Silverlake Blvd.

Renée Flemming & Susan Graham @ Disney Hall

 

 

Renée Flemming and Susan Graham presented an evening of duets and solo French songs from the Belle Epoque. Two divas, but it was intimate, not a spectacle. The ladies chatted about the music, the composers, and the legendary singers they wrote for (a slideshow at the start demonstrated those girls knew how to strike a pose, and Chicago’s Mary Garden never failed to provide a quotable quote).

 

Even Bradley Moore, the pianist, spoke. The concert felt like a labor of love rather than a commercial speculation. Besides, can anyone resist Debussy and Co.? The balance of voluptuousness and refinement? I can’t.

 

Plus there was the novelty of this relatively unknown corner of the repetoire. The duet from Delibes’s Lakmé is famous from a British Airways commercial. And as soon as they began Fauré’s Pavane everyone was trying to figure out how they knew it. But I wonder how many in the audience even knew that Berlioz had written a Death of Ophelia duet? And that it was hair-raising?

 

Each of the ladies also sang a few solo songs. It’s hard to say who scored a bigger triumph. Graham presented a selection of Reynaldo Hahn, featuring his setting of Gautier’s Infidélité, that ends “Nothing’s changed except you” (“Rien n'a donc changé que vous”) that could be a dictionary definition of a broken heart. Flemming’s rendition of Debussy’s “Beau soir” was less vividly personal, but perhaps more definitively devastating. 

 

MetLive screening of Ballo

 

 

I had heard it on the radio, oh, maybe 30 years ago. And even before that, I remember learning the plot from friends in the East High band. They made an annual field trip to the Lyric Opera, and that year they saw Ballo. I don't remember learning much else at East.

 

It’s strange. The wildly discordant moods are very bold. The Met’s Brecht-ish staging and the Fritz Lang stylization was not inappropriate. It begins with fizzy Gilbert & Sullivan nonsense. Then comes Ulrika’s prophecy, tolling like the trumpet of doom. And throughout, the characters collide without ever communicating. Each literally has his and her own music, inhabits his and her own world.

 

In the end, Gustav, before dying, pardons his assassin and the other conspirators. But unlike the forgiveness at the end of Mozart’s Figaro or Tito, this ultimate gesture of mercy is without hope. It will bring no peace, no reconciliation for Renato, Amelia, Oscar or any of the others. The tragedy is complete.

 

‘Tis a Pity She’s a Whore @ UCLA

 

John Ford’s 1633 shocker is a chemistry experiment—a dangerous cocktail. There are a few neutral spirits—the father Florio and the uncle Donado are well-meaning but completely blind to what’s happening around them. There is the catalyst—the servant Vasques, who makes everything happen without having any obvious personal motive.

 

And then—most important of all—there are the volatile elements—the characters that are high from the fumes of their passions. Hippolita, Grimaldi, and Soranzo are drunk on the pleasure of feeling their personal mixtures of ambition, lust and revenge. Annabella’s maidservant Putana is high on her sense of knowingness.

 

Our protagonist Giovanni is the worst drunk of all. He’s a very familiar figure in 21^st century America: the self-conscious rebel. Giovanni may be in genuinely in love with his sister Annabella, but he often seems to be more in love with being outrageous. He is addicted to transgression. In all of his conversations and soliloquies he never stops admiring himself. He views life as if it were theater. He sees himself as an actor. Even at the gore-filled end:

Shrink not, courageous hand, stand up, my heart,
And boldly act my last and greater part!

Then when his antics cause his father to drop dead of a heart attack, Giovanni admires it as a well-done theatrical stroke:

How well his death becomes him in his griefs!
Why, this was done with courage …

 

He seduces his sister-who’s looking for thrills herself. Annabella goes on to have regrets, but she exhibits the same addiction. It’s a play about thrill-seeking, addiction, posing and going over the edge.

 

Cheek By Jowl’s production at UCLA didn’t deliver everything in Ford’s play, but it was an impressive spectacle. And brave, to the point of being foolhardy.

 

Brave, because the staging dispensed with Ford’s sequence of carefully delineated groupings and scenes. It rejected any hint of Jacobean courtliness. Instead, the story was re-imagined as one continuous action unfolding in one set—Annabella’s bedroom. 

 

Before the action starts we see Annabella on her bed, working on her laptop, listening to music on earphones, texting on her phone. Castmembers are present more often than not, hanging around, overhearing the most intimate conversations, miming and dancing around in the background when not speaking.

 

This was not a representation of any young woman's bedroom, but rather a representation of a fantasy of a young woman's bedroom. The story was being presented as something we, in the audience, project onto young women like Annabella. Annabella, and the disasters that befall her, are something the public creates, and, frankly, desires.

 

It was a wild ride.

