I can't help but mock this. Changing the text, as I've argued*, is a very different thing from reimagining the work through radical restagings, and Not Okay. I mean it's fine...it doesn't actually hurt anyone, least of all dead authors and composers, but I think it's, eh, dumb.
Somehow it's particularly galling when the driving impulse is to indulgently correct for the political consciousness of people from another time. I know I sound like a hypocrite if you're anti-regie, but I still believe this is not what most haute regie productions do.
But maybe I understand the indignance of traditionalists better now. Like them, I want to ask "what next?" Antipsychotics for Wozzeck and marriage counseling with Marie? (This is a good example, in fact, because Wozzeck documents things about mental illness in a way nobody would mistake for some kind of approval of their treatment in the past the way Diane Paulus seems to think Porgy's creators knowingly or unknowingly did. And even this sidesteps the question of whether viewing something makes us complicit in oh never mind this is too far off track
Oh, how about a new final scene for Aida in which Radames posts "ZOMG am under HUMUNGOLOID rock" on fb** from his iPhone and his friends show up and there's a big final chorus about teamwork? Or like Dr. Grenvil is like "gurl, you just need some Cipro!" and it's kind of an important public service message about getting proper medical care etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc etc.
*yeah, I know, this makes it sound like I've written it up in scholarly journals...
**faraonebook
ETA: Orlando Furioso puts it succinctly and well:
If one finds it problematic, leave it unperformed. If one finds it powerful-but-flawed… well, live with the imperfections and enjoy the rest, as we do with so many good-but-flawed works.
But don’t create a new work, built on your favorite bits of what the original authors did, and then forge their names to the result.
3 comments:
Three posts in a month, Mister D'Annato, are you going to make a habit of this? Because if you are, I shall have to add MFI to my blogroll with circles and arrows and flashing neon.
Oh, goodness. If I knew, I would tell you. I'm past writing out of a sense of obligation, but also past the feeling of having absolutely nothing left to say that fell over me after five years of blogging.
I just now found this post! And I'm glad I did because (a) you are as witty and incisive as always and (b) I STRONGLY DISAGREE with you. I don't think that the text should be sacrosanct, as long as everyone gets properly credited—which may or may not have been the case in this instance ("The Gershwins' Porgy & Bess," indeed!) but on the other hand it doesn't seem like they're trying to fool anybody about what they've done?
I'd like VERY MUCH, for instance, to see the Auden/Kallman Magic Flute, with its radically reworked book: rearranged scenes, interpolated monologues, etc. Again, in this Porgy instance, the derangements of the text may be horribly misconceived—but we won't know that unless we see it. Even the team's announcements of their inane intentions are far less important than pudding-proofs; woefully misguided projects have sometimes produced great art.
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