This Just In: McCain Follows Gelb Strategy

That's right, John McCain has chosen to appeal to a youthful demographic by nominating as his running mate someone with good hair and star power. McCain's choice? Andrea Zuckerman, West Beverly's own 35-year-old high school junior. It's sort of like how Andrea took her job editing the school paper way too seriously--you get the idea that if someone had asked her to join a presidential ticket, she might've felt qualified, just as one might after being mayor of a town of 9,000 in Alaska...

Slightly Moar

So the answer is: yes, opera in a small room in the basement of a bar is a really good idea. No, the atmosphere never veered toward the rowdy--the crowd, in fact, was no younger than anywhere uptown in a bigger room--but it's simply very worth doing to take in opera on the scale where theater can be achieved in an intimate, direct way.

Speaking still of Opera Omnia's Poppea, presented here in English. Opera in translation is something that usually elicits bestial shrieks of fury from yours truly, but in this case and similar ones, I'll make an exception...I'll forgive a little of the awkwardness that rides on the back of translation (all but the best translations, and even then art and artifice have something to do with each other) for a couple of reasons. Probably the main one is that this kind of theater has immediacy as a keynote. I have listened to (obvious example) Elektra eleventy million times, but it still doesn't enter my head unmediated, if you see what I mean. There's a tradeoff--if I dare use the word authenticity, some of that is lost: the original way the sound lived in the words. But for losing that, you get an experience that's closer to watching tv. (Alright, I'm being deliberately provoc by not picking theatre, spelled "re" for good measure.)

Anyway yeah it's in English.

And an interesting thing about the production that could be seen as a fault or a strength is that there's a homogeneity of approach that can be seen in the singing of English--some singers going with a fairly talk-like diction, others singing "duty" as "dyoo-tee"--and carries over into other areas of performance. Basically all the singers have a different balance of strengths, the theatrical, the linguistic, the technical, the raw materials...and overall I think this makes for interesting listening and watching.

The most satisfying of these varying balances surely was embodied by Melissa Fogarty, the evening's Ottavia, she of the tremulous tone and smartly understated tragic air. "Disprezzata Regina" or whatever it comes out as in English (one likes to play at bad translator and imagine things that work metrically but not otherwise. We'll call that scena "Sister girl's in the doghouse") was dramatically and vocally a highlight of the performance.

Cherry Duke as Nerone and Hai-Ting Chinn as That Girl had a fascinating chemistry rooted in Ms. Duke's physical take on the role, honestly about the most forget-what-you're-actually-seeing travesti turn I can think of just now. Ms. Chinn responded with a Poppea who was a creature of instinct who learned years ago what her looks would get her. Not for nothing, Ms. Chinn works a bob to make Louise Brooks ask for a scrunchy. The vocals of the pair didn't always have the same poise as Ms. Fogarty's, but were never lacking.

Steven Hrycelak sang Seneca in elegant voice, with pathos. Props as well to Avi Stein, who brought polish and depth to a score that to opera queens per se (am I fair in saying?) has some notable longeurs. I mean, even with all the above-mentioned valorous work, Act I requires eyelid muscles of steel...or in the case of this performance in this venue, some gin. (You may be disappointed to hear, as I hinted earlier, that, non-traditional surroundings notwithstanding, the assembled crowd declined to observe period practice and at no point threw things at Poppea for being such a rotter, nor even yelled and cursed.)

***

In news of the...what's the opposite of monumentally important?, I just made this page for the likely event that I will be taking in opening night from the plaza or other rustic, downright outdoorsy environs, and am sure as hell not taking a laptop. Perhaps I'll use it during the season for 140-character liveblog reviews in brief: Intermissions at Intermissions.

Less is moar

One idea that tends to still the bickering among opera queens (who like nothing more than a good bicker), because it's just so obviously correct, is that venues are needed in the city for operas that lose something in a 4,000 seat house. Venues and companies, really. Because the You-Know-Who can dance on its toes like a cartoon elephant and put on Mozart and Handel, but it's not what they do best, and anyway the hall has a way of ironing out the subtleties. Performances that would work at Glimmerglass would look like not much of anything in the Barn, so the singers have to embiggen everything*. Here and there we have the singer like Roschmann with the right style for Mozart or Handel, the right grain in her voice to put the heartbreak over and be heard, but it's no fun waiting around for things like that.

It's probably just a financial reality of the city and an aesthetic reality of the century that appropriate forces and spaces for, say, Monteverdi...

Did somebody say Monteverdi?! As you may have read in the Times, but it bears repeating, a company called Opera Omnia has taken it into their heads to put on an English language Poppea at a "multimedia art cabaret" called Le Poisson Rouge, whose website proclaims: Serving Art and Alcohol. And who's going to argue with that? “Eh bien! que l’atmosphère est bizarre!” as the boys are saying, but this does seem to solve the problem of un-intimate performance spaces--as I'm guessing they don't seat 4,000--and another one, besides.

Now, I have mixed feelings about the idea of stuffiness in opera venues. I'm as pro-stuffy as the next so-and-so when I'm at a de facto stuffy institution of art delivery and someone the row behind me thinks the whole unspoken "no talking" thing is a milennial relic. But it's all about expectations...you go to that "Opera on Tap" thing for instance, if that's still up and running, and you know what you're getting into. Here, I assume, in a space called a cabaret, things will be on the loose side as well. And I think Monteverdi might be a good match for that kind of thing, both because--if my history is correct--this is opera from long before concert-going became so formal anyway, and because yes, Poppea has its chatty patches, let us admit, that could be smoothed over admirably by a sazerac or whatever the kids are ironically swilling, and the possibility of not sitting abso-bloomin-lutely still. (I think it is fair to expect that it will be a laid back, almost outdoorsy vibe, considering the line on Le Poisson Rouge's website that says "the venue's mission is to revive the symbiotic relationship between art and revelry" and if that doesn't clinch it, "bring open mind and drinking shoes" does. It's a little hipstery, but ok.)

