what light through yonder window breaks

Cal Performances usually makes its announcement of the upcoming season in late April, but here’s an exciting preview to help make up for disappointments caused by other season announcements, and yes, I’m looking at you, War Memorial Opera House: they will be presenting Mark Morris’s latest evening-length work, Romeo & Juliet: On Motifs of Shakespeare, on September 25 – 28, in Zellerbach Hall in Berkeley. These will be just the second performances after the July 4 – 9 world premiere at Bard College.

Here’s some intriguing information from a letter to the Friends of the Mark Morris Dance Group, sent appropriately on Valentine’s Day:

“This new production will be set to the original manuscript by composer Sergey Prokofiev and dramatist Sergey Radlov, recently discovered in Moscow by musicologist Simon Morrison. Forced to change his original work by Soviet cultural officials in 1935, Prokofiev’s manuscript includes a different ending from Shakespeare’s traditional, tragic finale and nearly twenty-five minutes of never-before heard music.”

Damn! Not only Mark Morris – a Prokofiev premiere!

Oddly enough, though I have, in decades of Shakespeare watching, seen R&J on movie and television screens, or various permutations of it danced by guys in tights and girls in tutus or played by orchestras or sung by suspiciously dancey West Side gangs, I have never seen a live performance of the actual play, though as with all of his plays I’ve read it many times. I haven’t exactly sought it out, but I haven’t avoided it either; the young love thing isn’t really a magnet for me (Angelo and Isabella are actually my favorite Shakespearean fun couple). I have noticed that most productions I read about are really staging the idea of West Side Story rather than what Shakespeare wrote: they make it about two historically and culturally opposing groups, like Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland, or Jews and Palestinians on the West Bank, or something like that, whereas Shakespeare makes it completely clear that the feuding houses (“two households, both alike in dignity”) are pretty much identical. He very pointedly does not even specify an origin to the feud, something he could easily have done in two or three lines.

I’m very intrigued by the “On Motifs of Shakespeare” subtitle. In Joan Acocella’s excellent biography of Morris, she points out that the keystone of ballet, the male-female pas de deux, has not played a huge part in Morris’s work, and obviously R&J calls for that, so I can’t wait to see what he does with this material. I’m also very curious about the changed ending – a tragic finale would seem to be the point, and I’m not sure what sort of apotheosis the Soviet censors would object to. Just another reason to buy a ticket, I guess.

MMDG has set up a special new website about the production and the musicological issues; you can find it at http://www.lovelives.net/, which I like as a name because Love Lives can be either adjective/noun or noun/verb. Nicely done!

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante, had a bad cold

I’d probably be pretty traumatized and depressed if someone told me how much time I’ve lost in my life to allergies, colds, and other nose-system problems. Sometimes I have to envy Gogol’s character whose nose just walked away. I had a sudden allergy attack yesterday and took plentiful medications, which left me woozy and drowsy but still sneezing and otherwise dripping in unpleasant ways, and unable to do much when I got home, and it picked up again today as soon as I got on the BART train, whose fabric seats collect dust. It might also be a delayed reaction to chopping down two large juniper-like trees (more like super-elongated bushes, actually) on Sunday. They were way too close to my bedroom window, and thinking of possible fire danger, in one of my bouts of prudence or paranoia I pulled out the axe; I also wanted to eliminate the handy bridge they provided to the roof for the squirrels and, no doubt, even worse creatures. I noticed that the rain puddles this evening were gilded with the powdery florescent pollen, so perhaps I’m just in for a long bout. I was reminded of my never-ending cold in December, and how much that threw my month off. I did get my taxes done this weekend, and here’s an unsolicited testimonial: all praise to TurboTax! I saved trees by filing electronically, and then cut them down in my backyard, so I feel well-balanced. Of course, as soon as I cut the trees down my window looked much more exposed, and I wondered if I had made a mistake.

I also wondered if there would be a lot of glare on the big screen (my television is conveniently located in my bedroom), so I had a test viewing of L’Elisir d’Amore from Vienna with Netrebko and Villazon. Yes, all my bitching about the upcoming San Francisco Opera season kind of put me in the mood to see it, and no, I don’t see any contradiction there – I mean, I love toasted coconut ice cream, but not at every meal, and sometimes I’ll happily eat it if it’s in the freezer, but I won’t bother going to the store and buying more even if I crave it, and it's like pulling a DVD off the unmanageable piles rather than buying an expensive seat months in advance and devoting a whole evening to the outing. I basically go to the theater for the show, not to get out of the house or through some weird misguided delusion that I’m in some sort of community, so the show has to be something I can’t get at home. All too often I’ll get postcards for plays that are about “romantic complications among thirty-somethings” or something similar that I have no interest in, and I just don’t see the point, when I could stay home and get the same thing for free, only better written and better acted, on any repeat of Friends. You don’t survive as a cultural institution by providing people with a more expensive, less convenient version of something that’s easily available all around them.

I did experience envy and the urge to go out of my house and straight to Houston when I saw that next season they get to hear the fabulous Laura Claycomb in Midsummer Night’s Dream, as well as Berlioz’s Beatrice and Benedict – I don’t care who’s in it, I just want to hear this live – plus a world premiere by Andre Previn based on Brief Encounter, starring Nathan Gunn. We’re awaiting final counts from all the precincts, but our experts are predicting that San Francisco Opera will hold on to its clear lead as the hand’s-down winner of Most Boring Opera Season in America.

Anyway, Otto Schenk was the director of this L’Elisir, which means, depending on your point of view, that it’s tasteful, charming, and realistic in a traditional way, or boring, conventional, and completely unchallenging. I’m giving it a generally positive review, since I am at heart mild-mannered and easily pleased, and I like the two leads a lot, and I always enjoy the energetic Ildebrando d’Arcangelo (who plays Dulcamara), and it’s a delightful opera, and we’re spared Zeffirelli-style vulgarity, but if this is tradition, it needs, if not a mad regie makeover, a careful examination. Do all the cheerful peasants need to be quite so clean and happy? Couldn’t someone tell Leo Nucci that Belcore is supposed to be a dashing miles gloriosus instead of a grinning buffoon, and that’s where his comedy comes from? Also, someone unfamiliar with the opera might wonder why the lovely Adina has decided to marry someone clearly old enough to be her father (perhaps there’s a hint of a regie concept there?). And this is the sort of thing that gets called “realistic,” showing once again that realism is merely a set of familiar conventions.

I don’t know if my precarious finances will allow me to travel to Houston in a year – it’s seriously a wonderful city to visit, what with the Opera House and other cultural halls on one side, the very nice newish baseball stadium on the other, and in between a light rail that takes you to the Museum of Fine Arts and the de Menil collection – fire up your Feldman and visit the Rothko Chapel! – but I would definitely make it happen if the Berlioz were on at the same time as the Previn. I’ve been on a Berlioz kick, as I’ve mentioned, and I’m not really foreseeing Beatrice et Benedict on the schedules out here anytime soon. I’ve noticed that, as with Ligeti, Berlioz’s music heard live has a vivid, detailed, ravishing quality that recordings don’t quite capture. Dutoit’s Damnation of Faust at the Symphony last spring was so crammed with life, it helped make up for the disappointment of the dry-voiced tenor in that work at the Opera a few years ago. I finally finished the second volume of David Cairn’s Berlioz biography, which took me longer than perhaps it should have, and I realized that, without consciously intending to, I was postponing the painful ending, when the disappointed old man, struggling against constant illness, sees his great opera fail, outlives his lovers and his son, and is left with only the grim determined hope that in the future his music will be played, understood, and enjoyed. It’s a story of neglect and incomprehension that sounded very contemporary to me, and it made me want not only to hear Berlioz’s music, but that of my own contemporaries. Let this expiate! as Lovelace cried. I regret more than ever not going to New York to hear Lorraine Hunt Lieberson in Les Troyens.

