About a week before I went to Oakland Opera’s Turn of the Screw, I received an e-mail from them warning me that their location had changed, due to real estate shenanigans beyond their control. (And earlier this year, TheatreFIRST lost their storefront stage – does Oakland just not care about the arts? These places aren’t even real theaters to start with. Can’t the city do better than this? It looks as if they can't even hold on to their baseball team.) Good thing I’m semi-obsessive about e-mail and addresses; the new place is on 3rd Street rather than 2nd, but quite a few blocks further inside the abandoned warehouse district of Oakland right outside Jack London Square. I hope it works out for them. I guess most people will just drive there. But it’s far enough off the main street to give pedestrians from BART pause late at night. It’s a shame, because Oakland Opera continued its streak of excellent productions, and that’s where they should be putting their energies, rather than having to unlock streetside Port-a-Potties to use as restrooms or setting up more rows of folding chairs (making this possibly the most uncomfortable theater I’ve sat in, after Bayreuth). If you’re sitting there looking at a big pile of money and wondering what to do with it, you could do a whole lot worse than sending it Oakland Opera’s way.
I have rows of CDs and DVDs by Britten, even his version of The Beggar’s Opera, but no Turn of the Screw, which seems like an odd omission, so this was my first exposure to it in any form (Deirdre McClure was the conductor and was a wonderful advocate for the piece). The story’s combination of the corruption of innocence with an outsider’s struggle to find a place makes it pretty obvious Britten material. The setting was moved to the American South, which is a good idea because it connects with the whole Southern Gothic tradition, though it ended up not making a huge difference in the presentation (it’s possible the sudden change in venue was part of the reason). The outside settings are bayou-like, and the old housekeeper is, in keeping with the location, a black woman (Lori Willis acted an old woman quite convincingly, but her vibrant and supple voice beautifully undercut the illusion of age). I had wondered if Quint and Miss Jessel would also be black servants, but that creates the obvious problem of having blacks as the evil characters (more precisely, sexually evil characters), which may or may not be why the Opera didn’t pursue that possibility. The ghosts were played on stage by acrobats (I don’t know if my Jessel was Ena Starling or Emily Leap since the program doesn’t give dates for their appearances, but Danny Starling was Quint) occasionally suspended from harnesses, which sounds like a cumbersome gimmick but was surprisingly effective; as is usual in such cases, the apparatus was clearly visible but disappeared for all practical purposes in the intensity of performance. Quint in particular was such a long, lanky man that his physique added to the unearthly quality of the apparition. The ghosts were sung by Marta Johansen and Gerald Semintore; the whole cast was of excellent vocal quality, and though they had surtitles they were not really needed at all, given everyone’s clear diction.
I had always assumed that any theatrical adaptation of The Turn of the Screw would of necessity make the ghosts real and lose the ambiguity of the first-person narration (is it all real? or is the governess hysterically projecting her sexual fantasies onto the children?), but Myfanwy Piper’s libretto actually preserves quite a lot of the possibility that it is the governess who is the problem. Anja Strauss is lovely in the role, both physically and vocally, but I thought at first that she was bugging her eyes and holding the expression of horror a bit too long, as if she were calculating the performance for a much larger space; then I realized it was a legitimate reflection of the character’s growing mental problems. The children are quite striking; Piper very cleverly has them speak mostly in nursery rhymes, prayers, games, and lessons, which subtly sets them apart from the adults and conveys the primitive and playfully surreal violence of childhood. I saw Nick Kempen and Kelty Morash as the children; Brooks Fisher and Madelaine Matej play them at alternate performances. Kempen in particular was quite striking and obviously had vocal training; I don’t usually like the sound of boy sopranos but he shouldered his burden manfully and seems to be sort of specializing in the role, to the horror of the nice woman sitting next to me, a long-time opera-goer and academic, who announced to me that she wouldn’t have let her children perform the role. Kempen seemed to be suffering no ill effects, judging from his buoyant bio. He lives in Castro Valley, where I grew up, and I was amused to see he had shared the stage with my younger niece in a recent production there of The Wizard of Oz, another American classic of dispossession, alienation, supernatural horror, and the search for the place where one belongs.
Showing posts with label Oakland Opera. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oakland Opera. Show all posts
21 October 2007
10 August 2006
Coming home to roost
In May I heard the Oakland Opera Theater's performance of Anthony Davis's X. Their performance space turns out to be just a short walk from BART, always a key consideration. I had never been to Oakland Opera Theater before, which is my loss, since it turns out they've done quite a few favorites of mine (4 Saints in 3 Acts, Rake's Progress -- and there was a Gertrude Stein evening and I was not informed?). I've had the CDs of X since they were released about 20 years ago, so I couldn't pass up a chance to attend the only post-premiere live performance I've ever heard of.
