Silverlake Blvd.

Opera UCLA's Mother of Us All

Imagine, if you will, a romantic comedy of the original women’s rights movement, incorporating deconstructions of 19^th century political rhetoric, set in an operatic mode mixing Pirates of Penzance with Dido and Aeneas, with music based on Stephen Foster, and American hymns.

 

I’ve been waiting to see and hear Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thompson’s Mother of Us All for about 40 years, so I didn’t miss Opera UCLA’s performance last Tuesday. It was a brilliant, funny, disturbing and moving production. I gather UCLA did it in 1965, with sets by David Hilberman. I left wondering why it isn’t produced all the time.

 

It’s Stein’s later mode, so there are characters, a sense of narrative progression, and the characters speak sentences, though their sentences play with sense more than assert earnestly. The meanings go in and out of focus – appropriate for dealing with politics. One witty touch was to provide supertitles, projecting bits of Stein’s text. It was a sign that director Michael Hackett knew his material. For all the amiable nonsense, there were some jarringly pertinent lines.

 

I suspect it will always seem topical – sexism, racism, public discourse, the constitution – but it seemed especially so the other night, “… because they are afraid of black men because they are afraid of women because they are afraid afraid. Men are afraid.”

 

Thompson’s music is the perfect foil to the text. Instead of knotty, it’s easy-going and tuneful. It delineates characters and scenes with elegant efficiency. Thompson provides an outline for some of Stein’s more freeform passages. There are elaborate instrumental interludes providing additional layers. Thompson is even more underappreciated than Stein, if that’s possible. Andreas Mitisek, the magician of Long Beach Opera, kept the music on target.

 

The action consists of seven scenes of Susan B. Anthony’s life, in which she lectures, resists, debates, dreams about or laughs affectionately at an inner circle of mostly fictional women and mostly historical men, plus a chorus of Suffragettes. It ends with an epilogue where the characters pay their respects to her statue on a pedestal in the Capitol, while her spirit looks down and wonders.

 

The whole opera is about people getting up onto, and down off of, pedestals.

 

Some – most of the men – are fanatical about maintaining their prominence. In the fourth scene there’s a male trio singing “We you see we V.I.P. very important persons to anyone who can hear or you can see just we three.” Garrett Schoonover gave Daniel Webster an impressively solemn voice and presence.

 

But none remain steady on their pedestals. Webster finds his Angel More. And Mario Arias found the ridiculousness of the John Adams character, constantly reminding poor Constance Fletcher of what an honor it is to be loved by an Adams.

 

Hackett gave everyone on stage a characteristic walk, a stance, a look and gesture. Though Susan B. dominates, Thompson’s music gives everyone a moment in the spotlight, and the students had a ball with it.

 

Even characters without much music made an impression:

 

Vanessa Martucci’s Angel More doesn’t sing very much, but she pulled off a way of carrying herself that was mesmerizing. Likewise Jacelyn Yeo did a memorable (literal) star turn as Lillian Russell, swanning around stage in a queenly manner. Ulysses S. Grant isn’t a big part, but Michael Valentekovic mimed rages that were hilarious.

 

Thompson made the role Susan B. a challenge, and Maureen Brabec pulled it off. She nailed the finale, “We cannot retrace our steps,” which is the work’s analogy to Dido's "Remember me". It was shattering.

 

Intermittently interrupting the proceedings is Jo the Loiterer, a not noble, idealistic, upstanding citizen. Other than Alice B. Toklas, he’s the most compelling character Stein ever invented. I suspect Jo’s a distillation of the irreverent G.I.s Stein delighted in after WWII. Eric Levintow perfectly embodied Jo's clowning, his funks, and surprisingly tender lyric tenor sighs. Under the table or sprawled on the floor, he was definitely not on any pedestal.

 

The big comic surprise – when Indiana Elliott’s brother forbids her marriage to Jo - was beautifully perpetrated by Dominic Delzompo, parodying a dozen other operas in authentic Gilbert & Sullivan style: “Nobody knows who I am but I forbid the marriage”.

 

Irena Jacobs’s sets defined interior and outside spaces with elegant austerity. Their minimalism was contrasted by the exuberant maximalism of Maddison Caroll’s 19^th century pastiche costumes. UCLA went all out, and it was worth it.

Happy Birthday Wanda June @ the Gene Frankel Theatre

 

The Wheelhouse revival of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1970 screwball/absurdist fantasia on men, women and guns was perfect. The audience packed onto the stage roared until the lines that made everyone gasp. More relevant to 2018 than 1970.