So despite my December headcold without end, I did make a point of getting to the Symphony’s performance of the Symphonie Fantastique and its sequel, Lelio (big thanks to SY, who got me a half-price ticket, and best wishes for a speedy recovery from one brave little soldier to another, much braver little soldier). I had drugged myself up so that I could listen without annoying myself or others with sneezing and coughing, though unfortunately the equivalent of the original instruments movement has not taken over medicine, and I was drugged not with absinthe, laudanum, tincture of opium, or other historically informed medications or drugs, but with Claritin, Sudafed, Theraflu, and whatever else I had in my satchel that seemed to promise a dry and silent nose.

I had somehow gotten the impression that the Symphony was going to perform the complete Lelio, which is why I really wanted to hear the concert – these days everyone loves the Symphonie Fantastique, and so do I, but it’s not really a rarity the way its sequel is, and I probably would have gone home searching for rest and chicken soup if I’d known. Cairns tactfully suggests that Lelio’s odd combination of solos, choruses, spoken interludes, and satire on the Parisian music scene doesn’t really hold up well, and that may be true, but I’d like a chance to hear it live and judge for myself. Most sequels suffer by containing too much of what made the original successful, and Lelio probably pushes the idea of the suffering artist maudit farther than we can follow; rebelling against society by becoming a brigand or a pirate probably seemed less ludicrous to a post-Byron generation whose world actually contained brigands and pirates, so I can’t really fault, however much I might regret, the Symphony’s decision to play only sections from Lelio, but without the framework it really does end up being just lovely bits of random Berlioz. The soloists were Stanford Olsen, Shawn Mathey, and Dwayne Croft, and generally they sang beautifully, though at a couple of points I wondered if they were fighting the same cold I had, in which case I sympathize and congratulate them on how successful most of their singing was. The chorus did itself proud as well.

Lelio was performed first, which was sort of odd since it's the sequel, but the Symphonie Fantastique was being filmed for the Keeping Score series and they used the intermission to set up the cameras and the audience. Right before the performance they demonstrated how the cameras would be sliding up and down and across all on their very own, which was wise because the audience just could not contain its excitement at the sight, so we got that out of the way before the music started. I have to say it – God, audiences are stupid! You’d think these people had been raised in a Bornean rainforest, far from any sign of the Industrial Revolution, and had only been dropped in Davies Hall five minutes before the performance started.

I was in the front row, and had enjoyed having empty seats on either side of me during Lelio, but for the filming no seats that prominent could be unfilled, just like the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Oscar night. Fortunately I realized what was happening in time to move one seat over so that I was at least on the aisle. I honestly don’t know how three or four normal-sized men manage to fit side-by-side in those Davies Hall seats. One under-recognized aspect of Wagner’s theatrical genius is the elimination of armrests from Bayreuth, so we’re spared the territory-marking they always entail. I especially love it when women who are about a foot shorter than I am can’t sit without elbowing me in the ribs all night. So I tend to sit with my arms folded across my chest, mostly out of courtesy to those around me, though I suspect I look as if I’m angrily daring the performers to please me. To top it all off, since I am visually oriented and easily distracted I often listen to instrumental music with my eyes shut, so unless the camera made me look as if I’m in an ecstatic trance of artistic bliss similar to the ones illustrated in those cheeseball ads in the playbills, there’s a good chance I’m ending up on the cutting room floor, which is fine with me.

Yes, I enjoyed the performance of the Symphonie Fantastique, though there’s something clean and precise about Tilson Thomas’s approach that may not capture the full wildness of Berlioz (Mike at Civic Center expressed this opinion in his much more timely report on the concert). But it’s the nature of wildness to recede with familiarity, so you can either accept that and emphasize other qualities – Berlioz’s classical side, for example – or risk emphasizing the grotesque for its own sake, which can also be an artistically and historically valid approach to this music. I had felt bludgeoned by Tilson Thomas’s accounts of the Brahms 4 and Mahler 7, so I was overall pleased with his approach, and I'm always pleased with this music. On the very first flight I ever took, during a high school trip to Washington DC, I put on the headphones they provided and just as the plane lifted into the air the most incredibly perfect music for that exciting moment started playing, and I listened to the whole program so I could find out what it was – it turned out to be the March to the Scaffold from the Symphonie Fantastique, music which ever since has given me the sensation of flight.

Now, Voyager, sail thou forth, to seek & find

I haven’t seen a lot of Mary Zimmerman’s work, and I’m not sure why – maybe because it’s usually marketed as something to take the kids to, and I tend to avoid those performances, though children are in fact usually better behaved than adults, and if they’re not, they have excitement and inexperience to excuse them. I had seen The Secret in the Wings, based on some of Grimm’s fairy tales, at Berkeley Rep a few years ago and liked it a lot, so I trekked out there again when they presented her latest work, Argonautika, the story of Jason and the golden fleece. I liked this one too, but not quite as much; during the performance the dazzle of the staging distracts you from weaknesses in the script, especially in the second act.

The set is relatively simple and so are the props, but just about any trick that could be done with them was done, to fantastic effect (though to continue with my sea monster thing: the billowing blue cloth that went from waves to menacing monster would have been even better if the creature hadn’t looked a bit too much like Cookie Monster). That’s the part you have to experience live to appreciate. Unfortunately it’s easier to talk about the script flaws than to convey the basic theatrical excitement that can be created with a few ropes and sheets, but that’s what I’m going to do.

The whole approach to the characters was a little cartoony for my taste, and tended to limit the characters to anachronistic caricatures; just to take the goddesses, Hera is a bitchy suburban matron, Athena sort of like the butch best friend in any girl-detective story, and Aphrodite a silly giggling flirt. Hercules is a bit of a buffoon, as he often is, and Soren Oliver was large if not ideally muscular, but he was also surprisingly subtle and moving, especially in his refusal to rejoin the expedition and move on after the death of his young lover, Hylas (Justin Blanchard). In the most profoundly moving exchange of the evening, Hylas half-emerges from a trap door, transformed to a shining river god, to comfort and still the mighty man’s grief with the distant pity and long perspective of the newly immortal. (Oddly enough, though Zimmerman says in the program that Hercules and Hylas are “clearly boyfriends” they are never described in those terms during the performance; they are always called “good friends” in a way that reminded me of the New Yorker cartoon from the 1940s showing a teacher crooning to her class, “Now, of course, Anthony and Cleopatra were the very best of friends.” I don’t know if this is some misguided attempt to be family friendly or merely a laudable reluctance to insist on the semi-obvious.)

Jake Suffian as Jason had an interesting solemnity and sense of duty that might have been better suited to Aeneas; I’ve always had the feeling that Jason is sparkier. Atley Loughridge as Medea had a perfect quality of oddity and apartness about her, but the play would have benefited with less of Medea; instead of shoe-horning the whole history of Jason, Medea, and eventually their murdered children into the second half, Zimmerman should have followed the example of L’Incoronazione di Poppea and left us with the happy couple and the clear knowledge of their unhappy future, for there are two things that everyone (and by “everyone” I mean “anyone likely to buy a ticket to a show at Berkeley Rep called Argonautika”) knows about Greek mythology, and one of them is that Oedipus marries his mother, and the other is that Medea kills her children (though years ago in New York I saw Zoe Caldwell as Medea, in the Robinson Jeffers translation, with Judith Anderson as the Nurse – yes, I actually saw Dame Judith Anderson on stage; I was of course a mere slip of a lad, and she was already encrusted with legend – and when Medea came out at the end with her hands covered in blood announcing that “the stars that scorn the weak shall not be mocking me!” the man next to me, suddenly roused, exclaimed, “Did she just kill her kids? She’s nuts!” which is semi-accurate without being quite adequate).

Not only does the whole child-killing angle swamp everything else, as such a thing would tend to, but I had the feeling Zimmerman was stacking the deck on Medea's behalf. I realize there are variants to all the legends, but I’ve always read that the brother she kills to distract Jason’s pursuers was a youth; here, he’s not only a fully grown man, he’s a vulgar bully, and she’d be justified in offing him just on those grounds. We also never see or know the children, and their murder takes place offstage, so we’re not really forced to confront what she did, which might lessen our sympathy for her, but only why she did it, which increases our sympathy. So much time is taken up with the extended Medea saga that we don’t even see the fulfillment of the prophecy that Jason will kill King Pelias; that storyline, the main plot engine at the beginning, just disappears. The script is entertaining despite its flaws, but it’s the images that really make the evening; at the end, the actors slowly come out and one by one all the elements of the story are turned into the starry constellations of the zodiac, using just some twinkling lights and posing actors, and it’s pure theater magic.

