gowans

I've been looking through pages of notes scribbled in various darkened halls over the last year, since I didn't get around to blogging most of it. That's partly because some stuff got covered aplenty and I had nothing to add, partly because I had to sit with some things, and partly because some things were fairly shrug-worthy.

Of the things that took some brewing, there were two:

Lost in the Stars, Glimmerglass, 8/16/2012

Altogether, this was a fine performance of a flawed work.  And I will confess that my only prior knowledge of this Kurt Weill / Maxwell Anderson piece, apart from having read the novel on which it's based, was via the standard bleeding chunks, so most of it was new territory for me. But it's telling, I think, when you go back to the original NYT reviews from 1949 and find you pretty much agree with them.  "However you judge the piece, Kurt Weill's music strikes me, on the whole, as too commonplace to evoke the atmosphere of South Africa..." wrote Howard Taubman in a -- by today's standards -- fantastically lengthy think-piece on the divide between opera and Broadway.

I think what Taubman meant by "commonplace" was "un-idiomatic". Or at least my thought at the time was that they had taken the characters from Cry, the Beloved Country and shoe-horned them into Street Scene. It doesn't help that Anderson took Alan Paton's carefully nuanced and far-sighted narrative about a desperately transformational period in South African history and foreshortened it into slap-dash polemic.  Not that polemic is uncalled for in works about apartheid, necessarily, but that, for instance, pointedly giving Jarvis no arias to sing, and only bogus things to say, sort of unbalances Paton's attempt at representing apartheid as a murderous system that would ultimately victimize everybody. And while it is in some measure true that we should be careful about judging adaptations by their source material, I couldn't help thinking that this novel could make a great opera someday, in the hands of someone who was interested in both the soundscape in question and the musical qualities of Paton's prose.

All that said, again, it was a fine performance, not least from Eric Owens in the role of Stephen Kumalo. Dude sings like a force of nature. And director Tazewell Thompson, much-lauded for his production of Dialogues of the Carmelites at Glimmerglass in 2002, managed to get the most out of both the work and a set where corrugated tin is the major design element. A bit of G'glass video here.


The Tempest, Shakespeare & Company, 8/7/2012

I've already mentioned this production in a bit of a vent about messing with Shakespeare (viz. fine, but do something interesting). The reviews of it were all over the map, not just in terms of criticism but in terms of what people saw. (A lot of the critics saw Moonstruck.) So, for instance, when I came out of the theater I turned to a friend of mine and said something about the gender shift really transforming the play. "Oh yeah," he said, "the anger." Apparently Prospero, played by men, is never angry, and the really heated lines that Shakespeare gives him aren't anger anger but just everyday garden variety anger. Disgruntlement, even. I guess if you want anger, like genuine termagant action, then you give the role to a woman. Say, Olympia Dukakis? Well, okay, except for one thing: Termagant isn't in this play.

But Prospero's lines, even the pissier ones, are full of poetry, and OD's way of delivering those lines fought the poetry. None of Prospera was swallowed in prettiness. This was compounded by the gender shift lending a tremendous sharpness to the drama side of things -- the human conflict that underlies it, that is so often buried in the profusion of characters, the presence of the supernatural, and the readily exploitable comedy. Dukakis spoke her lines like a shove, or a block, except for the ones she didn't, where love or tenderness won out, however briefly.  If you'll pardon the baseball analogy, she didn't pitch a perfect game, no, but her changeup was pretty spectacular.

Anyway I suspect by the end of the play my friend had forgotten the beginning, the actual tempest, and Prospera sitting in the middle of it, looking not angry, or even just angry, but sad. Which is how they established, from the beginning, that while Prospero is the deposed and outcast scholar Duke of Milan who has fought and lost one conflict, Prospera is a veteran of endless battles -- and you can imagine immediately what they have been, even over and above the pronoun-adjusted exposition. Endless battles and here comes another, of necessity, because the only respite has been a form of exile. Not that anger isn't there, but it comes with a tremendous weariness and a foreknowledge that the things to come, for herself and for her daughter, will be more of the same. And then, in the end, they left out the final speech, so no comfort of fiction for us, we don't get to liberate anyone, and I was left wondering how long this new, hard-won peace would last, how long Miranda would retain her enthusiasm for that brave new world.

Well, that's what I saw.

Next up for Dukakis @ Lenox, Mother Courage. Next up for this blog, a 2012 HD roundup, 'cause I figure if you've made it this far, your eyes must be bleeding.