Silverlake Blvd.

The House of Atreus in Malibu

 

Sometimes the delight of actually getting the chance to see a professional production of a something that’s never performed overwhelms any other response. The novelty of it happening at all dims any clear sense of what’s actually happening. Going into the production of Agamemnon at the Malibu Getty last night I felt that pretty strongly. Was I actually going to see and hear this text I have known as a philological puzzle, a source of mythological lore, an exhibit in the history of European drama presented as an entertainment, like Wicked? 

Yes, and it was terrific. The text is a collection of boobytraps for the director, and Stephen Wadsworth navigated around them with style.

Aeschylus was notoriously incoherent, even to his contemporaries. Robert Browning’s 1877 translation recreated the effect in English:

Shall he we know of bring the hard about
To soft …

Robert Fagles’s 1975 translation—the one they used last night—turns it all into a modernist poem, with fragmented lyric passages peppered with outbursts of blunt straight talk. It’s the most readable by far.
 
Wadsworth clarified things by engaging creatively with another problem area—the Chorus. In addition to having three Chorus Leaders, much of the choral material was taken by the whole ensemble—the Watchman, Herald, the principals. Even Electra and Iphegenia participated. It gave the different moods and contradictory outbursts of the choral material the feel of crowd chatter, which was apt.
 
These extra characters also helped clarify the longer narrative speeches with mimed action. Just enough to help those whose knowledge of history of the House of Atreus isn’t perfect.
 
They also repeated lines to emphasize a point, especially “Cry, cry for death, but good win out in glory in the end.” The musical effect for this most operatic of plays was just right.
 
The cast executed their enormous static speeches with panache, grappled with the knotty passages courageously, and generally found the right middle ground between naturalistic acting and poetry-recitation.
 
Burton Curtis got the play off to a good start as the Watchman. It's an arduous part: pages and pages of soliloquy with no context. But he made it work.

Delroy Lindo was a perfect Agamemnon—impressive, vain, touchy and clueless. He managed to make speeches like

There
is Leda’s daughter, the keeper of my house.
And the speech to suit my absence, much too long.
But the praise that does us justice,
let it come from others, then we prize it.

seem both funny, realistic and pathetic.
 
As Cassandra, Francesca Faridany was aware of the fact that she possessed the one theatrically surefire scene in the play. She extracted maximum terror from her delirious

The roofs--look up--there is a dancing troupe
that never leaves. And they have their harmony
but it is harsh, their words are harsh, they drink
beyond the limit. Flushed on the blood of men
their spirit grows and none can turn away
their revel breeding in the veins--the Furies!
They cling to the house for life. They sing,
sing of the frenzy that began it all,
strain rising on strain, showering curses
on the man who tramples on his brother’s bed.

It was horrifying. Though I don’t sympathize with them for a minute, by the time she was through it was no surprise the Getty’s neighbors objected to the mayhem.
 
The three actors playing the Chorus Leaders successfully managed to be obtuse and unhelpful without being boring. Nicholas Hormann extracted a gasp from the audience with

Fire comes and the news is good,
it races through the streets
but is it true? Who knows?
Or just another lie from heaven?

A couple of millennia old, and still pretty racy. Can you imagine the response if Obama or McCain had said anything like that on the debate that same evening?
 
Timothy V. Murphy seethed attractively as Aegisthus, raving in a broad brogue about “the carrhs of joostus.”
 
Tyne Daly brought Clytaemnestra to uproarious life. She animated her, but didn’t simplify her. In the end the most disturbing thing about Clytaemnestra is that we don’t really know why she murders her husband. We don’t know who she is. All we see in this play is a female politician who makes a sequence of speeches. She makes speeches of thanksgiving to the gods, celebrates the victory over Troy, welcomes her husband home, heaps honors on him, justifies his murder, and warns everyone they will have to put up with her.
 
Not that she doesn’t identify motives for murdering her husband, she gives a half-dozen: revenge for the killing of Iphegenia, revenge for being left alone for ten years, desire to be with her lover Aegisthus, jealousy of Cassandra, obedience to fate. But which is it? Which is her? All of the above? None? We don’t really know. Unlike Lady Macbeth, we never glimpse the private Clytaemnestra, assuming that such a person exists.
 
True, there are moments where she seems to let her guard down. She taunts the old men of the Chorus about being a woman in charge:

And here
you have it, what a woman has to say

and

That is what a woman has to say.
Can you accept the truth? 

She gets exasperated with Cassandra—“I have no time to spend outside.” And in the end she announces that she doesn’t care what anyone thinks:

And you,
you try me like some desperate woman.
My heart is steel, well you know. Praise me,
blame me as you choose. It’s all one.

Detective Lacey seized on these acidic taunts as moments of impolitic frankness. It was brilliant; amid so much high-brow rhetoric they came across as startling jolts of low-down. They got laughs, and getting laughs out of Aeschylus is quite a trick. But Clytaemnestra remains more than Leona Helmsly in a toga, and Daly courageously engaged her full elusiveness. Watching her navigate the tricky psychology of the part was as exciting as hearing her overcome the ferocious vocal demands of the speeches. 