I also saw my second play by Adam Bock: The Shaker Chair, with the Shotgun Players. I had seen The Typographer’s Dream at the same theater about a year ago. The Shaker Chair was a little more problematic, I felt, because it’s an issue play, and that doesn’t necessarily fit in with what I see as Bock’s strength, which is the creation of evocative conjunctions in suggestive, verbally fluid ways, which is much more entertaining on stage than it might sound. He has a Hawthorne-like touch with ambiguous symbols, such as the Shaker Chair itself, which is ornament, rebuke, luxury, and discomfort all at once. It is a recent purchase by Marion (Frances Lee McCain), a single older woman whose generally sensible attitudes can hide her quietly questioning side; she likes the new chair because it is cleanly built, and carefully designed with a reverent purpose, but she admits it’s not very comfortable. The overstuffed, possibly too comfortable chair across the living room is occupied by her sister Dolly (Nancy Shelby), whose main occupation in life is fighting with, fleeing from, and then forgiving her husband Frank (Will Marchetti). Their friend Jean (Scarlett Hepworth) enters, because Marion has the kind of house where friends naturally gather, and it turns out she’s involved in increasingly violent acts of vandalism against a local factory farm that mistreats its pigs, and Marion slowly becomes an activist.

The characters are all quite vivid, and they talk about issues the way people really do, which is actually kind of a problem in an issue play, because the way people really talk involves not thinking things through, and leaving things out, and getting flustered and forgetful, and insisting on things they know are wrong, or just wish were right, and repeating meaningless stuff loudly just because they heard it on TV or the radio. It’s very easy to lose the balance between a fairly thorough airing of the issues and the lived experience and personality of the characters. And that’s why issue plays are surprisingly difficult to write, and why Shaw, who managed the balancing act over and over, really is such a great playwright.

At slightly over an hour, the play is too brief for full coverage of the complex entanglement of agricultural mass production, looming ecological disaster, evolving humanitarian concerns, and corporate control that makes up our machine for living. I kept waiting for someone to make some obvious points about switching to a vegetarian/vegan diet, or buying locally grown and humanely raised food, or, especially, about car culture as a main cause of the world’s sickness, especially since the action starts with Jean needing to borrow Marion’s car for her mission of sabotage, but no one seems to think that there’s any choice except indifference or arson. And the issues aren’t presented in a way that would make the typical Berkeley audience question its assumptions about the whole corporate farming issue – and I’m not disagreeing with those political views, I’m just saying that you need to subvert the audience’s assumptions and smug certainties (something Shaw did regularly) for the play to be more than an evening telling us how right-thinking we are. There’s a brief moment when a live piglet is brought out (proving yet again that live animals on stage are generally a mistake, because the place fell apart; the woman two rows behind me could not shut up the whole time the piglet was trotting about), and with inadvertent irony it shows how alienated the audience is from the life of a farm; actual farm folk are much less sentimental about animals, and manage to control themselves in the presence even of cute little pink ones with delightful curly tails.

The handling of the issues is fairly schematic, but the characters make the evening interesting and complex. Dolly’s romance can seem ridiculous, or even pathetic, but she knows what’s important to her in life, and there’s a lovely moment at the beginning when she talks about her husband walking by when she’s mad at him, and smiling, and she can’t help but forgive him; and you bear that in mind, and it’s a bit of a shock, but also makes complete sense, when we finally meet Frank, and see how calculating and reptilian he actually is – though not with his wife. At the end, Marion, radicalized by the shooting death of Jean during one of her raids, sits in her Shaker chair and ponders her next step as an activist: “I could always loosen one bolt. . . .” The bolt she’s planning to loosen is obviously a symbol for the small things we can do to undermine the machine, but unlike the Shaker chair, it felt too forced and a bit fake to me. I didn’t believe for a moment that a woman like Marion, who has been concerned throughout with possible injury or damage to innocent people, would actually become that sort of violent activist, and that moment of falsity is a tribute to how skillfully and deeply Bock has let us know his characters.

the best in this kind are but shadows

No, I did not enjoy the Super Bowl. Thanks for asking. But now that the game's final five minutes, which I couldn't even stand to watch, snatched the perfect season from the Pats, they are once again underdogs, so in a couple of days I fully expect to hear the haters saying, "You know, it sure is a shame they didn't get a perfect season," and maybe they'll even start to talk about how sick they are of the Manning family and its tendency to hog all the titles.

Anyway. Since I've been lecturing opera houses on marketing, I thought I'd share my latest notion, which came to me while reading the Wellsung entry about what the Met was doing the day they were born. So there you have it, the perfect stocking stuffer for the opera lover in your life: a CD copy of whatever the Met was doing the day of his or her birth, in simple but elegant packaging. Or the deluxe set: the entire season for your birth year. You see where this is going.

So I looked myself up. It turns out the Met was dark that night. Um, OK. I didn't say my idea was fully thought-through. For instance, I guess summer births are out of luck.

I did check San Francisco Opera, and they made up for the Met by presenting two operas that day! The first was a student matinee of Pagliacci -- yes, a student matinee, in Italian, back before surtitles, and starring Jon Vickers as Canio, Dolores Mari as Nedda, Lawrence Winters as Tonio, Cesare Curzi as Beppe, and Theodor Uppman (Billy Budd!) as Silvio. No "family versions" translated into English of The Magic Flute or L'Elisir d'Amore for that crowd, and I kind of feel the student audiences have just kicked sand in my face.

The evening performance really interested me, though. It was the second performance of the American premiere run of Die Frau ohne Schatten. My mother, who can still recall decades later the excruciating boredom of having to sit through Norma at the Old Met as a little girl and who has mostly avoided full-length operas ever since, has always told me that she and my father went to the American premiere of Die Frau at the invitation of some friends. After about two acts they had had enough and left. Since she clearly was not at the second performance, being otherwise occupied contracting and dilating and suchlike, she must have attended the actual first performance, when she was eight months pregnant. I'm amazed she made it as far as the intermission under the circumstances, and Mom, I'm sorry if I kicked you in the stomach for leaving early. Maybe that's where I got my whole "I do not leave before the end" thing. Who knows what reaches you under those circumstances? I don't even want to think about what intrauterine influence the plot and music of Die Frau ohne Schatten had on my fragile little psyche. But at least I can now tell everyone I was at the US premiere, though the people I was with refused to stay to the end.

fighting vainly the old ennui

Dr Johnson, who would have killed at open mike night (“Ever notice how Whigs and Tories say hello? Whigs are all like, ‘Come, Citizen, let us to the alehouse whence we shall foment dissent!’ and Tories are all like, ‘Prithee, good sir, let us repair to the chapel, where we may thank the beneficent Maker for the rights of true-born Englishmen’”), famously observed that second marriages are the triumph of hope over experience; the same is true of subscription series – so many glittering stars and promising debuts, beloved masterpieces and exciting new works, laid out like a map to a new land, eventually turning into the reality of half-forgotten misty ruins, some shining monuments, blurred photographs, and lots of dust and inconvenience, and, always, a pile of bills waiting after the journey. I know this, but still get excited every year, by every company’s announcement. So I took it as a very bad sign for the upcoming San Francisco Opera season that I was bored, restless, and discontented even before I finished reading the renewal brochure.

One of the first things I did when I returned home in 1992 was to subscribe to the Opera, and I’ve been a subscriber (and small-level donor) ever since. The Opera has always formed the spine of my theater-going here. I came close to switching to individual tickets once before, when I was tired of uninspired performances of the same old standards (kids – this is what we call foreshadowing), but then Pamela Rosenberg took over and I could start expecting something interesting at the Opera House. So I actually feel very melancholy about this, and have put off posting about the upcoming season. I was fully prepared, despite an urgent need to pay off home repairs and suchlike, to pull out the credit card for the Opera. I guess I should be grateful that Gockley is watching my expenses for me.