The whole thing has more the feel of young musicians trying to do a little revitalizing from within, guided by their own aesthetics, than (with all apologies to Mr. Gelb et al who are doing, if you ask me, a bang-up job in most ways) battle-worn pros trying to figure out how to market kids into the concert hall, and this makes it promising.

So hey, theorbos and ethanol! I'm going--are you?


*Cromulence included

Singin' and cryin'

NHB, your wish is my command, which just goes to show you: it is sometimes best to stick with standard wishes like a pony or a filibuster-proof Democratic majority. So, for no real reason except I think they're great and you'll like them, here are two sliiiightly thematically linked clips from the films of Almodovar, the first from Tacones Lejanos (High Heels), with apologies for lack of subtitles, and the second from Volver with--I shit you not, as usual--subtitles in what I assume to be Turkish.



In this one, the magnetic Marisa Paredes syncs to Luz Casal's cover of "Piensa en mi," a wonderful little melodrama by Mexican songwriter Agustin Lara. Sample lyrics: "Piensa en mi quando sufras. Quando llores, tambien piensa en mi" = "Think of me when you're suffering. When you're crying, think of me then, too." Not for nothing is this sung by a character beloved of drag queens. (You'll even find one visual cover of the scene on youtube performed by a real live drag queen.) There's a neat trick Luz Casal does near the end, singing through the phrase "quitarme la vida" with a sobbing vibrato that permeates even the consonants. Curiously, to me anyway, the guitar accompaniment is exactly, but exactly, identical to the cover of the same song by hard-to-take songstress Chavela Vargas, which I think is also on youtube at least in audio. (I was introduced to the beyond-Dylan, beyond-even-Vysotsky gargling of Madame Vargas at this weird house party in Austin where I was also introduced to Laphroaig, perhaps Chavela's sour mash equivalent.) Ok, so my summer entries are all about lamentably autobiographical digression, yes. Cue the next musical example.



Ok, best lip-synching in the history of lips, no? You may or may not recognize the woman doing the crying in this one as Carmen Maura, tough but glamorous twenty years earlier in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (Almodovar on the verge of leaving camp and epater-ing-el-bourgeousie behind in order to make a number of increasingly sincere masterpieces.) Maura looks to me to have made the bold move of aging naturally, but in her first scenes in the movie, she's consented to be made absolutely haggard, with tremendous aesthetic pay-off. Cruz talks in the commentary track about wearing, well, a prosthetic ass, and she and Almodovar have a little love-fest about how it inspired her to carry herself like a mother instead of one of today's great screen beauties. The lyrics here are softer camp, and, uh, the subtitles, as promised, appear to be in Turkish. It was the longest version of the clip and I wanted to be sure of having the last seconds of it.

It occurs to me that what makes the second clip more convincing, though the first is more of a tour-de-force, is that Luz Casal is audibly younger than Marisa Paredes, though perhaps her character is meant to be lip-synching to her own beloved recording of the song from younger years. It makes me have vague thoughts about singing voice in relation to speaking voice--and recall an interview in which Upshaw said her coach or perhaps her doctor told her to try and habitually raise her speaking voice to be more in line with the range of her singing--because I'm still not convinced--anyway, Almodovar back then was at least half about artifice.

Really I just posted these because I played both of them for regular commentatrix Grrg, and didn't even think at the time about the fact that they're both so much about singing and memory and loss, even if they show Almodovar reacting to these things first at the tail end of his enfant-terrible phase, then as...I don't know how to categorize what he's become, other than one of the very best. For more on singing and crying, please visit the Opera-L archives, as I recall there was one of those immortal (in the sense of neverending, not in the sense of great or timeless) threads about what music makes you cry! Seriously, it was one of those things where by the end every recording in history has been referenced. Somewhere out there, there's someone who gets misty over Marilyn Horne singing "Groin pull."

All for now. A month, more or less, 'til I can go back to opera blogging. Oh but meanwhile, did you notice Santa Fe made public their intentions for next seez? Highlights include a Brewer/Groves Alceste and Dessay in Traviata. One feels certain she will make interesting and unusual dramatic choices in the role, no?

I'm just sayin' is all

Someone who never forgets a detail tells me that in the Met's production of La Gioconda, La Cieca enters with Gioconda...which makes sense seeing as she can't so much see and all, and a seeing eye dog would distract everybody and risk animal applause, the banal bane of many an Aida production.

So what I'm saying is, a smart stage director might want to figure out a way around this, because there's going to be a strong presence there of Podles cultists, and some of them have been waiting 25 years for her to come back (I say them, not us...I was not inducted until 1998ish.) There is going to be a loudish reaction at her entrance, I imagine, and it seems a little unfair to Voigt to suffer the ambiguity of entering with her.

Much of the bloodsport of the ticket exchange is now happily over, with good results. It almost feels like time to start posting about opera again, only it really isn't. Over a month left! Meanwhile I may post some absurd bullshit about Almodovar. The minutes will fly by like hours....

Pugacheva takes on the critics

Maybe you know her because of the story (apocryphal? well it's a touch recherche for an urban legend) that Schnittke envisioned her voice in the role of Satan in an opera he wanted to write, I think a Faust opera though I don't recall for certain. Or maybe you know the joking name the Russians have for her: Ustala Alla: Tired Alla. Oh or perhaps you're lucky and know her one song that doesn't sound like everything they should have told kids to fear during the cold war (tell a teen the Russians are sinister and they'll be intrigued; tell him they're unbelievably uncool and tacky and he might enlist), her one song that is an introverted gem, a spare setting for voice and guitar of Tsvetaeva's exquisite poem "Mne nravitjsa."* This is possible, because it was featured in a much beloved Russian film, Ironija Sud'by, i.e. The Irony of Fate. It's a film about hilarity ensuing, I think. Never quite made it through it, though I was graciously given a copy by an auntly Russian psychiatrist who used to diagnose kids, correctly, with the need for "a parentectomy."

What you don't know** is that La Pugacheva perpetrated a disco hit about the New Yorker's music critic. I think the first instance of her tribute occurs at about 1:04.



