Silverlake Blvd.

Shakespeare400: Anthony + Cleopatra + Coriolanus

 

I hope the scholars are right; I hope WS wrote Anthony & Cleopatra immediately after Macbeth, and then wrote Coriolanus after that. After two plays about the disaster of politicians with too little honor, a play about the disaster of politicians with too much. Good thoughts for election season.

 

Anthony and Cleopatra say “Screw it” to all their professional responsibilities. What’s wrong with that? At first their lovey-dovey behavior seems rather sweet. But that’s immediately followed by a scene with Cleopatra’s ladies and a Soothsayer, that makes explicit what kind of idiotic milieu they live in.

 

Not that the characters who take their responsibilities more seriously are in any way admirable. Caesar is solely interested in himself, criticizing Anthony’s behavior as an insult to his authority. Pompey, in contrast, goes on about A&C like a prig. Caesar’s great moment comes in Act 3, when his offer to make a private deal with Cleopatra achieves the precisely calibrated effect, and the loving couple turns on each other. Anthony whips Caesar’s ambassador, and then makes a completely incoherent, raving speech. It’s already over.

 

Coriolanus, in contrast, along with his mother Volumnia, represent monsters of duty. Too bad their context is post-Brexit remorse:

MENENIUS: Why, masters, my good friends, mine honest neighbours,

Will you undo yourselves?

FIRST CITIZEN: We cannot, sir. We are undone already.

 

WS shows the start of reality TV, over-sharing, selfies, Anthony Weiner, and Donald Trump:

SECOND CITIZEN: He used us scornfully. He should have showed us

His marks of merit, wounds received for’s country.

SICINIUS: Why, so he did, I am sure.

ALL THE CITIZENS: No, no: no man saw ‘em.

THIRD CITIZEN: HE said he had wounds which he could show in private,…

Verdi's Macbeth @ Dorothy Chandler

 

If you like Shakespeare’s play (see below) Verdi’s version requires an effort of sympathetic imagination. Verdi miraculously multiplied Shakespeare's three witches and two cut-throats into choirs. The subtly calibrated scene after the murder of Duncan is trashed in favor of a rousing Act 1 finale calling on God for vengeance. Macbeth’s famous lines of utter despair are set to lilting airs, interspersed with drinking songs, fight songs and more anthems of revenge. Then there are the ballets. Verdi concludes with a happy ending, of all things, making it the triumph of good over evil. As if anybody has ever cared about Malcolm. No doubt Verdi was very pleased with himself for not introducing a pair of crooning young lovers.

 

All that being understood, I was up for the challenge. I love experiencing the defunct dramaturgy that fired up the 19^th century. And how can you go wrong with Verdi in charge?

 

Unfortunately last Thursday at Dorothy Chandler it wasn’t Verdi who was in charge, but the director, Darko Tresjnak. Here we are nearing the end of a year of Hillary and Trump, and Tresjnak turns the supreme tragedy of unscrupulous political ambition into a playpen of pothead occultism, with pentagrams and satanic kittens slithering around the stage. Ugh. A giant step back into LA Opera’s bad old days, when the sets, costumes and direction were unbearable, even if the singing and playing was first-rate.

Shakespeare400 (Macbeth)

 

Goethe said somewhere that this was Shakespeare’s best work for the stage. Not his most profound or poetic, but the cleverest, most exciting theatrical contrivance. It could be true.

 

Think of Macbeth and his wife after the murder. This scene could have played in Athens, before an audience accustomed to Euripides. He is already raving (“The multitudinous seas incarnadine”) while she preserves a placid front (“A little water clears us of this deed. / How easy is it then! …”)

 

Every exchange is contrast and paradox.

 

For once even the passages of silly banter (The Porter) revive the discourse of paradoxes in a minor, bawdy key.

 

And yet, for such an action-packed spectacle, the action is interrupted by an interlude with the Witches and Hecate. This is usually cut. It follows Macbeth’s ghastly banquet, and preceedes some political speech by Lennox. It is a masque, a pagent, rather than a hard-boiled account of political assasination, like Julius Caesar. “Show” the witches cry, like good stage directors.

Shakespeare400 (Lear)

After Timon, another story of a Great Man abandoning the world. But in Shakespeare renunciation comes with a cost. In the same way Cordelia’s silence is the opposite of meekness: she wills her estrangement. Her renunciation is striking for a Shakespearean heroine: refusing eloquence, refusing poetry.

 

In the first Act, Lear plays at being mad, before actually being so. He jokes about blindness, before experiencing it. And then he anticipates his eventual disassociation when he shouts at Goneril, “Doth any here know me? This is not Lear. / Doth Lear walk thus? Speak thus? Where are his eyes?”

 

Later it’s Gloucester who answers, after picking up the trick of oracular utterance from Lear and the Fool, “I see it feelingly.”

Haunted House Party @ the Getty Villa

 

 

A preview of Haunted House Party at the Getty Villa last night. Luckily, I’m going to see it again later this month. Today I just want to note how unfailingly resourceful the Troubies were at finding ways of making Plautus’s characters, situations and imagery laugh-out-loud funny.

 

For instance, Philolaches’s introductory monologue—where he compares himself to a well-built but delapidated house. It’s one of those moments where Plautus’s point is inscrutible: are we supposed to laugh at his audacious frankness? Is it supposed to be shocking? Touching? Or is it just backstory needed to propell the plot forward?

 

The Troubies read it as an idiotic adolescent whine, augmenting the absurdity by having Philolaches croon his story to the tune of Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s “Our House”. As one of our party commented, “I missed a lot of the lines because I was laughing so hard.”

 

Vive le Roy

 

The Norton Simon’s “Duchamp to Pop” exhibit featured fabulous sculptures they’ve been hiding in their attic, including a rare Duchamp “Boite Alerte / Mailbox,” a roomful of Warhol Brillo Boxes, a touchingly ridiculous “Giant Soft Ketchup Bottle with Ketchup” by Oldenburg.

 

But without doubt the show-stopper was Roy Lichtenstein’s 32-foot long, polished brass “Long Modern Sculpture” from 1969. At once an affectionate homage to art deco, a sly comment on on preservation (it looks like a balustrade rescued from an demolished movie palace) and a “take that!” response to aggressively space-invading minimialist sculpture (it’s worth all of Serra’s steel plates and Heizer’s rocks put together). It should be in every guide book as one of the important things to see in Southern California—and it’s been sitting in storage. Hopefully it has been uncrated for good.