When it was done, we were all stupefied. 

Next year’s comedy will be Aristophanes’s Peace. Wouldn't it be nice if it turned out not to be topical?

P.S. The most outrageous political observation of the evening was Clytaemnestra : Agamemnon = Hillary : Obama.

No worries when the levee breaks on Wall Street

Of all the commentators on Wall Street last week, only Bill Moyers had the sense to quote from The Great Gatsby:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy — they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. 

To which I would add some lines of Charles Simic: 

"I love America," he’d tell us. We were going to make a million dollars manufacturing objects we had seen in dreams that night.  

Mauricio Kagel & Norman Whitfield

Goodbye to 2 musicians this week:

 

I've been listening to Kagel's Tantz-Schul, a diary of an encounter with Renaissance music, alternately touching and grouchy, and untainted by solemnity. This could serve as a description of the rest of his work. A fairly sympathetic obit in the Washington Post. Better is a long interview with The Bomb from 2004. Would somebody please put his featurette Ludwig Van on Youtube? (Ubuweb has about half of it.)

 

Songwriter, record producer, and arranger, Whitfield is responsible for I Heard It Through the Grapevine, I Can't Get Next to You, Car Wash and more. See the Telegraph obit.

Puccini's L.A. Triptych

 

It was a rare night in the theater last night. Everything about L.A. Opera’s production—playing, singing, acting, staging, sets—was spot-on. The Cloak was a noir shocker, Sister Angelica was a howl of pain ending only through the intercession of the Virgin Mary, and Gianni Schicchi provided real laughs at the end. It was a long, intense workout, presenting in concentrated form not only the lyric Puccini, but the modernist Puccini and the comedian Puccini. It was a fantastic show. 

William Friedkin gave the first two sections animation without fussiness; everything moved along and everything had a dramatic point. Santo Loquasto’s sets were spectacular, but functional and appropriate for the action. No pointless eye candy. Sondra Radvanovsky overwhelmed as Angelica and Larissa Diadkova earned hisses as her grimly vindictive aunt.

The big novelty of the production was Woody Allen directing the Gianni. He has been making public statements about how alien opera was to him, but he obviously found his way into it. His gimmick was translating the opera into a movie—specifically a neorealist farce (e.g. Divorce, Italian Style). This turned out to be faithful to the piece while making it work as a comedy. Loquasto dropped the naturalism and filled the stage with a giddy Piranesi/Rossellini concoction that earned laughs by itself.

 

The aesthetic success of the evening was so complete that you couldn’t help admiring the implied administrative and financial accomplishment. The thing must have cost a fortune. The cast was huge. I suspect the only reason Il Trittico doesn’t get played to death is that it’s too much trouble. The Dorothy Chandler crowd rose to the challenge with style.

The Fly in my Dorothy Chandler Pavilion

 

Despite the publicity, the bad puns and a bad back, we were eager to enjoy L.A. Opera’s season opener novelty. After all, the stories of a lot of the classic operas and ballets are every bit as preposterous. Then there was the repulsiveness issue. I can't stomach horror movies, though years ago I got dragged to David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly and never forgot it. But the problem with the opera of The Fly turned out not to be creepiness—it’s supposed to be that—but tediousness.

 

David Henry Hwang is obviously one of those people who think opera librettos are a branch of juvenile literature. "We are the smarties and we like to party" was the gist of an Act 1 chorus. He served up bits of Cronenberg’s remake, appropriating their significance while draining them of drama.

 

Howard Shore—who I remember fondly from the original Saturday Night Live and Howard Shore and His All-Nurse Band—provided music that was inoffensive but completely without dramatic punch: aural wallpaper. It reminds me that HS's music was the one thing I really disliked about The Lord of the Rings.

 

Daniel Okulitch wins a Good Sport Award for his portrayal of the protagonist, singing banal words, prancing about in the nude (the focus of the ad campaign), and wearing an insect head throughout Act 2.

 

By the time we got to the girlfriend's grand finale "I'm going to bear his mutant fly larvae child!" aria I had totally tuned out, thinking of the unproduced operas of Vivaldi, Handel, Haydn, Stravinksy, Britten, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, Dallapicola, Schnittke, Berio, Cage, Glass, Adams and Carter that LAOpera might have done instead, generating even greater publicity while actually being worthwhile.

"All things that mooue betweene the quiet poles / Shalbe at my commaund ..."

The Republican Convention reminded me of the Independent Shakespeare Company's production of Doctor Faustus. Christopher Marlowe is not Shakespeare, but the idea that conceit plus power equals disaster remains topical. The production was rowdy fun, capitalizing on the Three Stooges aspect of this dark, dark play. The finale—when all the devils appeared to drag Faustus away—made all the dogs in the audience join in with barking.