*what I'd really like is to provide a translation of this, but I tried, my own self, to translate the thing--preserving metre and rhyme--for a long time, and it always came out as translations of poetry so often do, accurate but broken, so eventually I abandoned the project. And I've never seen it translated except literally and without these structural elements, and that's no good either. Oh but here's the song, for all you Tsvetaeva fanbois.



And in fact, gadding about on youtube after the above, I did discover a verse-intact translation of the Tsvetaeva poem, sorta clunky, in the "about" section of an also clunky, though endearingly so, fan cover of the Pugacheva song. Would you have thought there would have been such a thing? It's like Rule 34, except not about porn: if it exists, someone has sat around with a guitar figuring out the chords, sung it with slight intonation problems, and put it on youtube. Oh anyway the point of this was:

"I like it that you`re burning not for me,
I like it that it`s not for you I`m burning
And that the heavy sphere of Planet Earth
Will underneath our feet no more be turning.
I like it that I can be unabashed
And humorous and not to play with words
And not to redden with a smothering wave
When with my sleeves i`m lightly touching yours.
I like it, that before my very eyes
You calmly hug another; it is well
That for me also kissing someone else
You will not threaten me with flames of hell.
That this my tender name, not day nor night,
You will recall again, my tender love;
That never in the silence of the church
They will sing "halleluiah" us above.
With this my heart and this my hand I thank
You that - although you don`t know it -
You love me thus; and for my peaceful nights
And for rare meetings in the hour of sunset,
That we aren`t walking underneath the moon,
The sun is not above our heads this morning,
That you - I like - are burning not for me
And that - I like - it`s not for you I`m burning.

Translator unknown--maybe the fan in question? If it's you, speak up!

**because it simply isn't true

Hat tips for exposing me to the song, and a rousing chorus of "Hachapuri to you" to B, whose oddly timed Georgian birthday dinner occasioned this shaggy dog of a post.

Grazing outside my pasture

I'm the last person you want to ask about pop music because the last time I was particularly in the know involved crouching by the stereo speaker with a cassette recorder, hoping to record a scritchy, unlistenable replica of "Don't You Want Me" by the Human League without accidentally picking up any of Kasey Kasem's patter. I was like a little gay suburban Bela Bartok. Soon after that I discovered classical music, and my inner life took flight just as my social life plummeted to the earth with a crashing thud.

Ever the euphemist, I like to think of my tastes in popular music not so much as "woefully underinformed" as "selective." I like what I like, yessirree, and that's about one thing a year. I can't name an American Idol winner for you, I'm still not 100% sure what is and is not hip hop, and even in the realm of indie pop (back in my day, young feller, we called it "alternative music") I just basically don't know shit from shinola.

However. Occasionally I toss off my Havisham frock and peer into the youthful world, and once in a while there's something good, and once in a longer while, something fantastic. Regina Spektor is at this point years off the cutting edge but in case you don't know her, I would like to be a big bore about her, complete with Youtube clips (the hipster Power Point!) Here's exhibit A. The song is Fidelity. Note the aspirated coloratura. I mean who the fuck does that?



What's so grand about this is, um, a bunch of stuff. Actually one thing that isn't clear here so much is her technical prowess, because though her album is (to my ear) a wonder of production that has a POV but doesn't get you all wet with it, it downplays Spektor the pianist at times. But she's kind of the anti-Madonna, the rare combination of a good voice, artfully deployed, with excellent instrumental chops. Let's watch the same song live, shall we? Oh hm, no. I have a better idea. Here's "Us" from an earlier album, live, because it shows more of what I'm on about.



There's something really bodily connected about her singing and playing, and beyond that, the love fest with her audience (see around 2:55 and at the end) is just enchanting.

Meanwhile, her songs go a lot of places...the tender revision of an not entirely loveable myth in "Sampson", the catalogs of doubts about love dressed up as love songs like "Better", even the sloppily lyric'ed "On the Radio" is a triumph of delivery, here and there the bluesy crag in the voice saving a too coy reference. Dramatis personae tend to be the standard "you" and "I" (my fave pop song used to be "The Boy with the Arab Strap" specifically because it has so many characters) and the verb tends to be love, but with interesting detours.

The songs are urban, multi-lingual, lightly polyphonic in the Bakhtinian sense unlses at this point I'm just bullshitting. And then, if you're still clicking around over there on youtube, songs like "Apres Moi" highlight something you hear a lot more of in the live clips, her playful sense of when to throw in an unsingerly sound.

Oh here's another, as long as I'm being insufferable. Here she's singing "That Time", and I'm including it because of the last riff in the song, a vocal ornament as delicately turned as Callas' ascending thirds near the beginning of "Al dolce guidami." No, I'm serious! Ok, yeah, now I'm totally exaggerating. But here it is anyway:



Regina Spektor is playing somewhere in Williamsburg next week but my skinny jeans are at the welder's having the rivets redone, so I'll probably skip it. We apologize for this detour into things I know absolutely nothing about. Regularly scheduled opera programming ought to begin in a month and a half.

Not Dead

Oh dear yes. It's been a good while. Do I have a damn thing to say? Lessee...

I probably need to add Nico Muhly not only to my blogroll but to my own habitual reading--he seems awfully clever with the words (um yes that is my way of admitting I'm 100% ignorant of his music) and all my friends like him, so yes. It's on my list of things to do. One of these aforementioned friends pointed me at his most recent posting, which includes the funny if also frustrating statement "I fear an opera queen, I have to tell you" and some musings on same, and on what differentiates oq's from new music people. I think what would be kind of hilarious is to get a turf war, a real Jets/Sharks rumble, going between opera queens and new music fans, as there is surprisingly little overlap so it could be total carnage. Me, I don't think I could characterize new music fans as a group, although I have this idea they all daydream about getting gang-banged by Eighth Blackbird.

Anyway Friday* found me at the one place, that particular day, you might find a number of Sharks and Jets, that being of course the Armory. No, we weren't arming ourselves for the rumble, just attending the Lincoln Center Festival's massive production of Die Soldaten. By the way as much as it's a default to look to Alex Ross on these matters, I'd have to say I found his piece on Die Soldaten particularly illuminating, so go read it if you can get past the terribly, terribly controversial cover of this week's issue. (Most sincerely I say: do not get me started.)