It's like the scene in The Hard Nut when the older daughter, who thinks she's very adult and stylish and sophisticated, opens her gift from her parents, and can't hide her childish disappointment at the ugly fluorescent green sweater covered with weird squiggles, which they obviously chose in the hope that it would be stylish and sophisticated enough to please her. It's a complicated sadness, of misplaced good intentions and misguided hopes. I’m going to survey the upcoming season, so if you’d like to skip the idle philosophizing and rueful retrospectives then feel free to jump on down to where I resume delusional speculation, sorrowful denunciation, and general more-or-less insightful bitching.

First up is Simon Boccanegra, with Hvorostovsky and Frittoli, Runnicles conducting. No arguments with this one, so I’ll go off on a tangent instead, no doubt to the shock of any regular readers. I’m a little surprised this was chosen for Opening Night, but then I don't know why they bother performing an opera at all on Opening Night. They should switch to an hour of popular arias and then straight to the party. Or skip the arias altogether and just have the society women march across the stage in their usually garish and poorly chosen gowns. Warhorse, clothes horse – it’s not a night about music. So I’m definitely getting a ticket for this one, and definitely not on opening night.

Next up is The Bonesetter’s Daughter, a premiere by Stewart Wallace with libretto by Amy Tan. I have my doubts about this. Let me put it this way: I am one who frequently went straight from Symphony Hall to Tower Records (or, in later times, to Amazon.com) to buy CDs from composers new to me whose music I had just heard (Messiaen, Lieberson, Harrison, and Rouse were some of them). I’ve been known to buy CDs just because a review or blog mentioned a composer in passing (certain key words, like “gloomy”, “intellectual”, or “difficult” can always get me to buy, regardless of whether the reviewer means them as compliments). So I was thinking I knew nothing at all about Stewart Wallace, and it turns out he composed the opera Harvey Milk which was done here a few years ago, so I had not only read about him, I had sat through an entire evening of his music, and I still didn’t remember his name. I’m thinking that’s not a good sign. I want to see this just because it’s new, and I’m hoping for the best (if I weren’t basically an easily pleased optimist, I wouldn’t go to the theater as often as I do). But I don’t think the Opera should pat itself on its backstage for taking a risk with this particular new work, at least as far as the box office goes; artistic success is yet to be determined. Amy Tan is an extremely popular author (and she lives in this area), the large local Chinese-American population would be drawn to the story, what I recollect of Wallace’s music from Harvey Milk is, shall we say, not forbidding to the general public, and those desperate for novelty on the operatic stage will want to support anything new.

The San Francisco premiere of Die Tote Stadt is next. Well, so far this season is looking deceptively appealing, since I would love to see this one as well. (Perhaps “City of Death” would be suitable for opening night, especially since the target audience wouldn’t get the joke.)

Idomeneo follows. This is probably my least favorite of the major Mozart operas, partly for semi-silly reasons, and yes, I’m talking about the lack of on-stage sea monster action. Sorry, I just have a sea monster thing, and if you’re going to tease me with frequent mentions of a terrible sea beast, then you’d damn well better put the thing on stage. Also, just as for me Bach’s Christmas Oratorio always conjures up a frosty late December night in an ice-cold church in Harvard Square, and the wooden pew getting harder and harder (possibly because it was literally freezing) and consequently my butt getting more and more numb as the hours slipped towards midnight, and this naïve young concert-goer thinking, This is a whole lot of German, so Idomeneo conjures up a struggle to stay awake on an overly warm summer evening in Tremont Temple during a concert performance of a very lengthy and unfamiliar work with only a bare plot summary to hand, back in the days before surtitles. That might even have been the night when I first wondered why everything, no matter what its length, had to start at 8:00. I remember thinking during the concert, We’re early music people – this is too late for the likes of us. (I looked up the playbill: Roger Norrington conducted, and the cast included Anthony Rolfe Johnson as Idomeneo, Lorraine Hunt [Lieberson] as Idamante, Jeanne Ommerle as Ilia, and Lisa Saffer as Elettra, and yes, I would love to have that evening back, along with the chance to take a nap beforehand, and don’t I feel like one whose hand, like the base Indian, threw a pearl away richer than all his tribe.)

So far it’s at least modified rapture; the score is four for four, though as they say in football, some of those were ugly wins. But next up is Boris Godunov, starring Samuel Ramey. Out of respect for a distinguished artist, I don’t want to dwell on this, but I’d like to remember his voice as it was. Normally this would make my cut, but not under these circumstances. The large local Russian population will most likely turn out in force for this no matter what.

Then we have L’Elisir d’Amore, a title the Opera insists on translating, because while apparently “Die Tote Stadt” poses no problems as a title for an American audience, that same audience is incapable of figuring out that L’Elisir d’Amore means The Elixir of Love. This is a new production, set in the Napa Valley wine country (so let me pose the obvious question right now – would Nemorino, raised among wineries, really not realize what it was Dulcamara was selling?). Given that angle, and this opera’s general sunny pleasantness, and especially its short running time, I’m surprised this isn’t the Opening Night victim. Sometimes at the opera I’ll see what is obviously date night for some attractive young pair, handsomely dressed up in dark suit and expensive tie and nice floor-length dress with a gauzy wrap to cover the bare pretty shoulders, and often the night’s performance is really ill-omened for the young couple – Don Giovanni, Madama Butterfly, The Queen of Spades, all calculated to give pause to young love – and since they seem like such nice kids, I’d like to give them this advice: Take it from one who knows, because he’s read a lot of books, and they talk about this stuff, and he’s had plenty of time to think about such things while sitting by himself in many an ornate and gilded auditorium waiting for the show to start – this is the one to go to for date night. You will smile gently at the lovers’ misunderstandings, you will glow warmly at their happy union at the end, and in between, since all great comedies have moments of deep and pervasive sadness, your hearts will be pierced when you hear Una furtiva lagrima (especially, no doubt, as sung by Ramon Vargas in this production), and you will think of all the secret tears you have shed, or hope to shed, for the beloved by your side, and your hands will creep together, and remain clasped until the end, when you must reluctantly separate them to applaud the delightful show; and in later years – and the Opera seems intent on giving you many, many chances for repeat viewings – your memories of this night will add to your pleasure in the opera and in each other; and I wish my imaginary couple great joy of it, but I’m not feeling the need. You see? I know it all already.

Next up is La Boheme. Of course.

I thought of leaving it at that (the alternative was: Next up is La Boheme. No. Fucking. Way.), but of course there’s more to say. Look, it’s a beautiful opera, and a justly loved masterpiece; it happens I’ve never particularly liked it, and resent it in my petty, brooding way, but I can see what people respond to (sort of like watching Jacques Tati films at the UC Theater back in the day, with a thin smile on my face, while some around me are howling with laughter), and the love duet in Act 1 always made me cry, at least until the last time the Opera put it on. But I seriously feel as if Mimi’s gelida manina are wrapped around my throat, and tightening their grip. Can’t they just let that bitch die in peace? When you live in an area of limited live-opera resources (that is, if you live anywhere outside of New York City), you can’t help but miss all the works unstaged so that the bohemians may once again trot out their increasingly threadbare antics. The big deal with this production (in case you haven’t noticed, the selling points this season are setting and star, not the overly familiar repertory – I was going to look up how many times I’ve seen these operas in my years with San Francisco Opera, but then I realized I didn’t need to bother, since the telling fact is that it seems as if I’ve just seen all of them, even the new ones) is that Nicola Luisotti is conducting, and Joseph Calleja is making his debut, and Gheorghiu is returning. I liked Gheorghiu quite a lot in Rondine, but it will not have escaped my astute readers that I spent more time discussing her truly awful hairdo than her truly beautiful voice – I would be happy to hear her again, but I’m not desperate about it. I understand Mimi is a signature role for her, and I’m curious about that, since Gheorghiu seems to traffic in mid- to high-wattage star power and general glam diva-ness, while the qualities you need for Boheme are sweetness, simplicity, sincerity, and a melting tenderness, qualities which, let me just point out, are all the more endearing when they are only seen at refreshingly long intervals. So I’m back to No. Fucking. Way. (Let me clarify what that means – it means I don’t want to pay for a ticket to this. That would only encourage them. If someone gave me a ticket, I would go, of course –my principles aren’t that strict. I’m not exactly saying I can be bought, but I can certainly be rented for extended periods.)

