Several years ago, coming out of the pandemic, Opera Parallèle presented Philip Glass's operatic take on Cocteau's magical fairy-tale film from 1946, La Belle et la Bête; I missed that production but fortunately a revised version was given a two-day run in Zellerbach Hall (I saw it last night) under the auspices of Cal Performances. Opera Parallèle has now performed all three of Glass's Cocteau operas (the other two are Orphée & Les Enfants Terribles); La Belle et la Bête is a bit different from the other two in that rather than a stand-alone stage recreation of the film, it is meant to run alongside the original as an alternative soundtrack (& in fact it is available as such on the Criterion blu-ray release of the film).
The Zellerbach stage was set with six different screens, three on top & three below. Their sizes & the line-up were balanced but not symmetrical; the middle screen on the top, the largest of the six, showed Cocteau's film. The smaller screen below usually showed the film as re-shot with OP's personnel (chiefly baritone Hadleigh Adams as the Beast/Prince & Avenant & soprano Chea Kang as Belle). The two screens flanking the top screen showed fragments & close-ups of the Cocteau film & the two flanking screens on the bottom showed other OP performers (chiefly mezzo-soprano Sophie Delphis as the stepsisters & baritone Aurelien Mangwa as Belle's father, her brother Ludovic, & the moneylender) or appropriate scenes related to the mood or setting of the scene (such as re-creations of the stone faces with blinking eyes from Beast's castle). The screens each had an ornate frame, as if around an artwork, while the top center screen, the movie screen, had none, making it look like a regular movie screen, while the others with their fancy frames reminded us of the artistic eye & placement guiding everything we were seeing, a note of the artificial & aesthetic which reinforced Cocteau's plea, at the beginning of his film, that we have the conscious sophistication to watch it with the unsophisticated but therefore farther-seeing eyes of a child open to magic.
In addition to the action being shown on the screens, the performers also enacted some of the scenes on stage, often alongside their filmed selves or Cocteau's originals. One of the beauties of the staging was how it reflected the film's intentions; in the scene in which Belle first enters the Beast's castle, in which she floats weightlessly down dim & eerie halls, Kang somehow managed to recreate the effect without camera tricks, moving with incredible dancer-like lightness down the stage along with Josette Day's original on the screen above. The interplay between the original film, the OP re-creations, & the physical performers was so seamlessly done that it seemed inevitable; it's only later, when the inevitable noise & distractions of the after-theater world start to rub away at the enchantment, that you realize how incredibly difficult it must have been to pull all of this off, how much work & organization it takes to get so many different components both mechanical & human (the different sets of films, the lighting, the singers, the orchestra) to click into place with dream-like inevitability.
It has been years since I last heard a recording of this opera or last saw the movie (that happens when you're overloaded with movies & music). I had forgotten how marvelous the score is. As is well known by both those who love & those who dislike this composer (I'm in the former camp, obviously, otherwise I wouldn't have gone to this performance, particularly with its ridiculous 8:00 PM start time), his music has a very distinctive & even unmistakable sound; but though the whole opera "sounds like" Philip Glass, each scene reflects an appropriate, often strikingly distinct, mood: uncanny, yearning, threatening, frightening, touching, elevating. The segments of the score move along with cinematic speed, like camera cuts. Certain melodies that are on the border of big Romantic tunes regularly appear & float off before they develop too far, reminding me of the unresolved musical longing in Tristan without ever echoing or parodying that distinctive score. (One of these tunes in particular, one that lent a touch of the "exotic" to the score, reminded me of one of the Borodin tunes used in the musical Kismet). Glass has written a number of fairy-tale chamber operas (The Juniper Tree, The Fall of the House of Usher – the latter is of course based on Poe's "horror" story, but is a sibling of the fairy-tale world) & he is adept at creating memorably unworldly worlds. There is a wide range of moods produced from a relatively small orchestra, one that is mostly keyboards, percussion, & wind instruments (no strings! as a friend in the mezzanine reported to those of us below). The final moments, with the transformation of Beast into Prince, are accompanied by what sounded to me like an organ, offering that instrument's sacred & otherworldly aura for his apotheosis with Belle.
