Silverlake Blvd.

Young Caesar @ Disney

 

Lou Harrison had the crackpot theories of the most forbidding High Modernist but the results, just intonation notwithstanding, could be soundtracks to an Oscar-winning feature film. Parts of his piano concerto are not very different from John Williams. The only reason he’s not as ubiquitous as Copland is probably his insistence on non-Western and home-made instruments.

 

This production was the kind of out of left field project that makes people love the L.A. Phil. Harrison's music is sweet and earnest. There are haunting violin solos. But the drama, after decades of revisions, doesn’t work.

 

The core of it is a gay Dido and Aeneas, that ends with Caesar leaving his beloved Nicomedes in obedience to his political duties. The concluding lament of Nicomedes is touching and lovely.

 

The first half consists of Caesar’s youth: his marriage, fatherhood, his father's death, his first taste of bare-fisted politics, his first duties in the army. Much of this becomes relevant in the subsequent scenes with Nicomedes. But none of it is presented in a way that makes it compelling in itself.

 

There are some arias (“Yesterday his eyes were bright” and “Now grasp your daughter”) that almost justify it. But some of it is awful, like the repeated unfunny jokes on the rejected fiancée Cossutia’s fatness. It’s intended as comic relief, but it came across as stupid misogyny. The dancer swirling around in drag with a box of chocolates didn't help.

 

This probably wasn’t the case in the original format, where all the parts were played by puppets. The unreality made it a cartoon. Puppet Cossutia’s dance of despair was probably a hoot.

 

But then later revisions added live performers. And boy did L.A. Phil provide live ones. Of course it was nice to see nice-looking guys like Adam Fisher (Caesar) and Hadleigh Adams (Nicomedes) cuddling on stage. Let's have more of this. But it’s revealing that the high point of this production—and the one moment of real hilarity—was the “Eroticon” orgy scene, in which the shadows of the dancers cavorted with the puppets. It was just the right mix of bawdy, silly and artful. It was the moment I could discern a gleam of Harrison and Robert Gordon’s “opera for X-rated puppets.”

Night & Dreams: a Schubert & Beckett Recital @ Disney Hall

 

It was not a complete fiasco. There were moments when the performers were permitted to sing, play and recite without too many obstructions. Ryan McKinny and Julia Bullock have commanding voices and are electric presences. Pricilla Pointer gave a creditable performance of Rockabye, as did Barry McGovern in Ohio Impromptu.

 

It was not a terrible idea, complimenting Schubert’s concentrated dramatic songs with Beckett’s concentrated micro-dramas. The problem came in the attempts to blend them together.

 

Act Without Words II was well performed by Barry McGovern and Miles Anderson. So well done they could have risked doing it without Schubert’s Impromptu #3 in the background. Since when is Schubert background music?

 

And then, how can anybody think the right way to end Catastrophe is with the Protagonist bursting into a magnificent, full-bodied rendition of “Gravedigger’s Homesickness”? The whole point of Beckett’s chilling parable is the character’s tragic muteness. It’s beyond belief. Did anybody read the play?

 

Likewise, the perfect regularity of the the three ladies in Come and Go was destroyed when Flo stepped aside to sing “Laughter and Weeping.” Bullock was wonderful, but why spoil Beckett?

 

And then there were the even worse moments, when McKinney and Bullock were required to sing with props from other Beckett plays—the mound from Happy Days, the trash cans from Endgame—treated like gimmicks in a cheesy review.

 

Is it any surprise that the Beckett play that gave the evening it’s title—the one Beckett piece that specifies the use of Schubert’s music—was not presented?

Salome @ Dorothy Chandler

 

I was unprepared for the orchestra. It blasts you out of your seat. Strauss unleashes one outrageous salvo after the next. It’s glorious. I couldn’t resist it if I tried. But it also makes sense, dramatically. He never just throws notes out. He always makes sure you know what’s going on. I realized this is the secret to his popularity, why his dissonance is appreciated and that of Schoenberg is not. Every jolt has a dramatic purpose. He never gets ahead of the audience. I get why people love him.

 

But the drama itself? It’s not a drama at all, but a black comedy. The L.A. Opera audience got it—there was a lot of laughter. Both Wilde and Strauss were having fun on two levels. One was the comedy of an impossible, rebellious daughter cutting loose. For Wilde, Salome is another name for Cecily Cardew, the too-bright no-longer-little troublemaker.

 

Patricia Racette was excellent, making herself heard over the hooting orchestra, dancing, doing a strip-tease and fondling a decapitated head for twenty minutes. What a workout! This role is not for sissies!