So, Die Soldaten is a tough one for opera queens per se, at least if you think of us as living purely for pretty yodeling. There are, as the AR piece points out, not a lot of interesting vocal lines--and this is not just a matter of being atonal, because god knows Berg manages--but then [and at this point, like Puccini, I lay down my pen, and have to try and remember what I was saying.] Well say, I'm in Cleveland now, and have you ever taken the train? Because there's this odd moment if you're in the station next to another train where you're not sure if your train is moving or the other is, and it's--for like a second--deeply disorienting, almost nauseating.

This effect is put to astonishing use in the now long gone production of Die Soldaten. I am telling you this, despite the fact that I found it the more thrilling for not expecting it, because you can't see it now, but the very first thing that happens is you and everyone else watching notice that the center runway thingy is moving except then it turns out YOU ARE MOVING TOWARD THE STAGE across the gigantic hall of the armory. You've probably read about that by now, but I think it's the most radical theatrical effect I've ever experienced, for all it may seem, what, gimmicky? I was sitting two rows behind Laurie Anderson, total thrill in itself, and because I get these daydreams where I am pals with famous people, but only really high quality ones, I wanted to go up to her and say, super casual-like, "so did you ever think of moving your audience around? Hey, I like your earrings."

Missed opportunity for transition there, because I did in fact see Laurie Anderson's show "Homeland" a couple of weeks later, but first I will note that my immediate reaction to Die Soldaten was something to the tune of "that was great, and I never want to see it again" (because, honestly, the raped-by-Santa-Claus thing is not something you're up for all the damn time) and yet, a few weeks later, I'm having to recant. If Mortier's plan for entertainingly obliterating City Opera includes it, you will find me there with bells on. Sleigh bells. Ew.

[It was an obvious target for wit, but my favorite comments were "and here I thought Santa only came down the chimney" and a bewildered humming of "I saw Mommie kissing Santa Claus." Don't dare say my friends aren't funny or I will cut you, bearing in mind that the phrase "cut you" is getting moldy.]

Oh I had so much more to say about Die Soldaten. Eheu, fugaces labuntur blatherings.

Anyway yes I did see "Homeland," my fourth Laurie Anderson show and probably my favorite, and not wholly because it was so lovely to see her kiss Lou Reed on the cheek. One number, apparently not written originally for this show, bids fair to be a classic moment of Laurie Anderson in the mold of "O Superman" though wholly, wholly different. The song is "Only an expert can deal with the problem" and it's quizzically angry where Superman comes from that hypnotic L.Anderson place, topical rather than cryptic, but especially in the current arrangement, which isn't yet on youtube, electrifying. It's a spare show, not much tech beyond the vocoder, but well paced and a good mix of song and the kind of fractured narrative, in her somehow very comforting artificial cadence.

I don't know how it will fare as an album, but then I don't think much of her stuff easily becomes a 100% aural experience. There's something so integral to the experience about watching her create it. During "The End of the Moon" at BAM, I saw her, of all people, have a tech breakdown, and it was a traumatic crack in the thereto unconscious feeling that she just stages her concerts in her head and manages to invite you in by force of will.

Here's a story I like from her interview with The Onion's AV Club about the time she worked at a McDonald's in the city for a brief period:

...I went in thinking, "I'm going to see a factory." How do you make things that appeal to a mass audience, whether you're making hamburgers, or CDs, or whatever? How much sugar do you put in these things? And, in fact, I had a great experience there. I really loved the people I worked with, and it was very surprising to me....I just went in and got the half-page application form and started working there. People I knew did come in, and I would look at them, and they would look at me. I would say, "Good morning, welcome to McDonalds," whatever. And I thought, "They're going to say something," so I'd wink, and they didn't recognize me at all. I'm standing three feet away from them, but because I wasn't supposed to be there, I wasn't. It was really odd.

In the program notes, by the way, she professes a disdain for blogging, so I guess that's not gonna be my entree for how she and I are going to hang out and go for coffee and stuff.

So this is my Lincoln Center Festival posting I guess. I also went to see Liam/Ralph Fiennes/Neeson, never have known which is which, in Beckett's Eh Joe but really, what can you say about that? But really, this time. It's half an hour of a guy silently looking worried as he's taunted by a female voice (in the original televised production, Sian Phillips.) The actor's craft is, I daresay, a bit invisible in this one, though I'm happy to have gone; Beckett, I am coming to find this year after a lifetime of ignorance of his stuff, is rarely irrelevant. So.

Coming soon, soon being "within the next month" I may post about Regina Spektor. Just because.

*Many, many Fridays ago at the time this...may go out.

More Reasons to Love Living Here

...include stumbling upon little mixed-bag productions of Boheme, staged with milk crates, in neighborhood parks. To remove this from the abstract, I am speaking of a production by, hm, the Moose Hall Theatre Co. under the auspices of the Inwood Shakespeare Festival. Obviously opera's not a rarity here, even in the summer, but you have to understand, living in Inwood is like living in a nice little town outside of NYC (Radio City, you might say, were you a stewardess in a musical) and the fact that opera pops up even here is just one more thing to make one insufferable about this city. Just imagine, one might say, as one's friends got out socks full of horse manure, we're practically bursting with artistic expression here, yesirree. The performance was accompanied on synthesizer, and amplified which of course makes it difficult to tell high quality vocalism from shinola, but there in the shadow of the bridge on a humid evening near the solstice, it was just what the doctor ordered. In any case some artful vocalizing was certainly produced by Eleni Calenos, the evening's Mimi, and to my ear best of all, Matthew Singer, the Marcello, who appeared to be a barihunk of the bearihunk subspecies. They're doing it again Saturday, so if you're not afraid of the upper reaches of the 1 train and what I'm describing sounds fun rather than shoddy, c'mon up!