The previous week A and I had gone to the Cutting Ball Theater's production of Suzan-Lori Parks's The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, which was wonderful -- Cutting Ball productions always are -- kind of like a staged version of a long lyric poem, like an African-American version of the Wasteland. So she joined me again for some more Fighting of the Power. (Interestingly enough, what she heard about Malcolm X as a black girl growing up in Louisiana was not that different from what I heard about him growing up as a white boy in California -- he was a crazy radical/reverse racist/the bad guy to Dr King's good guy. But the more I hear of what he said, the more sense he makes, especially in the context of his times, which is where we're all trapped anyway.)
Being unsure where the theater was, I arrived even more insanely early than usual, and since they were late opening the doors (like 40 minutes late) I ended up standing around for about 90 minutes, which is why I always travel with a book. The company management was sweeping and finishing up the set after the previous night's poetry slam. The crowd was starting to get restless. One woman who arrived shortly after I did turned out to be the grandmother of Jason Jackson, who sang Malcolm's brother. Someone once told me as a rule of life "never criticize a black woman's hair" (though I would never criticize anyone's hair in the first place, and all the black women I know do amazing sculptural things with their hair anyway, though A cuts it very short and dyes it gold) and to that rule we can add "never make a black woman wait to see her grandson." The growing crowd was now getting extremely restless. I was not looking forward to grabbing a seat (I hate open seating) and then figuring out where the men's room was, when it was already almost starting time for the opera. I was beginning to wonder if I should write off Oakland Opera Theater but the performance changed my mind. Amazingly enough it started on time and was of outstanding quality, despite the limitations of the space (which included sauna-like heat that day).
I'm happy to report that Jackson's grandmother was justifiably proud, and Joseph Wright was superb as Malcolm. The whole cast was excellent (though I felt Darron Flagg as Elijah Muhammad was straining) and the staging was remarkably effective, given that the stage area was smaller than most high school theaters.
The opera itself is tableau-like, with perhaps a bit too much repetition from line to line, and it helps to follow it if you've seen the movie. But it's quite effective on stage and the Oakland Opera Theater, despite its discombobulation beforehand, was sharp and professional where it counted. I can only hope that someday X will provide a vehicle for black performers who are tired of a steady diet of Porgy & Bess.
Anthony Davis himself turned out to be at this performance. I almost went up to him but I always feel awkward about approaching artists, even without the additional awkwardness of the whole white-boy angle. So afterwards we slipped out where the air was much cooler, hoping our applause was sufficient thanks, though it probably isn't.
The previous week A and I had gone to the Cutting Ball Theater's production of Suzan-Lori Parks's The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World, which was wonderful -- Cutting Ball productions always are -- kind of like a staged version of a long lyric poem, like an African-American version of the Wasteland. So she joined me again for some more Fighting of the Power. (Interestingly enough, what she heard about Malcolm X as a black girl growing up in Louisiana was not that different from what I heard about him growing up as a white boy in California -- he was a crazy radical/reverse racist/the bad guy to Dr King's good guy. But the more I hear of what he said, the more sense he makes, especially in the context of his times, which is where we're all trapped anyway.)
Being unsure where the theater was, I arrived even more insanely early than usual, and since they were late opening the doors (like 40 minutes late) I ended up standing around for about 90 minutes, which is why I always travel with a book. The company management was sweeping and finishing up the set after the previous night's poetry slam. The crowd was starting to get restless. One woman who arrived shortly after I did turned out to be the grandmother of Jason Jackson, who sang Malcolm's brother. Someone once told me as a rule of life "never criticize a black woman's hair" (though I would never criticize anyone's hair in the first place, and all the black women I know do amazing sculptural things with their hair anyway, though A cuts it very short and dyes it gold) and to that rule we can add "never make a black woman wait to see her grandson." The growing crowd was now getting extremely restless. I was not looking forward to grabbing a seat (I hate open seating) and then figuring out where the men's room was, when it was already almost starting time for the opera. I was beginning to wonder if I should write off Oakland Opera Theater but the performance changed my mind. Amazingly enough it started on time and was of outstanding quality, despite the limitations of the space (which included sauna-like heat that day).
I'm happy to report that Jackson's grandmother was justifiably proud, and Joseph Wright was superb as Malcolm. The whole cast was excellent (though I felt Darron Flagg as Elijah Muhammad was straining) and the staging was remarkably effective, given that the stage area was smaller than most high school theaters.
The opera itself is tableau-like, with perhaps a bit too much repetition from line to line, and it helps to follow it if you've seen the movie. But it's quite effective on stage and the Oakland Opera Theater, despite its discombobulation beforehand, was sharp and professional where it counted. I can only hope that someday X will provide a vehicle for black performers who are tired of a steady diet of Porgy & Bess.
Anthony Davis himself turned out to be at this performance. I almost went up to him but I always feel awkward about approaching artists, even without the additional awkwardness of the whole white-boy angle. So afterwards we slipped out where the air was much cooler, hoping our applause was sufficient thanks, though it probably isn't.
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