It’s probably just a function of Spoleto’s institutional branding, but when you looked at the materials for 1927’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, did you not get the sense that the production was some sort of experimental, edgy theater piece? Funny, certainly, but perhaps with some added bit of theatrical gravitas?

An ingeniously dark and peculiar blend of fairytale and silent - movie homage where live performance effortlessly merges with pre-recorded film, London-based cabaret company 1927’s Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is a wonderfully surreal journey through a variety of skewed and often sinister landscapes.

Yep. Kinda vague, but definitely leaning toward the gravitas.

Here’s a shorter definition of what Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea really was (sadly, it’s gone already): A comedy. As in it was funny, it was intended to make us laugh, and it succeeded, over and over.

The reason that you might struggle to make that critical diagnosis is that it’s so inventively, darkly, wickedly funny that it doesn’t act like a comedy, with all the goofball conventions that automatically identify comedy as lowbrow and fun and a little embarrassing.

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1. Eurydice: PURE Theatre, 10 Storehouse Row, North Charleston
2. Lobby Hero: Stelle Di Domani, Chapel Theatre
3. I Live Next to Horses, Piccolo Fringe, Theatre 99

It occurred to me today that there are a couple of things going on between the big festival’s Amistad and the small festival’s Eurydice. Both are concerned with memory and forgetting, and both make creative use of non-traditional performance spaces. Upon further reflection, I suspect that the latter — staging — divides our tastes more deeply than any other factor.

P&C overview critic Tim Page knocked Amistad’s opera-in-the-round staging Sunday morning, noting that the singers can’t project their voices to everyone in the audience simultaneously. This was part of an overall lukewarm review that declared the opera disappointing. But here’s the thing: The people who decided to stage the opera that way knew going in that 360-degree opera would present these acoustic challenges. They said as much. You could have criticized Amistad for its acoustics without even attending.

The more interesting question to me: What did the audience get in the tradeoff? Because in the ever-shifting tension between form and content, in the ever-morphing context of a media-saturated culture, the design of a production has perhaps never been more important. I found Amistad’s set design fascinating, and the use of space in dress rehearsal got me excited about the story’s mythic aspects.

Fast-forward to Sunday’s Eurydice matinée.

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