&c

It always seemed to me a very practical thing the way Rossini and to some extent Donizetti and Bellini built little applause platforms into the end of their arias, musical nothings, the equivalent to "And that's what I did with my summer vacation" that might as well be clapped over, because they're going to be. The gong rang, the e-flat's over, here's something to drown out with your applause.

Broadway audiences like to applaud. I sometimes think it's their favorite part of a play. And I think (though I'm going to have trouble explaining it) there's a special kind of applause that happens a lot at Broadway shows, in the middle of a show. You hear it start sometimes and not catch. It comes after a particularly well-placed one-liner, and I'm not sure if it owes its existence to sitcoms or, primally, to the bel canto opera--in fact it reminds me of the spontaneous applause after a piquant high note as much as it does the "you go girl" ovation after, I dunno, Courtney Thorne-Smith puts down Jim Belushi for leaving the toilet seat up on whatever that nightmarish cesspool of mediocrity they're on is called.

This kind of applause is more and more common. Maybe I'm just telling stories to make a point, but I'd swear I even heard it in The Year of My Entire Goddamn Family Dying with Ms. Redgrave. No that's probably just a lie. But you can hear people itching to do it, the nascent "oh no she didn't" applause rippling almost to a start in the mezzanine like the flashing lights before a migraine. Not to be a horrid curmudgeon. It has its place.

The 39 Steps, at the small and comfortable Cort Theater, is built around an audience's need to applaud. In the first act there was a blackout or the mugging end of a funny exchange about every three minutes, cue mid-act applause. With this wind-up it sounds like I mean that as a bad thing. As a matter of fact, given such indulgent permission, it's not an odious or even irritating thing. Only a few lines are truly funny, if you ask me, but it's a good time, a trifle.

Ok. I'm trying to be a good sport. The fact is I didn't love it. There's a lot of swell physical comedy, and some virtuosic timing, and even a whimsical little joke in the program bios. The thing is I found the comedy, under the perfectly enjoyable performances, just a little stale. By the end I had the distinct sensation of having watched the best episode of "Whose Line is it Anyway?" ever. Yeah, the American version. Like...not to spoil anything, the attempt to slip in the names of as many Hitchcock films as possible, and the audience roared at each, and said to each other "Vertigo! Did you hear?!" I think it may actually be a meme we can blame on stuff like Dreamworks animation, wherein references to things outside the frame are automatically funny.

And seriously, the reactions of the audience were those of pure pleasure, and what kind of sniffly Puritan would I be to piss on that, so, let's just say The 39 Steps is a real crowd pleaser, only I'm not much of a crowd.

***

The revival of Les Liaisons Dangermouse gracing I forget what theater* is something I'm actually a little more comfortable dismissing though for my own reasons, namely that I would donate a kidney to Sian Phillips if she needed or in fact merely fancied one, I was happy to see it. Laura Linney, it goes without saying, is among our finest, able and often required to redeem the worst kind of crap. (See also: her scenes in Love, Actually if you need proof, or watch the moribund bustle opera of House of Mirth, wherein her entrances are the only signs of life.) In good company, she's a revelation, as in You Can Count on Me, perfectly capable of wallops of joy and pathos in brief utterances. But not here, for some reason. The fact is, the Marquise de Merteuil is not a deeply interesting character, illuminated only by a faint glimmer of grand-guignol camp such as Annette Benning provided in the better filmic adaptation, Valmont. It seems to me Linney was searching for some kind of pathos, perhaps inspired by Glenn Close's risibly serious turn in the lesser filming of the book/play/movie/opera we are so well familiar with now.** There was little there to find. It's how teenagers think adults might behave badly, and it's still around and adapted so much, I think, because it's nostalgic to revisit that. My companions noted the awkward physicality of the direction. And for god's sake, if you're going to have cast in minor parts sing Handel arias, ask them to do it rather more idiomatically and without all the pomo ambient reverb, or at least get an Italian diction coach. Ombra my foo, indeed. Ombra your own.

Yeah, I have this and that I'd been meaning to post about including a link to some music I'm thinking you'll like a lot. Maybe that'll happen next week.

*I thought of it, and maybe was blocking it out because I wish theaters still had classy names, all of them, instead of being named after corporations. I hope people in Chicago are still calling Comiskey Park Comiskey Park because no matter my indifference about baseball, there can never be any poetry in something called Cellular One Field.

**I'm speaking of English language films, btw. I haven't seen the French. Actually it appears there's a miniseries of some sort with Catherine Deneuve, too.

Pre-Tony Roundup, after a fashion (TLDR)

It's a regrettable impulse, or perhaps one would have to call it an inhibition, that keeps me at home on my couch much of the year where theater is concerned, only to bound (wallet recklessly open) to the box office the moment shows are nominated for the yearly awards. For one thing, what's a Tony mean? As I was recently reminded, Bernadette Peters lost to Marissa Janet Winokur (who was good, but c'mon) so even if it weren't limiting from the outset to think only of shows moneyed enough to open on Broadway, a Tony nom is hardly a guarantee of quality.

It's just that the broadcast really is a lot of fun to watch if you have a dog in the fight, and the more the merrier. And so, with the regularity of old faithful or of Ed Rosen mentioning he knew Richard Tucker (did I ever mention my Opera-L drinking game? Well it was a little mean-spirited but you can imagine) early June finds me scrambling for mezzanine bargains at the Booth or the Brooks.

To wit, in the space of about a week and a half: the justifiably ballyhoo'ed revival of Thursday in the Zoo with Lloyd, the not-so-talked-about-because-it's-a-play revival or perhaps Broadway premiere of Caryl Churchill's Top Girls, and the inevitable but not unwelcome elevation of Patti LuPone into the very highest level of gay iconography by way of Gypsy.

Last things first: I understand most of Caryl Churchill's work is more like the rambling, bizarre, but usually gripping first act of Top Girls than its more or less traditional, even more gripping second and third acts. You may have read, and if you go to see it you should probably know going in (to make limited sense of things), that the first act is an imagined soiree the protagonist, here played with ardor and certainty by a Elizabeth Marvell, throws for herself upon being promoted within her agency of some sort or other. I wonder if the half act set in said agency was an exotic glimpse into a corner of the working world when the play was new. It ain't now, which isn't a gigantic problem, but it does mean that the rest of the play is less familiar and more gripping.