Tosca, the first opera I saw at the War Memorial Opera House back in 1992, and many times both before and since, follows. Again, I like this opera a lot, but the only way I would pay to see it at this point is if Maria Callas returned from the dead, and even then only on one of her good days.

The Opera, by the way, is claiming that Tosca and Boheme are being presented as a special tribute for the 150th birthday of their composer. Sounds more like business as usual to me, and pretty half-assed as tributes go. I have yet to see Trittico or Fanciulla, or Edgar or Le Villi – can’t they even present unusual repertory from the familiar names? Even a single gala concert by distinguished artists of famous scenes or arias would have seemed more like a special evening and a suitable tribute to their favorite cash machine.

Porgy and Bess, with players to be named later, returns; this is actually the first opera I ever saw, and in the touring production sponsored by David Gockley’s Houston Grand Opera, no less. (Oh, David! You remembered! But I’m still not forgiving you for this season). I love the opera, it’s a great, vibrant work, and I just don’t feel like seeing it again.

Given the nature of this season, you had to know that Traviata would make an appearance – hear that lyrical coughing off in the distance? This time it’s not the audience. Again, a beautiful work, though I could easily name five, or six, or seven other operas by Verdi I prefer (well, if you’re going to force it out of me: Falstaff, Trovatore, Rigoletto, Ballo, Forza, Boccanegra, and Don Carlo/s). I’ll confess to being a little torn about this one; Alfredo is the dashing Charles Castronovo, and each time I’ve heard him (Tamino, Nadir, Don Ottavio) I’ve been progressively more impressed, and Violetta is La Netrebko. People divide very sharply on her. I’ve always been on the pro side of the great Trebs Divide, but she seems to have changed repertory since she sang all those Russian roles here long ago, and I’m curious to hear her now. But last time I saw Boheme, I had changed my ticket so I could hear her Musetta, and even her famously gorgeous shoulders couldn’t carry the overly familiar work for me. (I also note that for this, as well as Boheme, the much-touted stars are not singing every performance, and the second cast is not even named, so why buy in advance when you don’t know what you’re getting?) So right now I’m very doubtful about this one.

Then there’s the new Jake Heggie piece, Last Acts, with a libretto by Gene Scheer based on a play by Terence McNally and starring Frederica von Stade. As with The Bonesetter’s Daughter, I want to see this because it’s new, but I have my doubts, though fewer in this case. Generally I like Heggie’s music, and I’ve enjoyed a number of Gene Scheer’s songs and I thought he did an excellent job with the libretto for An American Tragedy, and von Stade is always appealing. On the other hand, though I especially liked Heggie’s music for his last collaboration with Scheer, To Hell and Back, an updated version of the rape of Persephone premiered by Philharmonia Baroque last year, I thought Scheer’s libretto was a failure, largely because of the simplistic and stereotypical presentation of the male character (who doesn’t even make an appearance; it's sung by two women). As for McNally . . . I’m not expecting much beyond slick and entertaining and sentimental on cue. I heard At the Statue of Venus, his last collaboration with Heggie, a scena about a woman waiting to meet a blind date. The libretto was basically the Barber/Agee Knoxville Summer of 1915 and Sex and the City run through a blender (Sex and the City: the incredibly repetitive adventures of four spunky gals in the big city – the whore, the bore, the priss, and the lawyer – who are not nearly as interesting and intelligent as they seem to think). Mixed bag here, but it’s actually a moot point for my decision on the Opera subscription, since I can get this through my Cal Performances subscription, and I’ll keep subscribing to them as long as they keep bringing Mark Morris back.

So there it is, and I don’t know anyone who is excited about this schedule. Well, let me adjust that, since I am nothing if not scrupulously accurate: there was one. At the intermission of the recent Gil Shaham concert, after appropriate introductions from a mutual friend, I mentioned to the elegantly dressed and obviously respectable dowager next to me that I was disappointed in the Opera announcement. She seemed stunned. “What do you want?” she demanded. “All new stuff?” Naturally I stoutly denied the ugly accusation, but things were never really the same for the rest of our five-minute acquaintance. I just think planning an opera season, especially at a large house, is a tightrope act, and I really think Gockley lost his balance this year.

There’s no shame in a safe season of well-produced and familiar works, but there’s little excitement either, and no glory, and ultimately no future. Twenty-five years ago, I would have been, if not excited by this season, at least satisfied enough to send in my money. But now, like all too many of this season’s protagonists, I’m left alone in my chilly garret, wondering why (O mio destino avverso!) cruel fate has decreed that I must part from my long-time love, the operatic stage. Here’s a conversation I’ve had way too many times:

Me (to Opera-Lover): Are you going to [name of the season’s token “modern” opera]?

OL: Oh, no. I hate modern opera! I don’t want to hear that!

Me (too courteous to point out he/she hasn’t heard the music yet): Oh. Are you looking forward to [fill in name of warhorse]?

OL: Oh, no. How many times do I need to see that?

As with anything, the core group that really loves and appreciates the form is fairly small, but steady, and you need their excitement to leaven the lumpen mass of the benignly indifferent (this applies to baseball or football as much as opera or the symphony), and I just don’t see much here to excite that group. The Opera has been doing a lot of outreach, with simulcasts, and the forthcoming movie (and, I hope, DVD) releases, and with lowered ticket prices this season (I salute that sincerely, and wish I liked the season enough to take advantage of it; all they need to do now is acknowledge that most of us have to work to buy our tickets, even at the lower prices, and raise the curtain earlier), but the outreach is mostly technological and not artistic. I’m not sure that filling a stadium for a live simulcast proves much except that you can round up several thousand people who don’t actively hate opera, and who love a free show. In order to move at least some of those people into paying for tickets, you need to break out of the view of opera as a stuffy, dead-end art form, and I don’t think you do that by showing the same ten operas over and over. Do you need to bring people into the opera house only to drive them out after a few years because they’ve already seen everything there?

There is a potential audience, and not just of music lovers, who turned out for St Francois, Dr Atomic, Dead Man Walking, Le Grand Macabre, or anything exciting, controversial, and adventurous. I have friends who bought tickets to those operas who had laughed at me for going to Boheme and Traviata repeatedly. I think what they were responding to was not any individual qualities in those fine works, but the sense that opera was a closed and somewhat outmoded and smug world for the already-initiated, or an expensive and comforting diversion for the comfortable. I’ve often heard that marketing has taken over arts organizations, and I’ve often wished it were actually true. Considering all the useless or dangerous junk that marketing types convince Americans they need (vitamin water? the Republican Party?), why can’t they convince people to sample something they really do need, like more productions of Janacek? There seems to be an assumption that anything outside the established warhorses is going to turn off potential opera-goers, but that’s just a projection of timid and conservative taste. There is absolutely no reason why Janacek would be more foreign or difficult than Puccini for a contemporary American with an interest in music or theater, and I wish musical organizations generally would stop sighing heavily about how difficult some music is, or how new music doesn’t sell out. You don’t tell people stuff is difficult and doesn’t sell. You tell them: Look, this isn’t for the run-of-the-mill opera-goer; this is for more cutting-edge types who don’t mind something a little more adventurous, and I'm thinking this might be something you would appreciate. You create series like the Los Angeles Opera’s Recovered Voices, with an intriguing premise that will keep people coming back. You don’t tell them something never gets put on because about ten people want to see it; you tell them it’s a rare opportunity to judge a controversial work for themselves. I have no background in marketing, but isn’t this obvious? I well remember walking around and around Boston Symphony Hall, nervously scanning all the posters day after day for weeks, thinking about going to a concert. I finally decided that Mozart’s 40th symphony and Beethoven’s 5th would be safe. I went and decided going to the symphony was OK. Dissolve to several years later, and I’m getting all excited when I hear there’s a piece consisting of 100 metronomes set off at the same time (and it doesn’t sound at all the way I thought it would, and I can no longer even remember what I was so afraid of in my cautious early years). See? It can happen. And I was an exceptionally timid youth. And if you still get people who refuse to see anything but the same ten operas over and over, well, to quote another celebrated quipster (not Dr Johnson this time, but also associated with the Word), let the dead bury the dead.