 

Kate Maccluggage as Penelope provided the one touch of civilized behavior – which the play proceeded to dismiss. Has anyone else presented Odysseus’s homecoming so unsympathetically? Even Dante reserves a grudging admiration for his daring. Vonnegut will have none of that.

 

This production combined some characters in a way that seemed inevitable. Penelope became the ghost of Harold’s ex, Mildred, living it up in heaven. And Harold became the ghost of his victim Major Siegfried von Konigwald: “The woods were full of all kinds of nuts who were proud of some damn thing or other, and they all had guns. They were always looking for revenge. You find a way to bottle revenge – that’s the end of Schnapps und Coca-Cola.”

The spread of polychromy at the Getty Villa & the Met Breuer

 

I didn’t hate everything in the Met Breuer’s “Like Life: Sculpture, Color and the Body”: there was a statuette by El Greco (of all people), Charles-Henri-Joseph Cordier’s over-the-top polymarble bust “Capresse des Colonies”, and good examples of Duane Hanson and John De Andrea.

 

But then I realized that I had seen this exhibit before, at the Getty Villa’s “The Color of Life: polychromy in sculpture from antiquity to the present” (March 6–June 23, 2008) that featured Hanson, De Andrea, El Greco’s statuette and Cordier’s “Capresse des Colonies”.

 

I remember the Getty show as compact and focused instead of gigantic and sprawling; witty rather than clever. Instead of freakshow hipster bait the jawdropper was a conjectural reconstruction of a statue of Augustus with its original (eyepopping) colors.

 

[Image: John De Andrea’s self-portrait in Oakland in 2016]

Mostly about pianos

Last February the highlight of the Green Umbrella concert was Julius Eastman’s piece with the name I don't want to repeat.

 

I don’t know what I expected but it wasn’t this. It’s minimalism but not the minimalism of long fine threads spun out and twined systematically; it’s the minimalism of kids banging a piano with two-note trills, over and over. It’s ferocious and insolent. The four pianists – Dynasty Battles, Michelle Cann, Joanne Pearce Martin, and Vicki Ray – understood their duty and delivered an overwhelming sound.

 

Then, in the last quarter, the trills subside into distinct lines, and the mood relaxes. But only a bit. It’s never nice, never entirely agreeable. It’s up there with the American piano epics – The Concord Sonata, Sonatas and Interludes, Night Fantasies – but alone, separate in its urgency.

 

A few weeks later, PianoSpheres presented “An Evening with Terry Riley and Gloria Cheng”. I’d seen Riley play before, but this was the moment I woke up and heard.

 

Cheng set the stage with works by Riley from the 1950s and the 1990s, demonstrating how Riley is too idiosyncratic for labels. His spikey postwar serialism (Two Piano Pieces 1958/1959) has a jazzy bounce, and later pieces (The Heaven Ladder, Book 7, 1994) recapitulate modes of the last century and a half (Brahms, Ravel, ragtime, stride, Ives, Monk, Webern, Cage, minimalism, trance, etc.) in a way that is genuinely epic while remaining genial.

 

“Genial epic” maybe an oxymoron but it’s the best description of Riley’s own solo piano performance. He followed Cheng with Simply M (2007) and Requiem for Wally (1996). In the program Cheng commented on Riley’s comportment at the piano. He holds his torso very still and steady. And even his arms, extended, are poised rather than slashing through the air. The variety of styles in his music is matched by the precisely gauged varieties of attack, sweetness/harshness, velocity/stillness.

 

The concert ended – and culminated – in the world premiere of Cheng Tiger Growl Roar (for four hands). It was a glorious roar.

 

Unfortunately, because Riley is a celebrity, Zipper Hall was full of Goops more interested in broadcasting their presence than attending to what was happening.

 

I understand that the custom of sitting quietly and listening intently is a relatively recent development, and confined to a narrow range of live performance events. I also understand that since the beginning of time people have been going to live performances for social, rather than aesthetic reasons.

 

Still, it’s a pain to have to struggle to hear Riley’s otherworldly music over idle chitchat about last night, celeb-spotting, and selfie- and video-taking.

 

It got so bad that – in the absence of ushers – a woman got up and slapped one offender so hard she dropped her video-taking phone. This did not result in a brawl, but fists were shaken and fingers were flipped for the rest of the show. Where were the ushers? The event organizers? Are we just supposed to put up with it, like Zipper Hall in the 2010s is the Anti-Club in the 1980s?