Silverlake Blvd.

Gianni Schicchi & Pagliacci @ Dorothy Chandler

This summer I’ve been watching as many Italian comedies from the Fifties and Sixties as I can get my hands on. Maybe the immediacy has softened with age, and what originally was shocking bluntness has become charming nostalgia—but the wit remains pointed. And the targets—greed, vanity, self-importance—remain among us.

 

And so Woody Allen’s recasting of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi in an early Sixties farce by De Sica seems perfectly natural. It was terrific when first presented seven years ago, and it seems even funnier now.

 

The best thing about it is that Allen gets out of Puccini’s way, and lets him—his music—get the best laughs. The reading of the will, for instance. And consider the opera’s most famous aria, “O Mio Babbino Caro,” which in isolation seems a pretty confection. Allen correctly realized that, for all it’s sweetness, it’s the punchline of a joke. Lauretta’s father, Gianni, has just been ranting about how nothing, ever, ever will induce him to help the family of her fiancé. Lauretta’s response is so extraordinarily grand that it makes the audience gasp and laugh.

 

The joke was also perfectly set up. Plácido Domingo obviously had a ball playing the crooked Gianni.

 

The Pagliacci production, originally designed by Franco Zeffirelli, was also set in a post-WWII Italian movie setting, but more a tragedy alla neorealismo than commedia all’Italiana.

 

Zeffirelli and director Stefano Trespidi approached their task with extraordinary imagination and thoroughness. The set and props recreated an urban, working-class neighborhood in vivid detail, down to the flicker of a TV’s glow through the window of an upper story apartment. Besides the principle singers, the stage was populated by a vast chorus, plus 11 circus performers and 57 supernumeraries—9 of them children. Every one of these performers was given a distinct look, distinct gestures and a little story to enact in mime. It was beautifully choreographed; it was impossible not to be impressed.

 

But it was also impossible not to be, at times, distracted from the drama. I felt sorry for Ana María Martínez struggling to make Nedda’s quieter songs perceptible above the hubbub. Last year’s concert performance at the Bowl presented no such obstacles to  Julianna Di Giacomo, whose Nedda was instantly compelling.

Medea @ the Getty Villa

 

The program claims Luis Alfaro’s Mojada; a Medea in Los Angeles is an “adaptation … based on Euripides’s Medea.” I think it would be more accurate to say it’s a good 21^st century writer's attempt at doing exactly what a good writer was doing in the 5^th century B.C.E.—bringing a mythological character to vivid life by grounding her in the local setting and culture. Assembling old and new materials, Alfaro charted the progress of love and sacrifice into hate and destruction.

 

Alfaro doesn’t follow his predecessor’s trajectory at all. When the Greek play begins, Medea already knows the worst: her beloved Jason, for whom she has sacrificed everything, has found somebody younger and more useful for his career, and married her. What follows is a meditation on what anger and grief can do to a person. Euripides does not articulate the transformation of love into hate: his Medea’s first big speech is broadcasting her resolution to poison everybody. 

 

In the end, the Greek Medea not only extracts her revenge, but flies away unpunished, crowing about it:

“Why do you rattle these gates and try to unbar them, in search of the corpses and me who did the deed? Cease your toil. If you need anything from me, speak if you like. But your hand can never touch me …”

 

It’s a horror story, bitter and without any consolation. Six years ago UCLA did a production that was closer to the original—with a choir that sang as the chorus!—but Annette Benning failed to be frightening, and without a scary Medea, the drama Euripides wrote doesn’t make any sense.

 

Alfaro, on the other hand, absorbed Euripides and the story and so thoroughly digested it all that he didn’t feel any need for chitons, Corinthian ladies in a chorus, or other antique bric-à-brac. His Medea (Sabina Zuinga Varela) is an undocumented Mexican in Boyle Heights, living with her Hasan/Jason (Justin Huen), and son (Quinn Marquez). Instead of marrying a local princess, Hasan betrays the self-sacrificing Medea to marry his boss, Armida (Marlene Forte), who builds ugly condos all over town.