I wasn’t exactly expecting Moses und Aron or Die Gezeichneten to show up on the schedule, but there are plenty of neglected operas that are well within the artistic boundaries of this season that at least would be interesting to experience live; there are older works by Carlisle Floyd, Barber, Hanson, or Menotti, or newer works such as An American Tragedy or Margaret Garner, or even revivals for some of those world premieres that we keep hearing Gockley championed in Houston. But familiarity, down to each phrase of each celebrated aria in each well-known work, is the guiding principle here. Think of what a deep shock it would be to see Wozzeck on this schedule, and you realize how constricted the season is.

When your big step outside of mainstream repertory is Korngold's 88-year-old opera, already beloved by those who know it, by a well-known (albeit mostly for film music) composer, one considered unfashionable for a long-time because of his lush, melodic sound. . . . well, you’re just not that far from Puccini at all. The repertory this season seems particularly narrow in theme as well as style, and a gray sameness settled over the season as soon as I read through the list; most of them are of the “isn’t this romantic?” school, however misguided such an interpretation might be; most of them are of the “what pretty tunes!” school, however superficial such a judgment might be, or however based on familiarity more than anything else. Perhaps any musicologists out there can tell me if there is a single dissonant passage in this entire season; I feel like the dinner guests of the Emperor Heliogabalus, suffocating to death beneath the relentless cascades and accumulating drifts of heavily-perfumed rose petals.

High School Musical!

I was in the middle of preparing a long entry detailing my disappointment in San Francisco Opera's upcoming season, when I did get some good operatic news (and let me express due gratitude to David Gockley for first staging the work in Houston back in 1987): this coming July, plucky local upstart Trinity Lyric Opera is presenting the (let me make sure I have all the qualifiers in place) northern California staged premiere of Nixon in China! (The exclamation point indicates my excitement; it's not an integral part of the title, indicative of general kickiness.)

And get this: it's at my old high school. Not in the cafeteria where they used to stage the annual spring musical (and I was already objecting to the body mikes back then), but in the brand spanking semi-new Castro Valley Center for the Performing Arts, at Castro Valley High School, where, I regret to say, they did not raise the weak above the strong, though I did learn that to be a grain of sand in Heaven's eye is to taste eternal joy. It's easily accessible on BART. I've already bought tickets to both Friday performances.

From the scorched earth
People step forth
Over dead wood
And over the dead:
Follow their lead!

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Vingt Regards

I

Is Messiaen’s music now a cult? Hertz Hall is full for Christopher Taylor’s performance of Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jesus, with a buzz surpassing the usual recital. I overhear conversations about L’Ascension at the Symphony the other day and Saint Francois at the Opera several years ago. Does this happen to every composer on his way to “Oh, him again” status, or only the heaven-stormers? Is this what it was like to gather for a rare hearing of the late quartets when the generality still held that Beethoven’s late work was insane and monstrous?

II

resplendence, transcendence, refulgence, resounding reredos of reverberation

III

If you saw Christopher Taylor on the street, he would look completely ordinary, albeit slightly goofy; you’d guess correctly that he was interested in mathematics. When he plays, his looks change. He becomes completely compelling and magnetic. He’s downright adorkable!

IV

I’m not on the coveted piano-recital left-hand side of Hertz Hall, but if I look at the glassy black underside of the grand piano's raised lid, I see the reflection of Taylor's hands dancing over the keyboard and then the jumping inner works of the Steinway. The entire piano is trembling, quivering and shaking.

V

Christ, this ticket was a bargain!

VI

The paradox of silence, rarer and rarer in our world: the quieter and more attentive the room, the more disruptive even the smallest sound becomes; a hastily turned page in the program rips open the atmosphere. Once, on the hajj to Stratford-on-Avon, I was walking on a path beside an empty road, and suddenly the crunching of gravel beneath my feet sounded like a horrible deafening roar. I stopped walking, and experienced absolute stillness and silence for possibly the only time in my life, until a car came by and broke the spell.

VII

I’ve had a low-level migraine all day, but I just noticed it stopped when the music started, and resumed when the music stopped. Should I forward this to Benedict XVI as Messiaen’s first miracle? Do I need more of a miracle than his ability to write such music? Years ago, in the Cathedral Treasury at Chartres, I noticed a rather sheepish reliquary stuck way up on a shelf. It contained the alleged cloak of the Virgin Mary, the alleged discovery of which caused the great cathedral to be built. Doesn’t that make it actually miraculous? Isn’t what’s around us enough? Why are we slightly embarrassed by the sublime, yet hoping always for miracles?

VIII

I am hearing passages I never really heard on the several recordings I have. Do I just listen differently in a concert hall, so that, for instance, nothing distracts me from the quieter moments? Or is it just the recreative performers who take the same score and render it slightly differently, to people who all hear it slightly differently?

IX

“I know noble accents

And lucid, inescapable rhythms;

But I know, too,

That the blackbird is involved

In what I know.”

X

(colors of the celestial city) I have my eyes shut. How did he get that bell sound? If I could play more than a C major scale on the piano, would I understand, even if I couldn’t replicate it? The sound is exactly like the Campanile carillon caroling as I walked through the light rain to the concert. It would be so cool to have synaesthesia right now. But only if I could turn it off later so the colors don’t blind me.

XI

Who are all these people?

XII

Walking out of the Hall, I’m oddly grateful for the misty rain and the trees of such dark green they’re almost black silhouetted against the pearly dove-gray sky.

XIII

This was one of the concerts I was most excited about this season. What do I do now? What does Taylor do after a performance? I would need to pace up and down in a darkened room for at least an hour.

can I get a witness

I don’t usually see the New York Times, so I am indebted to indefatigable linkmeister Sid Chen of The Standing Room for bringing to my attention the recent article on the new, or finally produced, operatic version of Elmer Gantry, with music by Robert Aldridge and a libretto by Herschel Garfein. It occurred to me that I might post something about it, since apparently I am one of the few people around who actually heard Lorraine Hunt Lieberson sing at least part of the role of Sister Sharon Falconer. I’ve often wondered what happened to the project since I heard the workshop back in 1992. Once the Internet blessed our lives, I would occasionally try to google some information, but rarely came up with much.

I had also wondered occasionally what happened to Composers in Red Sneakers, the composers’ collective in Boston that started around the time I moved there. The Times article mentioned that Aldridge was one of the original sneakers. I should dig out my old playbills and see if I heard anything by him at their concerts – for some reason I didn’t make the connection at the time. I sort of lost sight of the Red Sneaker group even before I moved out of Massachusetts (e-mail has since made it much easier to reach your potential audience), and I had assumed they had dissolved or otherwise imploded, as is the way of collectives. Turns out I was wrong – they’re still going strong, so good for them. I don’t know what they’re like now, but they were known back in the mid-1980s as a fun and informal new music group – this was back when being a fun and informal new music group was considered pretty much an oxymoron, or at least a bizarre and suspicious aberration. I’m not sure where exactly the name came from, but you got free admission to their concerts if you wore red Converse hightops. I had a pair and enjoyed new music, so I went several times. I think the concerts were usually at Memorial Hall on the Harvard campus.

The Elmer Gantry workshop was at the small C. Walsh Theatre at Suffolk University on Beacon Hill. According to my playbill, there were two performances, Thursday February 27 and Saturday February 29, 1992. I was at the Thursday performance. I know this for certain because I bought a libretto ($5) and had both composer and librettist sign it, and Garfein wrote the date. I wish Hunt Lieberson had been available to sign as well; I know there’s something silly about having people sign a piece of paper, which is why I rarely ask for autographs outside of formal signing sessions, but there’s probably some principle of sympathetic magic behind its appeal, and I wish I had had the chance to ask her – at least it would have given me the opportunity to say thank you to her.

