Ravinia Celebrates Leonard Bernstein with New Immersive Theater Show
Robert Niles - Violinist.com
August 7, 2021
Ravinia Festival is celebrating the musical and humanitarian legacy of Leonard Bernstein with a new permanent installation, "Bernstein's Answer."
Developed by Los Angeles-based BRC Imagination Arts, "Bernstein's Answer" is an immersive 10-minute video production that plays in the new Music Box facility at Ravinia.
…
"My father was all about communicating and making a connection with his audiences," Bernstein's daughter Jamie said before the show's press preview yesterday. "Everything he did was really a form of teaching, a form of communicating something that he was excited about."
"Also my father was so in love with every kind of music that there is in the world. As long as it was great, he was in, whether it was Balinese Gamelan or R&B - anything that he ran across, he was all in. That's very contemporary too, because now today's composers feel completely free to write in any style they want or any bunch of styles - they can thread it together any way they want, and everybody honors and celebrates that.”
…
"My father's music always contains the questions about our existence, and why do we have so much darkness, and how do we rise above it?," she said. "I think it's great that Brad and his team found a way to really make that an organic part of their presentation, because it's how my dad was.