As usual with Opera Parallèle, Nicole Paiement conducted, & as usual, she led a clear & beautifully judged rendition; Brian Staufenbiel was, again as usual for OP, the director & the guiding hand behind the production concept, &, again as usual, thought & care had gone into a visually arresting & creative presentation (aided by the production design & film work by David Murakami). Delphis & Mangwa brought distinctive edge & depth to each of their characters. Kang & Adams were both superb. Her clear & lovely voice echoed & reinforced the distinctively innocent & loving Belle. Adams was a virile & anguished Beast, his voice skillfully softening as Beast is tamed by love or raging up as he is threatened. You realize how insightful & controlled his performance is at the end, when he resumes human form as the Prince, & though the handsome Adams looks appropriately princely there is a very slight, very subtly & astutely judged, sense of self-pleased placidity, a touch of royal entitlement, that reminded me of the story that when Garbo first saw Cocteau's film, she is said to have slumped down in her chair & murmured, "Give me back my Beast."
I also have to note the astonishing work by Sharon Peng & Natalie Barshow in recreating respectively Beast's make-up & his & Belle's sumptuous costumes for the stage & OP film scenes.
The audience . . . they were generally attentive, though I could hear some whispering & someone down the row from me kept pulling out his or her phone & flashing some light (checking the time?). Those were relatively minor things; the opera, done without intermission, was about an hour & forty-five minutes, which is not a long time in a movie theater but which for some reason seems like a long time for people at a live performance (it doesn't help that Zellerbach is an uncomfortable hall). But though the audience seemed appreciative, giving the performers well-deserved & hearty applause at the end, they also seemed, as a whole, & I realize I'm sliding out onto some thinnish ice here, not quite to get the mood & therefore the meaning of the piece. There was quite a bit of laughter at various points that struck me as appreciative but uncomprehending, starting with the scene in which Belle's Father, who has wandered into Beast's castle, sits down to dinner & is unnerved by the disembodied hands that hold the candelabras down the hall & that serve him at the table. Cinematically these are fairly simple tricks, but effective nonetheless, if you enter into the unreal enchantments of the tale. (I will say that I find such tricks, not just from Cocteau but even more so in the films of Méliès, far more beautiful, moving, & effective than the shiny plastic fakery of computer-generated effects in current films.)
Maybe the audience laughed because they were expecting Mrs Potts, Lumiere, & Co to launch into Be Our Guest? I don't say this to be dismissive of the wonderful Disney version of the story, but though the animators clearly studied their Cocteau, their film has a different mode & mood. There was also quite a bit of laughter, not quite mocking but also not quite comprehending, of various love-story lines at the end, & I was at a loss to figure out what was supposed to be funny. This is a fairy tale, not a sitcom or a Hallmark "romance". During the scene in which the guileless Belle is led into giving her siblings some of the Beast's magic secrets, a woman in the row in front of me whispered (very loudly whispered) that Belle was . . . she said either stupid, or a fool, or a word to that effect. Reading innocence & trustfulness & guilelessness as stupidity is exactly the attitude Cocteau asks us to consciously though perhaps only temporarily renounce while watching his enchantments. He is very clear in his statement at the beginning of his film that he wants the audience to approach this story with an openness that draws on a purity & innocence usually crushed out by or at least hidden away from the social & adult world. We are certainly meant to appreciate the sophistication of all the artists involved, the silvery cinematography, the lovely surrealist touches, the artificiality of our suspension, which is perhaps only temporary, of our usual civilized skepticism. But it is only by doing so that we can truly grasp the anguish of Beast's dark & deliquescent heart, & the beauty of Beauty coming to love him.
No comments:
Post a Comment