I don’t remember where I heard about the workshop, though the Boston Globe seems the likely source. It was open to the public – I certainly couldn’t have gotten in otherwise. I talked some friends from work into going with me – the literary source might have held some interest (one of them actually had a Sinclair Lewis thing and collected editions of his work – not the author I would choose, but I respected it and found it kind of an endearingly offbeat choice), and these were people who were sort of edging into classical music and opera, and I’m sure they went because I said “You have to hear this woman.” I wasn’t really familiar with the lead, Vernon Hartman, but of the other singers Sharon Baker as Lulu Baines and Frank Kelley as Eddie Fislinger were familiar performers; I had often heard them with Lorraine Hunt (her name at the time).

There are two things I remember clearly about the performance. The first is this: The playbill said that the opera's opening scene would not be performed and the workshop would open with the second scene, and the libretto had only a synopsis of the first scene, and I believe either Aldridge or Garfein beforehand summarized the first scene and said that the faculty meeting we were about to see was actually the second scene of the opera, and despite all that, several people started off the post-performance discussion by saying they didn’t think the faculty meeting scene was the best choice as the first scene of the opera. The Times article implied a certain arrogance or at least bluntness on the part of Aldridge and Garfein, but I recall them being exceptionally courteous in the face of this evidence that the people who pay the least attention are always the first to voice their opinions. (By the way, the Times article isn’t quite correct in saying the workshop was of the first act – it was of portions of the first and second acts, and Aldridge and Garfein had a note in the playbill saying that “When complete, Elmer Gantry will be three hours long, in three acts.”)

The second thing I remember is of course Lorraine Hunt’s performance as the Aimee Semple McPherson avatar, Sister Sharon Falconer. While sorting through and organizing my boxes of playbills recently, I was surprised to see that I had heard Hunt as Nitocris, the king’s mother, in Handel’s Belshazzar. Imagine the luxury and folly of hearing her often enough to let some performances slip away from the mind. But others are particularly vivid in my memory (in Handel’s Giulio Cesare and Mozart’s Clemenza di Tito, for example), and one of them is the Elmer Gantry workshop. The Times article referred to a recording of her singing Sharon’s entrance aria. I hope it still exists and is released some day soon. No disrespect to the artist who ended up creating the role, but Hunt Lieberson’s peculiar spiritual intensity brought a special edge to the character – she might be an ordinary woman, she might be a charlatan, or, when you heard her sing, she really might be in direct contact with great powers sweeping through the starry skies, and it was all a matter of faith. The scene I remember most vividly had her crouched down in front of (possibly figurative) incense burners, her hands arabesqueing as if with the scented smoke, while she chanted and sang an incantation filled with deep, vibrant ululations. Afterwards one of my co-workers kept saying, “Oh my God! Oh my God! That thing she did with her voice!” Yep. Exactly. That thing she did with her voice.

complacencies of the peignoir

I will sometimes go into the theater with hypothesis in hand. For instance, this one about La Rondine: its supposedly clumsy dramaturgy had more to do with people missing the point than with actual faults in the work itself – was it probable that the masterly dramatic mind behind Boheme, Tosca, and Butterfly could have fumbled that late in his career? It reminded me of what a professor of mine had once blurted out when discussing the middle of Dr Faustus – “I wish Marlowe hadn’t written these scenes!” I knew what she meant; between the noble questing of the beginning and the sublime tragedy of the end, there are scenes of low farce. But it seemed to me that those scenes are central to the meaning of the play – given great potential, and an amazing chance, most people will squander their opportunities on the equivalent of squirting wine in the Pope’s face, and so the bumptious comedy points to the moral even more than the high-toned tragic speeches do. I’ll admit to a bad habit of listening to operas without reading along in the libretto, but I vaguely knew Magda in Rondine had made a choice between love and comfort, and I was developing the possibilities of a whole Dr Faustus/Rondine comparison in my head, and just as I am apparently the only inhabitant of the blogosphere who has written at any length about both Nathan Gunn and Barry Zito, so I figured this was my big chance to be the only person in the history of the world ever to compare Rondine and Faustus.

It turns out I was wrong, though. It is possible for the dramatic genius whose works have both blessed and oppressed the operatic stage to produce an inept drama. After the first part of the recent San Francisco Opera production, I was thinking, That was lovely – the second act was maybe too reminiscent of the Café Momus scene in Boheme, but still all very lovely. . . . I left the theater after the second part thinking, Whoa! That sure went off the tracks.

I’d like to make a distinction between being tired of certain Puccini warhorses and dismissing Puccini. The very fact that certain works of his are so much in demand that any habitual opera-goer is sick to death of them is a tribute to his genius. You could argue that his success salted the earth for succeeding generations of composers, raising expectations of lyrical and dramatic success combined with popularity that no one else could live up to, or should have to live up to, especially under changed social and financial circumstances. Years ago I read that, even though he was seriously ill, Puccini traveled to Vienna to hear the premiere of Pierrot Lunaire, and took the time afterwards to congratulate the young Schoenberg. I’ve always liked that story, since it indicates a generosity and openness that I admire. I’d like to read a good biography of Puccini to get an accurate picture, since there is no trace of any such attitude in the playbill’s Rondine articles; according to them, Puccini was jealous of the success of other composers (notably both Strausses), was contemptuous of any Viennese experimentation, and longed to achieve the dubious goal of writing an operetta, which seems to me like being able to weave a great tapestry but aching to dominate the crafts fair through the mastery of macramé. Maybe Gockley & Co. are just trying to reassure the Philistines, who seem to be in the ascendancy at the house (how ironic that this season opened with Samson).

It was a lovely production; all three acts had a different and gorgeous Art Deco set, each of which received a round of applause while the music was playing, for they were that kind of set and it was that kind of audience. Angela Gheorgiu made her local debut, and she does indeed have a strikingly lovely voice. The first act opened with a group scene, and I wasn’t sure which one was our star, until she moved towards the on-stage piano to sing her famous aria, and I noticed her dress was slit up to there, and I realized, well, obviously, there’s our star. I didn’t recognize her because for some reason she wore an incredibly unflattering Gidget-does-Lulu hairstyle. Considering the role wigs have played in her story (for those who don’t know, she was the one playing Micaela in Carmen to whom Volpe said, “That blonde wig is going on stage whether you’re under it or not”), I was surprised she agreed to such harsh-looking hair. I’m all about the hair. Anna Christy, whom I keep seeing playing maids, was both pert and charming, but of course since this is an attempt at an operetta Magda’s maid is treated with condescension and ultimately is put in her place. I like Misha Didyk (I have friends who hate him), who is the tenor and therefore, needless to say, the male romantic lead, but I didn’t have strong feelings about him either way in this role.

As for where the work goes wrong, it’s the third act. After the café scene in the second act, which I needn’t describe because it’s so similar to Act 2 of Boheme (though I would like to offer sincere praise to the hilariously tacky disco ball glittering in the back of the set), Magda has run off with her young lover. There is no Violetta-type sacrifice here, though – the woman of the world and her ardent young lover are in a fashionable resort, just as stylish as the first two acts, running up the bills. They sing about how much in love they are, in a duet of ill-advised length. I can accept this sort of thing from lovers with a mythic aura, like Tristan and Isolde or Cio-Cio San and Pinkerton, but there’s only so much of other people’s bland banal happiness I want to sit through. The maid and her boyfriend show up and then leave. Our lovers realize they are in serious debt. (That’s something I’d prefer to hear them go on about – as one who has spent not wisely but too well myself, I await the great operatic treatment of debt. Other than Rheingold, of course.) The youth wants to marry Magda, but such are the benefits of her worldly experience that she knows such a marriage would kill his saintly mother. Again unlike Traviata, no parent is brought on stage to make such a plea for him- or herself, so instead of a dramatically interesting confrontation we are given a supposition, and a clichéd one at that. (Being partly of Latin descent myself, I have some familiarity with such saintly old women, and personally I’m figuring that the mother is actually a raging controlling bitch.) Magda realizes that mounting debts and society's rigid rules require her to abandon her young lover, who, we must take on faith based on his tenor voice, is the great true love that would last the rest of her life, and instead she turns to – not poverty, disease, and a lonely death, like Violetta, but the wealthy arms of her rich protector. I thought there would be another scene or two after she makes this choice, but no – that’s it! Since her protector was played by the handsome and distinguished-looking Philip Skinner, and he obviously has pretty elastic views of what he requires from her in the way of fidelity (as shown by his willingness to take her back, despite her running off with the young lover, and despite the really awful hair), I’m thinking she should maybe count her blessings.