 

The other level is the comedy of Authority struggling to hang on. Narraboth (the excellent Issachah Savage) gets what’s happening early on. Then no less than John the Baptist (also excellent Tómas Tómasson) arrives to proclaim that Herod’s whole world is finished. And Herod (excellent Alan Glassman) really is the protagonist. He suffers the fate of all fairytale characters that get their wishes granted.

Nixon @ Disney

 

Though I was only able to see Act 1 last Friday, it was clear that this was one of the best things the LA Phil has ever done. Could be the best semi-staged production. Definitely the best video and live music presentation.

 

It’s a glorious work. Adams realized that the highpoint of every classic opera is the mad scene, so he wrote an opera in which every character is mad, and every aria is a mad scene. The music expresses the manic high of grandeur and power each felt about him- or her-self.

 

Ryan McKinny (Nixon), John Matthew Myers (Mao), Joélle Harvey (Pat Nixon), Joo Won Kang, Chou En-Lai were terrific. As Mao’s secretaries/bodyguards, Lacey Jo Benter, Renée Rapier and Rachael Wilson provided a scary/comic update of the Three Ladies from Magic Flute.

 

The Master Chorale sounded great and impersonated mobs and banquet guests effectively.

 

The staging by director Elkhanah Pulitzer with scenic designer Alexander V. Nichols was minimal—by necessity—but ingenious, defining distinct spaces for each character.

 

There was continuous video background, but for once it was lovely and appropriate—if a bit busy when the live performers were also performing. And no wonder. This morning in the program I saw it was by Bill Morrison (The Miners’ Hymns, Decasia) who is the master of this genre. I have hated L.A. Phil’s experiments in video accompaniment, but if they can get Morrison to do them from now on, sign me up for all of them.

The Abduction from the Seraglio @ Dorothy Chandler

 

Abduction should be fast and funny. But maintaining the breezy tempo is a problem, because the music keeps stopping. And unfortunately the dialogue is never up to Mozart’s level. (How could it?) It is a lesson in the importance of continuo and recitative, which seem silly extras until they’re absent.

Updating the setting from Imaginary Ottoman Empire to the Orient Express circa the Jazz Age was a promising concept. But they never pulled it off. The principles were not clever clowns, so most of the physical humor fell flat.

The exception was So Young Park as the confidante/servant. She was not only on top of Mozart’s exacting vocal music, but also elegantly delivered the slapstick shenanigans devised by director James Robinson. She even managed to lure Morris Robinson (the bad guy Osmin stuck on her) into superior clowning. They made the show. Allen Moyer’s cutaway railroad cars were cute from the Loge, but you probably had to be in the Orchestra section to get the full effect.

Abduction is a tough piece to stage, but the music is worth it. Mozart presents the emotions of his characters with complete conviction. Konstanze’s “Welcher Wechsel herrscht...Traurigkeit ward mir zum Loose” is the quintessence of despair. The music embodies this despair, with complete sympathy.

But at the same time, the subtlety is so exacting, that the music, as it evolves, presents the despair not as a single state, but as a progression of finely discriminated, varied states. It is not Despair, but a specific story of the progress of a specific despair—this woman’s experience, in this place, for this period of time. Konstanze’s situation is not a single, fixed thing. It touches self-pity, then regret, then defiance, then flies off in heroic postures, … and so on.

This mutability constitutes, for Mozart, hope. The music does not pretend despair is unreal, but suggests, tactfully, that it is temporary.

Love raptures and despair are of course still in vogue—no translation necessary. But Mozart also gives Kontanze and Belmonte "Welch ein Geschick! O Qual der Seele"—an opportunity to proclaim that their love is stronger than death. This is not such a popular idea. Mozart treats it with sympathy, but also arranges matters so that this bravado is not put to the test.

The Fairy Queen @ Long Beach Opera

 

The assumption that it’s an operatic version of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream is misleading.

 

First of all, fans of the play will catch the mention of Oberon, and the opening song about lovers running away from town, and the fairy chorus, But after that, all Shakespearean references are immediately bumped offstage by Night, Mystery, Secrecy, Sleep, Corydon, Mopsa, Phoebus, the four seasons, Juno, and A Chinese Man and Woman who, in the style of a vaudeville revue, each sing a show-stopping character song.

 

And the songs alone are what makes Fairy Queen worthwhile. Purcell provided each of these unreal characters with songs worth hearing (e.g. “See, even Night herself is here”).

 

And (for the second misleading thing), for listeners who equate opera with Verdi or Wagner, the distinctive sound of Purcell can be a shock: it’s an entirely different branch of music theater. There are show-off vocal acrobatics, but instead of a grand orchestra, Purcell’s forces are like a lounge act band. It’s not just the English language that links them to show tunes.