The party, too, in fact, begins to feel stylistically archaic, while the third act bids well to be ageless, as does the brief scene in the second, both of which consist of Elizabeth Marvell and Martha Plimpton knocking you dead over and over with their acting chops. (Now I have forced myself to picture Martha Plimpton beating someone senseless with a large pork chop. Poor Martha Plimtpon to be subjected to such a things, even in the limited space of my head. It is an ignominy on par with The Goonies, but without the fun Cyndi Lauper song.) If you do go, please let me know why you think Marisa Tomei is so utterly chameleon-like in the last act and so perfectly tin-eared in the first. As noted in the I think Times review, the Scottish accent alone is a cry for help.

I feel almost like discussing Sunday and Gypsy in one rhetorical breath, as they share a certain kind of self-referentiality; Sunday being (at the risk of belaboring the obvious) a work partly about Seraut that is, in its individual elements, nothing special--no single song could hope to compare with the best of A Little Night Music or Company--but as a whole, a deeply affecting work of perhaps genius. I ended the sentence there because it was getting umanageable. And Gypsy being a work partly about the death of an earlier kind of musical theater, in which the songs and scenes that represent it are so tiresome you understand in an emphatic, at times visceral way why nobody wanted to watch that kind of thing anymore.

Both are flawed, but Sunday is unquestionably a better chunk of art. LuPone as Mama Rose is larger than life and for much of the show delightful--there's a kind of idiomatic "I Know What Broadway is About and I'm Going to Tell You" quality to numbers like "Some People" that just fits, like Gedda in French opera type of thing. But Gypsy is very end-loaded; "Rose's Turn" is the masterpiece and absolutely central to the success of the performance. This is why Bernadette Peters, fach-wise not really a Mama Rose, pulled it off and should've won the big T her year. Watch her Tony broadcast performance of "Rose's Turn" on youtube and bite your lip and try not to be moved. (Your chances are approximately as good as listening to "Little Lamb" in the current production or really any production and not wanting to walk to the Hudson and drown yourself. Seriously, even a production in L.A. I think I'd start walking toward the Hudson with stones in my pockets.)

LuPone's performance throughout is more forceful, less vulnerable than her immediate predecessor's, and rather than just sustain that level of volume in "Rose's Turn" it's as if she yanks the volume knob off its...its...somebody run get me a new metaphor. She stops singing the notes at all and engages in the kind of behavior that, let's say, goes fine in certain lines of Elektra, but even there, you have to maintain some contact with the vocal line as written. For me the effect in sum was riveting but jarring, especially given what she could have done, given her vocal resources. I mean LuPone sounds for sure like she could sing this stuff without the mics, to the point that with them, she sounds a little bit ridiculous. "Rose's Turn" is too loud in a number of ways.

The supporting cast is very much in the shade, but Laura Benanti is essentially succesful as Louise. She, too, rings a little false late in the evening, in that she doesn't really convince as a devastating sophisticate, even a fabricated one. The three stippers got enormous laughs in "You Gotta get a Gimmick" but it's that kind of number and it was that kind of crowd.

God this is long.

So long, in fact, that I'm just going to say of Tuesday at the Lake with Clem that it has its issues but only a desperate curmudgeon would note them much. The performances are ensembley rather than individually brilliant, and the design is just ingenious in a way I won't slobber all over with my four word visual vocabulary. (Hey not for nothing, the design and the music were top notch in Top Girls, too.) Also, last thing, the very last gesture of the production is something that brought tears to my eyes not only as it happened but the next thirty times I thought about it including, hey, just now.

Coming soon to this space: blathering about Les Liaisons Dangermouse most likely, and The 39 Steps, and if I lose my mind entirely and opt for financial collapse, In The Heights. And if you're really good, I'm going to link to a wonderful performance of a terrific piece. As usual, it actually doesn't matter if you're really good; I'm going to do it anyway.

Bonus Review from Sources Who Have Not Stated Whether They Wish to Be Identified but Texted Me so Here You Go: Boring Boring! It was really dumb. Great looking production...think Noises Off but totally cliche and predictable. The audience was roaring with laughter at all the SHOCKING DOUBLE ENTENDRE!

Well that's enough to keep me away...

I Know What Boys Like

From an MSN article entitled "5 Dates No Guy Wants to Go On," one of those profound ruminations you see when you log out of hotmail, it would seem that Peter Gelb has not yet convinced the masses that Opera Is Fun:

Opera
If given the choice of how to spend a Friday or Saturday night, what guy wouldn’t vote for putting on some uncomfortable formal clothing after spending a couple of hundred dollars for tickets, then another hefty chunk for parking, all to hear overly-costumed and overly-made-up folks belting out tunes that don’t have a beat and don’t rhyme, in a language only U.N. translators can understand? Exactly. And yet we still get the evil look from girlfriends when we try to stay awake during Madame Butterfly by playing a video game on our cell phones.

If we must do something cultural and uplifting, at least make it ballet, where the women are in shape, wearing form-revealing clothing and moving their bodies in ways that cause us to imagine them with us in a variety of other non-dance situations. It ain’t Dancing With the Stars, but it sure beats counting down the seconds ’til it’s over when the fat lady sings.

Well, so, I guess that answers...some question I didn't really have.

Handbag ariettes

To the best of my knowledge, what she has sung:

-Che faro senza Eurydice
-Caro mio ben
-Hojotoho!
-Pour mon ame
-Der Holle Rache [hat tip: Rysanekfreak]

What else?

Sparsely, like parsley

Yeah, I haven't been blogging up a storm lately. I just haven't been feeling bloggy. This is not exactly me throwing in the towel, but I think the summer is going to be lean times, word-wise.