 

I’m glad I didn’t know about this in advance. I probably would have groaned at the thought of new mythological characters (hardworking migrant, scammer migrant, loudmouth old lady) superposed on the old. But fortunately Alfaro goes beyond clichés. His characters are vivid and alive. Best of all, they did not seem to be sleepwalking toward doom—the default mood of Greek tragedy productions.

 

Last night I realized we were in good hands when Efren Delgadillo, Jr.’s house front set was wheeled out. It was elegant, efficient and exactly right—terms which applied to every aspect of director Jessica Kubzansky’s polished production. Everyone was exactly on the mark.

 

Alfaro provided lots of allusions to Euripides for anyone interested in following them up. It was fun to note his racy, colloquial translations of the classical original details. But it wasn’t necessary for understanding. His best move was to combine all of Euripides’s commentator-characters (Nurse, Chorus-Leader, Tutor, et al) in one, formidable, funny, profane Tita (Vivis Colombetti) who stole the show. 

 

[Image: Cruelty of Medea, Isaac Briot, 1637]

Palmyra, here and now

 

On the first of this month ISIS destroyed the Roman Temple of Bel in Palmyra. They've continued destroying ancient sites in the area. It's the latest steps in an effort of systematic destruction of sites associated with paganism, Christianity, and Shia Islam in areas under ISIS control. There are organizations monitoring the destruction like Unite4Heritage, and the International Council on Monuments and Sites, but nobody proposes any way of stopping it. At the same time it's destroying ancient buildings with great public fanfare, ISIS is selling looted ancient artifacts on the black market.

 

ISIS's argument is zero tolerance for paganism, Christianity or Shia Islam in their communities. Every reminder must be extirpated. The community must be cleansed. The goal is the unity of uniformity. It has to be total (totalitarian) and absolute.

 

Antiquarian interest doesn’t matter. There is no necessity that the works of ones forefathers should be preserved, if the works were accomplished in ignorance.

 

The most prominent and common words for this violence against property--vandalism and barbarism--are ethnically charged. The Vandals as the destroyers of the Roman Empire, barbarian being the term Greeks assigned to non-Greeks. There is probably some comfort to be found in assigning to a distant, alien culture extremes of intolerance, ignorance, disrespect. We may have a spotty preservation record ourselves, but at least we’re not as bad as them.

 

But are they really so alien? Weren’t the leading lights of modernism advocating something similar a hundred years ago?

 

 

Our task is to destroy four centuries of Italian tradition. Into the resulting void we must plant all the seeds of potential which are to be found in the examples furnished by the primitives, the barbarians of every nation, …. (Umberto Boccioni, “The Plastic foundations of Futurist sculpture and painting,” Lacerba, March 15, 1913)
 

Let each man proclaim: there is a great negative work of destruction to be accomplished. We must sweep and clean. (Tristan Tzara, Dada manifesto, March 23, 1918)

 
Forward, my country, / move on faster! / Get on with it, / sweep away the antiquated junk! / Stronger, my commune, / strike at the enemy, / Make it die out, / that monster, the old way of life. (Vladimir Mayakovsky, 150,000,000, 1921) 

The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. (Andre Breton, Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1929)

 

 

Almost a century earlier, John Ruskin identified in “The Lamp of Memory” the quality of old buildings that excites such adolescent fury:

 

… the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, nor in its gold. Its glory is its Age, and in that deep sense of voicefulness, of stern watching, of mysterious sympathy, nay, even of approval or condemnation, which we feel in walls that have long been washed by the passing waves of humanity. It is in their lasting witness against men, in their quiet contrast with the transitional character of all things

 

That witnessing and voicefulness are inimical to totalitarianism. They check delight in violence and destruction. They render doubtful the bravado of outraging the world. Get rid of them, then. Get rid of everything that obstructs the intoxicating sensation of self-annihilation.

 

[Image from Agence France-Presse, Sept. 4, 2015]