 

Moreover, like a superior lounge act, Purcell never settles into one groove. He passes from high to low, grand to common, alternating from wholehearted get-down dances to thrilling grand anthems, from devastating laments to cheeky comic songs.

 

As a consequence, the songs live as independent concert pieces, and their original context is forgotten, the same way songs of Irving Berlin and Gershwin outlive the shows they were originally embedded in. But inevitably, there’s a desire to see and hear the songs a real show. And so people create new theatrical productions incorporating the old songs (My One and Only, etc.)

 

Hence last Sunday with Long Beach Opera, home of the unexpected. Andreas Mitisek deserves a lot of credit for getting Culture Clash to adapt Fairy Queen.

 

It's not really a stretch. The trio is especially good at finding the key for material whose comic secret has been mislaid. Their version of Peace by Aristophanes was the best Getty Villa performance ever: a hurricane of slapstick, topical allusions, painful puns, outrageous ethnic and racial stereotypes and fine-grain satire. I staggered out of the performances wounded from laughing.

 

And so, too, this production was full of brilliant and apt inventions. First of all, setting the scene in Las Vegas. And then, taking a cue from Shakespeare, Culture Clash created three couples who fall under the influence and lose their way. They created characters and context. I don’t know if Purcell’s stately periods really worked as music for a rave, but it felt just. Culture Clash’s greatest triumph came after the party, after the love drug fades, and everyone wakes up with a hangover to sing “If Love's a Sweet Passion, why does it torment?” It was a better dramatic use of the song than in the original.

 

But I walked out of Fairy Queen unwounded. The only hurricane was the meteorological one happening outside the theater.

 

I suspect that the music was too much for them. One stately rave scene can be a goof, but almost three hours of Purcell imposes its own sensibility. Purcell is not stuffy and he loves fun and frivolity, but his pace is never frantic. And Purcell's vocal music makes extraordinary demands. It's hard to clown while having to draw all that filigree. Even so, Marc Molomot as Puck, the owner of Club Fairy Queen, was game, as was Alexandra Martinez-Turano—who first appeared as a pole dancer during one of the instrumental interludes.

 

Tellingly, the moment just before the music started might have been the funniest of the show. Zacharias Neidzwiecki (the head-turning Bartender and gold-trunked go-go boy) comes out while Musica Angelica is tuning up. You know how those period instruments sound. He glares at them: then plops on a sofa and covers his ears with pillows.

Amélie @ Center Theater

 

I’ve started the year by seeing two musical plays—one about to launch on Broadway in March, while the other launched in London 325 years ago. Henry Purcell’s Fairy Queen was a mega-hit back in the day, though it didn’t make any money (sounds familiar), and who knows how Craig Lucas and Daniel Messé’s Amélie will be received.

The Center Theater production was excellent and the cast superb. Other than the principals and a little girl, the ten performers of the ensemble played multiple roles with verve and style. It was nice to note that only two of them were conventional Apollo/Aphrodite physical paragons. Also outstanding were the sets, and visuals (the goldfish hat!).

But the story—based on the 2001 movie with Audrey Tautou—is a romp that runs out of oomph long before the curtain falls. The music was agreeable without being memorable. Even so, there were hilarious moments. Don’t ask me why there suddenly was an Elton John impersonation, but it was terrific.

A Merrily We Roll Along Thanksgiving Weekend

 

 

I can remember 1981—just cue up “Tainted Love” or “I Love a Man In Uniform” or Human League’s “Fascination” and I’m there. The music’s an infallible time machine.

 

For some people the music that brings back 1981 is Stephen Sondheim’s Merrily We Roll Along. Until last weekend I knew nothing about it, but now, not only did we see a superb revival at the Wallis, but also the new documentary about the original production.

 

Lonny Price’s “Best Worst Thing That Ever Could Have Happened” is a good place to start if you’re somebody who’s suspicious of musicals in general and ignorant about Sondheim, like me. We see and hear the original cast of Merrily tell their funny and awful stories in the present, and then—through the magic of lost and miraculously rediscovered archival footage—see and hear them as they were in 1981—the auditions, the rehearsals, the rewrites, interviews with everybody involved.

 

I knew nothing and was moved. Price’s documentary is a meditation on what can happens to dreams over time. The irony is that Sondheim’s musical is a meditation on exactly the same thing. What happens when the greatest opportunity of a lifetime turns out to be a disaster?

 

The revival at the Wallis was first-rate: efficient without being slick, visually interesting without glitz, a 100% committed cast. The problems were the the problems inherent to the work, i.e. the book. The contrast between the triteness of the dialogue and the wit of the lyrics was jarring.