For the record it looks like the end of the season for me will have been last night's Fille, in which everyone was loosened up as if it were closing night, which I am told it wasn't. Madame Palmer chose "Pour mon ame" as her surprise for the little improvised scene. This scene was actually funnier when it didn't go on quite so long, but the immediate impact of hearing her sing the tenor aria was good for a laugh from the gut; the improvised line following, "C'est bien, Madame, mais mieux avec un tenor," good for an amused smirk and self-inflicted pat on the back for understanding that much French. One performance left--I'm rooting for Klytamnestra's nightmare monologue, though it has been suggested that "I am the Wife of Mao Tse Tung" would be a daring choice as well.

Barry Banks, in for his scheduled cover's-one-off, proved once again that he is more or less the equal of the flashier presence for whom he waits, poorly bewigged, in the wings. Seriously the wig was bad, or so it looked from standing room (for there I was, as if a younger man.) Anyway maybe the voice is a notch quieter than Florez, and his French probably the same little bit off. But to my ear, he sings with an extra soupcon d'elegance, an extra dash of dash. If I were one for having a private snit in public, I might say for all the controversy over singers and their weight, there is none over singers and their height. A short tenor simply doesn't get the starring spot, so there's no controversy to be had. But then Florez is no giant, so maybe I'm barking up the wrong sycamore. Whatever the case, he was given a star's welcome by the assembled public.

Dessay sounded tired, but not seriously diminished. My god, the unhealthy fantasies I begin to have about that woman, no not that kind, but of hearing her sing Tatiana or Violetta, things that might break her in the big hall, just because she is of all our sopranos the most alert, mercurial, dare I say smart.

I have a few drafts sitting patiently on their hands, something half-baked about Terfel, &c. And I still might go to Hazmikbeth even though the Lady in question did not overwhelm, Siriusly speaking. The trouble is there's very little to throw one's hat in the air about this summer. Krol Roger at Bard might be an interesting novelty, but there it sits on my desktop, unbelistened, despite the kindness of him who sent it for sending it. Glimmerglass is a bit of a wash, and so on, and so on. Anyway I'm supposed to be working on this miniseries about Germaine Lubin.

Also Gencer has passed from among us so what, really, is there left to say?

Beware of metaphors

...especially outside of your native language. Funny bit from the Times article about Muti stepping up to the podium in Chicago:

"When I left La Scala, I thought it was time for me to be absolutely free, like the birds in the air," he said. "Birds go around and they enjoy their happiness, their freedom. But sometimes it can happen they find a tree and they like to stop on a tree, and they didn't know about the tree before. It doesn't mean one tree is better than another tree. It just happens at the right moment in life."

Wait I got lost in there. You didn't know about Chicago before? Or are we actually talking about plants now? I hear eucalyptus trees are nice. I will say it is brave of Muti to take on the conducting gig if I am reading this altogether wrong and he has, in fact, become a bird.

Still hoping to go to Macbeth though I think it may be fairly well sold...

Recommended reading

If you have any interest in music outside of opera (hey, some of us do; some of us don't) I urge you to pick up this week's issue of The New Yorker and read Burkhard Bilger's piece on the unearthing and preserving of American folk music. Fascinating and a marvellous piece of writing.

"I'd say ample for a regiment!"

There are two ways, at least, of looking at the kind of ovation that followed Juan Diego Florez's's' first jaunt through "Pour mon ame" in last night's opening of La Fille du Regiment at the whatsitcalled on the Upper West. Well, two ways of looking at the fact that it isn't, these days, atypical. The more cynical is that something in the audience has changed, and we're more likely to yell our fool heads off, the implication being that our standards are wearied and worn away. The other, no more convincing as an absolute, is that the Met has just gotten so consistently wonderful that it's all we can do to keep from leaping off the balconies to land on the stage. You know, in my head, that sounded like an expression of enthusiasm but now's I read it, I guess it's just a symptom of severe depression.

The point, such as it is, is that a number of things inform the newly vociferous audiences--I'm not making this up, right? My memory of performances in the Volpe era is that the reception was rarely so rowdy--for a number of reasons, some of them kind of intangible. Gelb has made a lot of changes, and cumulatively they have made Sybil's Barn a more exciting place to be, have not they?

Two people I spoke with after the performance expressed the same...I think we'd call it a concern. Which is that the rerun of the aria might become a reflex, as it did with "Va, Pensiero" that one season. And indeed, M. Armiliato was doing what in Charades might mean "turn the page back" pretty quickly on the heels of the last "militaire!" Not for nothing, the decibel level of the roar of the crowd did compress what might be considered the requisite wait for an encore; an ovation can surely be sized up by intensity rather than length.

To me, though, it did have the feel of something more set-up than spontaneous, which isn't a terrible thing, and the fact remains it was exciting singing, as was the rest of JDF's Tonio. My reaction may be tempered a little by the fact that, for my groschen, it was almost measurably less exciting than his reading of "Cessa di piu resistere," a year and a half ago. The Fille aria proves only one thing about a singer. The Fille aria, to be a little blasphemous, was delivered just as convincingly by a Met auditioner two years back, one Alek Shrader*. Could he have delivered the rest of the role with such charm, have sung "Pour me rapprocher de Marie" with such finesse? I haven't heard him since, so I can't say. But the aria on its own, well, for me it was a nice trick, and not the real measure of the tenor. I think it was a moment that had to happen--Fille now has baggage, albeit pleasant baggage, and you give it to a tenor with weighty expectations.

Part of what I'm struggling to say, if the point hasn't already been made too much elsewhere, is that Juan Diego Florez isn't The New Pavarotti, nor should we care that he isn't. What's so great about him is his own combination of strengths, not least his presence. The singers we love are the singers we feel we know; seeing them onstage is (in the least creepy-stalkery way) like seeing a friend. Florez, his physical energy, slightly nervous, his gait, his boyish eagerness and warmth, these are a part of why we carry on for him.

