Apartment613

Photo courtesy of Robert Bodrog from 4pianos2hands.com

Take your familiar theatre review column, sprinkle in some academic insights and a good dose of industry knowledge, and you’ve got So Much Theatre: a semi-regular feature by Apartment613′s Andrew Snowdon. Follow Andrew on twitter: he’s @snobiwan.

Dreams sometimes have a roundabout way of coming true.

2 Pianos 4 Hands traces the funny and touching story of two young boys who grow up chasing the dream of becoming concert pianists. Far from being a conventional play, it takes the form of progressive anecdotal vignettes or brief scenes interwoven with stunning live piano performance.

Since Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt created the play 15 years ago, 2 Pianos 4 Hands has been performed the world over by different pairs of performers, both male and female (a testament to the common experience of aspiring musicians). Ted Dykstra and Richard Greenblatt have returned to their piano benches for one last farewell tour, playing themselves again, while also taking on a variety of roles including each other’s parents and various music teachers. The set consists of only the two grand pianos and a backdrop of two suspended picture frames that serve, with the aid of a variety of back-projection effects, to suggest different scenes and settings.

Dykstra and Greenblatt are not merely highly-skilled pianists (and that they are). Here their particular power to entertain lies in their ability to do other things at the same time. They can pull off an entire physical comedy routine while playing a moderately difficult piece without missing a beat or dropping a note—unless they intend to. Since they are often seated at the piano—invisible from the waist down and busy from the neck down—the comedy depends to a great degree on their considerable facial acting ability. Dykstra and Greenblatt both have decades of experience and success as performers on stage and screen, and they know how to tell a story and put on a show. But a performance that relies so much on music itself to tell the story and convey emotion demands a different kind of perception on the part of the audience.

Make no mistake: 2 Pianos 4 Hands is all about the music. Having at least some appreciation for classical piano music, and musical skill, is a basic requirement to enjoy the performance. Beyond even that, audiences without familiarity with music theory (for example, that a C♯ scale is laden with accidentals) will find the majority of the spoken humour sails right over their heads. Music nerds (or ex-music nerds) will find themselves staring in a mirror, music lovers will find themselves staring at the performers’ hands, and those indifferent to music may well find themselves staring at their watches.