 

But the songs keep coming. I’m more attuned to the satirical ones than the ballads: “The Blob,” and “Opening Doors,” and “Franklin Shepard, Inc.,” and “That’s not a tune you can hum to”. The slow number that still haunts is Gussie’s “Nothing wrong with wanting me, … darling. / Also nothing wrong with … … not.” The words couldn't be plainer. But the music, the tortuous pause before the final word of each line, makes it an existential threat. Somehow Frank, and everyone else, survived.

Akhnaten @ Dorothy Chandler

 

We are not totally starved for Philip Glass in Southern California. It’s easy to think of memorable Glassian events, like L.A. Opera’s own Dracula at the Ace last year, the phenomenal marathon of Music in 12 Parts at Royce a few years ago, and Einstein on the Beach a bit before that.

 

I wish the powers that be would note how full the seats are with younger people when Glass is performed. (And I also wish during the year that every other musical city in the world is hosting a festival to celebrate Steve Reich’s 80^th birthday, L.A. would get with the program. But to return to Glass …)

 

We’re even in pretty good shape regarding his 1983 opera Akhnaten. There was a memorable performance of Selected Scenes in 2006 at Disney Hall, with countertenor Daniel Bubeck, attractive and unnerving in just the right measure. And in 2011 Long Beach Opera mounted a terrific production at the Terrace Theater. With the catch that LBO, as always, was operating on more enthusiasm than cash.

 

The new L.A. Opera/English National Opera co-production is definitely not done on a shoestring. It addressed the big challenge of the piece—the fact that nothing happens—with lavish visual spectacle. But it wasn’t empty spectacle, or gratuitous. Conductor Atthew Aucoin, Director Phelim McDermott, Set Designer Tom Pye and Costume designer Kevin Pollard took Glass’s eerie drama to heart, and created a moving dramatic spectacle. It was a perfect realization.

 

The first act was a triumph. It conveyed the weight of tradition and ritual that sets the drama in motion. It also conveyed how a Person is transformed—or replaced—by a Pharaoh. Anthony Roth Costanzo came out on stage naked, and was dressed by the Jugglers, doing nothing himself. It was mesmerizing and made the point.

 

The non-singing Jugglers were part of almost every scene. The juggling was artful and anxiety-provoking in a way that was completely appropriate. The looping and interlinked repetitive patterns also mirrored the music.

 

Among the many details that demonstrated the production's serious engagement with the work, was that they chose not to provide supertitle translation of the libretto: they realized that Akhnaten is a pageant, and the significance of the words is more symbolic than dramatic.

 

When listening to the recording, I always skip the parts with the narration, but Zachary James’s immense voice made The Scribe’s words compelling.

 

The only drawbacks were the limitiations of the work itself. It's really a cantata more than an opera, consisting of declamation and tableaux rather than action. For example, Akhnaten’s big solo, the hymn that ends Act Two, is extraordinary, but it decisively stops whatever dramatic momentum dead. L.A. Opera did it with extreme gravity, ... and I started to nod off.

 

And then there's the “Attack and Fall” scene in Act Three. This is the big test of a production of Akhnaten. How do you stage a violent revolution with music that’s refuses to acknowledge abrupt change? L.A. Opera did a good job, presenting tableaux of the coup d’etat. If the Chorus and all the Daughters had been up to the task, it would have been a triumph.

 

So what if it wasn't perfect? It was magnificent. The longeurs are just part of the ride, like the boring bits in Tristan. It’s worth it.

Nosferatu @ The Ace

 

 

What made this an L.A. Opera event was the live music by Mathew Aucoin, the current Artist in Residence. Like traditional silent movie music, it included lots of recycled material. I caught the bits of Pierrot Lunaire, Verklärte Nacht, and Tristan, but not Schubert’s Gretchen, or the Zemlinsky. Aucoin’s collaging was clever, but I almost prefered his solo piano vamping.

 

Liv Redpath provided vocals throughout, switching from Pierrot to Gretchen to Isolde without breaking a sweat. Phenomenal.

 

It wasn’t the most immaculate print—they didn’t identify what it was. Am I sounding like a fussy old classicist, whose first question is not What do you think of it? but Which edition are you reading? Unfortunately with movies in general and silents above all, it’s a valid question.

 

It’s great that there were all these people at the Ace who who had never seen an opera, but many of them seem not have to have ever sat through a silent movie before. Yes, there are campy moments in Nosferatu, but too much laugher was distressing. Ellen glancing out at a street filled with undertakers carrying away coffins, her confused mix of disgust and fascination—it’s not quaint or irrelevant.