An older friend is Natalie Dessay. Well familiar to us, her intensity, her ability to find a dramatically logical physical flourish to go with a vocal one, her sense of fun at curtain calls, her spontanaeity. All on display here, to great effect. What I wasn't expecting was how much freer her voice sounds in this score than in Lucia, though her top isn't available nonstop like water from a tap like it used to be. Some will find her comic sensibility over the top, but it's an opera that begs for it. I think I've never seen anything so funny on an operatic stage as her brief piano solo during "Salut a la France." Also, she wins the Teresa Stratas Prize for being able to sing a high Q while being toted around or doing something that looked like moshing. It's a little bit of a shame that what they're taking out of the crate for her next season is something as dramatically stillborn as Sonnambula but then a Greek lady once made something of it, and wasn't it the Sonnambula scene in which she was so on fire at the Volpe gala?

Felicity Palmer remains a great asset to the company in whatever she does. I'm dying to know if she was singing anything in particular during her most comic moment (a good deal of the humor made use of the piano) or just improvising wildly, and I think she gets a prize as well for accompanying Dessay in the beginning of the trio. Marian Seldes, given sort of odd lines in an updated script, did a lot by means of her inherently expressive bearing.

Now the production I don't know quite what to do with. As you can see, I thought a good deal of it was funny, but there was some amount of WTFery going on, too, some clunky, unamusing staging for the regiment and other groups of chorus/supers, business I'd have to describe with a word like "zany" or some descriptor with a little self-destruct built in like that. The postcards that descend from the flies I find mystifying, and all the undergarments in the first act, cute at first but maybe overused. Overused underwear, great, didn't mean to leave you with quite that image early in the day, but..."Il faut partir," is not a comic number--it should be, while not grand tragedy, sweetly sad, and the audience giggled, as anyone might, when Dessay began it trudging across a stage, trailing a phalanx of soldierly underpants. On the whole it brought me neither delight nor fury, but I did wonder that it had been such a hit in London, unless that was just about the singers themselves, I suppose. The production team recieved a friendly but not raucous ovation, and it seemed about right.

My god, did anyone else notice that the season is drawing to a close?

Next up: maybe a Macbeth with the notably more intriguing cast

*JSU dissents, and I concede that I am at least to an extent making a point. Which is that the requirements of the aria are steep but narrow, and do not engage what I like best about the singer in question, his astonishing florid technique. And for some reason the staccato attack on the first of each pair of c's I find a tiny bit jarring.

18

Bis of "Ah, mes amis" at the prima!

More tomorrow.

[eta: duh, I mean "Pour mon ame"]

We could fix up this old comment thread and make a post of it!

Would it be tiresome of me to take a thread from comments that I found interesting and write about it? It just seemed like there was more to say, on my part and perhaps on yours, if this thing is on.

The setup is that the Met had their open house, open dress, and some of us in the 'sphere went, and then some of us wrote about it. I wrote very little; others gave a more detailed report. Someone in comments gave me a thumbs up for not violating the unspoken rule that most of us know: you don't review a rehearsal. (Sort of like you don't boo a cover. I thought that bore repeating.) Our doyenne weighed in somewhat to the contrary, however, noting the difference between a review and a report. (Italics hers. She lent them to me.) La Cieca went on to say:

After all, if a company welcomes the public to a rehearsal, then surely it is expected that there will be talk afterward. If the Met really wants to keep a lid on a show, they have the option of closing the final dress...

And the point is well taken. I think one thing that's important and a little hard to put a finger on here is where blogging falls on the continuum between conversation and, not to be grandiose, journalism. The deal with reviewing a rehearsal, it would seem, is that you're critiquing something not yet fully on display because it's not fully finished, and if you do that between friends, it's just ungracious, whereas if you do that on a front page, it's really quite unfair, and if you have an audience closer to a crowd than a flock (as I do not), you could even affect whether people put the event on their calendar or stay home that night to touch up their highlights.

I mentioned, in comments, my own history with this: once upon a time, at an opera house moderately far away, I went to an open dress for a rather blood-and-guts piece starring a mezzo famed for shaking the walls. She marked almost the whole time, and her cover sang the big number, and not giving it much thought, I sniffed about it on another forum in a manner I'd now call petulant. I believe I specifically made reference to the spelling of the singer's name, said that the "c" was silent, and huffed that so were a good many other notes. Well. They like to ran me out of town, and not wholly without reason.

I think it was said to me that criticizing a free preview was like being invited to someone's house for dinner and mocking their fricasee. But what I felt back then, and still do to some extent, bolstered a little by what La C has said, is that the company in question invited a passel of folks to come hear, and by doing so, changed the nature of the event in a substantial way. The difference now is not between a closed part of the rehearsal process and a finished public spectacle but merely between a performance you were given free access to and one you had to pay for. And that makes it less clear whether you can, in good faith, be critical.

I did, that day, feel I was going to the opera. I took time out of my busy schedule of, well, frankly, sitting around wondering why I was in graduate school, but that's not the point. I think it's the norm now for a rehearsal to be more of a performance than a run-through, and because of this, yes, it's probably a little bit open to scrutiny. I wouldn't have gone to the above anonymized performance if I had known it was mostly for blocking and publicity photos. I'm not really interested in how Madame Silent C gets from point A to point B. I wouldn't have gone to Fille either, and I think the way the Met publicized their open house shows that they knew people were coming with some expectations.

Yes, there were differences...the intermission was extremely short; there were cameras swooping around, the audience was slightly chattier though generally still well-behaved. None of us minded that, I shouldn't think. And indeed, I do still err on the side, as I've said, of not pissing anyone off, because it doesn't seem important enough to make a big deal of. But in principle, I think the people who did write, insofar as they stayed within the bounds of giving a generalized sneak preview, did no disservice to anyone.

I'm interested to know if this is fair. Singers, in particular, I'd imagine might feel protective of the final dress. But that's my ten cents. (Now where's my dance?)

Female Offspring of the Military-Industrial Complex

Our spy at the Final Dress of Fille (hereinafter FDF, though this posting is going to be like two lines long so it's a short hereinafter), we'll call him Raury L'annato, knows better than to gab about a rehearsal, but figured it can't hurt to mention that all principals were in top form and sang out, Louise. It's been sold out for months and tickets are going for mortgage-like prices online, but anyway it seems likely to be the talk of the town, insofar as opera ever is.