator and it was far too dangerous for the audience to leave, so we played the entire concert pretty well from memory (a feat I don't think many professional orchestras could achieve), with just a dozen hastily assembled candles lighting the stage.
At time, it felt like you were sitting at a magic show, wondering how the producers pulled off such a quick set change or got all those candles onto the stage, or hid the phantom into pieces of scenery.
With candles lining the stage, each of the four coaches, the Top 3, host Carson Daly and some of the former "Voice" contestants from Season 3 held a sign with the name and age of one of the victims as they did a Jeff Buckley-inspirenditiontion "Hallelujah".
Eleven tall white candles burned on the stage, one for each victim and another representing hope.