 

Laurence Spellman was appropriately disturbing as Vasques, emitting an ambiguous combination of servility and malice precipitates most of the bad things that happen. He made a chilling exit with “Pray, sir, go in: the next news I tell you shall be wonders.”

 

The text’s Act 2, Scene 2, was a particular triumph. Soranzo enters mouthing absurd love verses by Jacobus Sannazarius, until cut of by the entrance of his outraged discarded love Hippolita. Ford’s word’s aren’t quite enough here. The tableau with Annabella as a statue of the Virgin Mary provided the exactly right combination of hysteria, blasphemy and bad taste. And it provided Hippolita with a nice target to blow up, and Hedydd Dylan almost stole the show in a role that's often seen as irrelevant. Then later she singlehandedly made the tricky wedding scene into a triumph—beginning as a vocalist warbling a cheesy tune and ending in a violent death, spitting poison-spiked curses on everyone.

 

I started to feel that they had expended so much ingenuity on vivifying minor scenes, that they had no time left to make anything of the major ones.

 

Above all, an hour into it I started wishing that they had investigated Ford’s unique gift for quietly understated ominousness. I started praying that the actors would sit down and stop yelling for a second. But whenever solemnity threatened to take over, the actors would run laps around the stage. Or, if they were men, they would take their shirts off and show off their chests. We lost the pathos in the quietly reckless peevishness of Annabella’s

Pish, do not beg for me; I prize my life
As nothing; if the man will needs be mad,
Why, let him take it. …

 

Or consider their version of the scene when Vasques gets the truth out of Putana. In the text, he seduces her with quiet sympathy—and as soon as he gets what he wants, rips her eyes out. In this production, Vasques flirted, poured drinks down her throat, felt her up, brought out a male stripper, gave her coke, and banged her. The orgy was quite a spectacle. But when the gore started, there wasn’t the jolting dissonance of Ford’s conception of the scene.

 

Orlando James (Giovanni) seemed to be the only castmember aware he was speaking verse. Granted, John Ford’s sober, drab blank verse is not Shakespeare—it’s not even Marlowe or Webster—but he has a grave music that can be quietly hair-raising. Gina Bramhill botched Annabella’s purely musical soliloquies—though she did fine with the purely dramatic scenes.

 

I suppose the cuts were necessary to keep the show under three hours. But it was a shame to loose the jaw-dropping scene when a Cardinal tells the citizens that a murderer will not be brought to justice because he says so. It’s so chilling that even a numbskull like Florio realizes, “Justice is fledd to heaven, and comes no neerer.”

 

Also we lost the comedy of Annabella’s idiotic suitor Bergetto, and therefore his grotesque on-stage assassination. These scenes clarified Ford’s careful filling-in of the background around Annabella and Giovanni. They aren’t the only guilty ones.

 

 

Ken Price @ LACMA

I knew I liked his work, but I wasn’t prepared for this. He was really working alongside Arp, Brancusi, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. To which explorations in biomorphic forms he added a completely genuine 60s Southern California surfer dude goofiness that’s utterly endearing. Of course the numbskulls won’t see it because he’s never solemn and grand. Thank God Ken Price didn’t care about grandeur. The least of his teacups is worth all the 340-ton boulder earthworks ever conceived.

 

Almost all of his works from the 60s on operate on the interplay between the form and the skin, the shape and the color. From the 90s, the skins got so fascinating that you momentarily forget about the forms. Then you stand back and … Pow!

 

For example, The Pinkest & Heaviest (1986) looks like two lumps from the ocean floor, each sliced open to reveal a pure, gleaming Hollywood cerise husk. He loved this game, contrasting the rough, matte, irregular exterior and the geometric cut, and contrast of the black and the pure color.

 

There are a variety of emotions at play here. L. Blue (1961) is rude and disturbing, but it’s not just rude and disturbing. It’s not a Paul Thek and it’s not Alien. It makes its point without succumbing to adolescent despair.

 

The last fifteen years of his life were devoted to the ostensibly absurd and contradictory task of refining and refining various blob shapes. His variations run the gamut of moods.

 

The apex is probably Hunchback of Venice (2000), an arc of bladders with a skin speckled with seafoam, brick and lavender. It’s a partially-deflated cartoon thought balloon, but it’s numinous as the grail in Tristan. It may be the most moving sculpture since David Smith’s 1951 Hudson River Landscape.

 

On the other hand, that same year, Price produced a puddle of lavender flecked with electric blue having an erection (Mo) and rapturous egg of mottled pumpkin, blue and RAF blue sticking out its tongue (Venus).

 

Steve Gehrke’s phrase “you rose / in me like a fin” describes what you see in Price’s work. To which is added the delight of witnessing the most exquisitely refined masterpiece let a fart rip in public.

 

[Images, Above: Hunchback of Venice, 2000; Below: The Pinkest & Heaviest, 1986]