I was glad to have seen Rondine at last, and I would enjoy seeing it again. But it filled me with ironic skepticism rather than a warm glow. Unlike such operas as Carmen or Trovatore, with their sympathetic treatment of outsiders and those alien to the usual opera audience, this is a work aimed at warming the toes of the privileged (so I guess Puccini did succeed in writing an operetta). It is designed for those who have chosen, or ended up in, comfort, and want to luxuriate without consequences in the pretense that they might have had a great romance instead (so I guess Puccini also succeeded in writing an ur-chick flick). It’s an essentially nostalgic work, like Boheme, though it lacks that work’s real sense of poverty and sickness, however obscured those qualities might be by a golden haze of remembrance.

I was kind of stunned to realize that the plot of Rondine is essentially the same as the plot of Mae West’s Sex, which I had seen a few days earlier. Mae handles the whole thing with greater aplomb, and there’s no silly pretense that marrying her rich older friend rather than her handsome young stud is some sort of tragic dilemma. Both were written around the time when “A Bird in a Gilded Cage” was a big hit, so the fate of what the times would have called women of the world as well as the need for women to find financial support seem to have been popular themes. Maybe this reflects the growing independence, sexual and financial, of women. Maybe it reflects the largely female audience’s need to see dramatic interest in their lives – though as dilemmas go, choosing between love and money is sort of like deciding between Paris and London for your annual vacation – it’s a dilemma of privilege. It’s not as if we’re talking about coal miners and their wives here. Maybe it just reflects a certain self-indulgent need to feel sorry for oneself, and to reflect weepily on what might have been from the comfort of our padded red velvet subscription seats at the opera. Magda’s tragedy? Magda’s dilemma? Cry me a river, sweetiepie – at least your cage is gilded.

you're the moon over Mae West's shoulder

The hilarity ensues immediately once you buy a ticket for Sex, the Mae West play which has been making the national rounds: do you write “Sex” on your appointment calendar? Do you tell people you’re going to see “Sex”? I generally settled for “the play at the Aurora Theater” in my discreet way, but you’ve got to hand it to Mae – you might think society has moved past her particular brand of naughtiness, but she’s already sauntered ahead of you, because her good-humored innuendo not only outsmarts our blunt ways, she’s also as aware as Jane Austen of social class and money.

The script is similar to those West wrote for her movies – she (called Margy LaMont this time around) is a good bad girl; a rich and innocent young man, ignorant of her background, falls in love with her down in Trinidad; when he takes her home to meet his parents, she realizes that his mother Clara is the ungrateful society lady she rescued in the first act from a misadventure in slumming. Margy eventually decides that her future happiness lies in marrying her old-time friend and lover, the recently retired Lieutenant Gregg, who knows all about her life and keeps proposing anyway, and moving with him to Australia, an ending which satisfies everyone except the love-struck young man, who will get over it.

The play is actually similar to most of Oscar Wilde’s plays; like them, it is basically an ironic melodrama about class boundaries leavened with sexually subversive epigrams. I don’t want to oversell the comparison; I’m not saying West could have written anything like The Importance of Being Earnest (though even Wilde only managed that once), and she never wrote anything like Salome (though I would love to have seen her version). And her play is a lot looser than, say, An Ideal Husband, which is a disadvantage or an advantage, depending on how you feel about plot machinery. Her play has plenty of vaudeville moments, and the first half ends with a very entertaining and very extraneous series of song and dance numbers (Robert Brewer as the lovestruck young man had a particularly nice voice, sounding at times remarkably like an actual 1920s Irish tenor – I guess I’m thinking of the John McCormack sound).

The Aurora is one of those tiny theaters (four rows in a U-shape around the open stage) that like to claim there are no bad seats, but I had one, at the right-hand tip of the U, behind the stage couch. For quite a bit of the play I was looking over the actors' shoulders or observing their necks. I would have just accepted this as my bad luck, but I saw a woman buy a discount ticket at the box office half an hour before the show started, and her seat was much better than mine. You’d think that buying in advance at full price would give you the better seat. Apparently I have a lot to learn about the ways of the theater.

Seating discontent aside, this was an enjoyable evening (oh, all right, I’ll give in and say it – I really enjoyed the Sex, thanks so much, the money is in the box office), though I couldn’t help feeling that if this had actually been a film from the 1930s, the class drama would have been more sharply delineated – there’s something antiquated and formal about the dress, movement, and speech of the upper classes in those films that is alien to our society, and difficult to convey with modern actors in a stripped-down set. I wish the Aurora had trusted the material a little more and relied less on its curiosity value and period charm. They opened and closed the show with unnecessary historical background – a sketch of the usual jazz age pizzazz, some shocked contemporary reviews, the eventual arrest for obscenity after packing the house for months. I’m not sure why they thought this fairly straightforward, enjoyable play needed all that – they wouldn’t have done the same for Lady Windermere’s Fan.

The attempt to recreate the atmosphere around the original play may also have been the reason for the production’s major miscalculation, which I’m guessing was the fault of Tom Ross, the director: having Delia MacDougall, the actress playing Margy, imitate Mae West. There are certain artists, like Gertrude Stein or Groucho Marx, who have such strong styles that attempts to discuss them usually end up as attempts to imitate them, which is always a mistake. You’re just not ever going to see a better Mae West imitation than the one Mae West did. And the exaggerated voluptuousity that is the West physique provides a built-in punchline that just can’t be supplied these days, since the red hot Mama body type seems to have disappeared with vaudeville.

The basic question is whether a star vehicle can survive without the star. I think Sex is a solid enough play so that it would have been worth trying, and MacDougall brought enough interesting flashes to her performance so that I wish she had been encouraged to form an independent interpretation. One of the best plays I saw last year was a star vehicle without the star – Charles Busch’s Red Scare on Sunset, performed by the student actors at the American Conservatory Theater. Usually it just seems to work out that I post late, and basically I’m OK with that, on the grounds that it’s all based on memory the minute you leave your seat anyway, and sometimes it helps to have things shake out over a few weeks, and also it’s not as if anyone is waiting to hear what I think before buying a ticket. But sometimes a little too much time goes by even for me (though never say never – I may paper over poverty-induced gaps in my upcoming schedule with reminiscences of past theatrical glories, like some superannuated theater ghost who can’t wait to regale you with the time he was the understudy Guildenstern for the greatest Hamlet of three generations ago), and I do wish I had posted about Red Scare, mostly so I could salute the genius of Charles Busch.

I think I just had a vague sense that he was one of those guys who put on a dress and did bad Bette Davis imitations; I have nothing against that, but on the rare occasions when I’m drunk enough to laugh at something like that I’m usually preoccupied with wondering how to make the room stop spinning. I didn’t even bother going to see Tales of the Allergist’s Wife when it played here a few years ago. I don’t know what tipped me off that I might be mistaken, but I have recanted my heresy. Busch recreates, subverts, and glorifies a grand tradition of theatricality that goes back to Bernhardt and no doubt farther; and if you doubt me put Die Mommy Die in your Netflix queue. About halfway through viewing it I thought, Sweet Jesus, this is the Oresteia! with suppositories!

Last year the young conservatory actors created a Red Scare that was true to his spirit but independent of his presence. It was not only probably the most consistently well-acted play I saw last year, it was hilarious from start to finish (assuming that you find funny, and I do, a plot that centers on a Communist conspiracy to abolish star billing and the Arthur Freed unit at MGM and replace them with black-and-white ensemble dramas). It also dealt in a deeper way than many more ponderous plays with the function of art and fame in a democracy, with the easy American way of switching personal identity and its confusing results, and with the American attempt to define a cohesive social identity through demonizing outsiders. People tend not to see comic cross-dressers as holding the mirror up to our profounder nature, but I’ve gotten more out of Busch’s work than I have out of a lot of Eugene O’Neill’s. Charles Busch and Mae West, raffish provocateurs on the far shore of the mainstream! Is it universal, or peculiarly American, that it’s the marginal who tell all the truth, but tell it slant?