Consider the Lilies

IMPROMPTU rides again...

2009-11-11T05:39:00.000-08:00

The Mozartfragmentarypantomimereconstructionproject which I was recruited to direct for the Chicago Humanities Festival and which I've blogged about before appeared this past Monday at the University of Chicago Theater and Performance Studies Workshop . Minutes before the workshop kicked off we discovered 1. half the costumes were gone, including Jonathan DeSouza's entire costume and that 2. toenails (mine) react badly to being mowed over with pianos. Undeterred, this weekend we/the show travel/s to the American Musicological Society annual conference in Philadelphia to participate in its first year of experimental performance panels ... whoo hoo!

Anne LeBaron @ U of C

2009-10-24T05:56:00.000-07:00

Anne LeBaron presented this past Friday to a (rather poorly -- yikes!) attended colloquium in Fulton Hall. The subject: her opera, Sucktion. LeBaron's work sounds immediately fascinating. Here's a random selection from her very impressive CV: she won a Guggenheim, studied with Ligeti (not in that order), has written a "dance opera" called Pope Joan, and Wet, another opera about the big business of water and the horrors of floods and she, I'm quoting, lectures at CalArts on the "concept of HyperOpera." (I don't know what this means but surely it is meant to address the hyper, erratic, overblown aspect of opera--aspect, or sine qua non--that is, the histrionic too-muchness of opera, perhaps in order to address what happens when the "Opera/Too-much" dial continues to be turned even further up, up, up?)

In the beginning of her lecture Anne charmed us by revealing a years-long fascination with old vacuum cleaners and vacuum cleaner sounds. She played us early samples of her work, female vocalizations layered on top of recorded & processed vacuum sounds. At times the two seemed uncannily to merge, and at one point, LeBaron had the vocalist spit and buzz into the vacuum mouthpiece to produce a series of fun sounds that would probably make Kaija Saariaho jealous. LeBaron's collaborators on Sucktion include the poet Douglas Kearney, whose libretto is a clever homage to Marinetti typeface. This all seemed promising.

LeBaron saved the nugget of her presentation for last -- that is, the semi-finished, workshop staging of the opera in L.A. But this is where things started to go downhill. LeBaron later mentioned she feared that 40 minutes of vacuum sounds weren't in and of themselves interesting enough to justify the ticket prices (okay, I made that part up, but she did say she was worried the vacuuming lacked moxy) so she crafted a heavy-handed scenario to go along with them. (For the record, vacuum sounds are TOTALLY interesting. Maybe not for forty minutes, sure, but for at least 25. If John Cage can get away with Points in Space, I say go for it!)

Oppressed housewife cleans house, anticipating the arrival of her husband home from work. (The singer/actress in this case was Asian, and one grad student floated the thought that LeBaron intended the opera as a critique of interracial marriage. Or better, I thought, that the Mail Order Bride phenomenon in this country replicates/updates in the 21st century the phenomenon of the overbored, undersexed housewife of the 1950s? But LeBaron seemed uninterested; or else this was my private flight of fancy. Anyway.)

The husband arrives home (a recorded voice-over, "Honey, I'm Home"; i.e. there is no "husband"), finds the place a mess & retires for the night. Depressed, the housewife turns melancholy. A vacuum arrives. A present from her hubby. She falls in love (with the vacuum), sprawls on it orgasmically and thus the comedy endeth.

To put it simply, the problem? Too much scenario and too literal.

1. Put the husband in a locked closet stage left so that the "housewife" (or is she a dominatrix? an updated Alcina?) controls his exits and entrances.

2. Or make it Erwartung Appliance! Instead of losing her fiancé, this poor woman is in denial over the death of her beloved vacuum.

3. Or make the husband's cleanliness phobia the center of the (o_p)/e(r?)a and his hapless wife the Mrs. Haversham of the Ace Hardware Cleaning aisle.

A dash of the intellectual wit that has made LeBaron such a successful composer and a writer is needed. Instead, the staging we saw consisted of the soprano (who, by the way, is a musicologist and member of the group that commissioned the opera) putting on and taking off rubber gloves, stuffing them into her oversize apron pockets, dropping them, and putting them on again. LeBaron's score, and her ideas, play happily far off of the beaten path. But this opera needs a director so that the curiosity that motivated its inception gets taken up a notch. Staging, to honor its points of origin (the ideation of the opera, the wit and spirit of adventurousness that composers like LeBaron bring to the table), should amplify, qualify & problematize that origin; not bow to it.

I think I might be famous...

2009-10-23T07:05:00.001-07:00

... but I'm not sure. Does a photo in the Hyde Park Herald constitute arrival, recognition, everything I've been waiting for?

(Confirmation pending.)

Lucinda Childs at the MCA

2009-10-20T09:36:00.000-07:00

I fell for it. No, I TOTALLY fell for it.

The MCA press for its Lucinda Childs show last weekend advertised not "Lucinda Childs Dance" or "Lucinda Childs, Adapted, Updated" but "Lucinda Childs." Period. And the only accompanying photo on their website is a lithe Lucinda Childs doing something extremely cool with her arms that I can't reproduce. (I tried.) I don't mean to accuse the MCA of false advertising, but they really had me: I thought, despite her being 70 years old, Lucinda Childs herself was going to walk up on the stage and dance. And come on: I'm not insane. Dancers age better than the rest of us. Look at frigging Baryshnikov! But I should have known. There's an age at which respectable artists of all stripes stop publishing photographs of their current selves and use the same one indefinitely. Lucinda looks a little too gorgeous in the photo to be 70. But then, who knows? It seemed to me at least plausible that if she were 70, and that picture had been snapped when she was 60 (it's a stretch, but not totally ridiculous) it might be the case that the show was not just a showcase of her work, but that Lucinda would appear in the flesh. And in a way she did.

"Dance" is a reconstruction commissioned by the Richard E. Fisher Center at Bard. The original piece (1979) comprises three 20-minute pieces with music by Philip Glass. Rather than simply reenacting the piece and having done with it, the creative team last weekend thought it would be a good idea to project a live recording of the original, 1979 version on top of the live dancers. A very, very thin scrim divided the audience from the stage making this possible. The video was rarely in sync with what was going on onstage and the projected dancers were also very, very large by comparison so that they dwarfed the live performers.

Childs' choreography Mickey Mouses Glass's music. (Translation: it's repetitive.) 20 minutes kinda crawls. The problem wasn't that the dance was boring. In fact, the video projected dance was riveting. If the MCA had shown an hour of the video only (by Sol LeWitt) I would have left, a happily paying customer. The problem was the discrepancy between the live and the video-projected dancers. On the video (which included a breathtaking solo dance by Lucinda for Lucinda), Childs' choreography worked. It was repetitive, but in a good way, because the ingenuity of the movements bear repeating. The dancers are poised on a giant grid, 12X12 squares. They skip along the grid at breakneck speed as though it were propelling them along. LeWitt's camera follows the dancers, making it seem as if they're actually hopping up and down in place on a moving sidewalk. The effect is a bit like Irish dancing, to use a terrible comparison -- the torso stays totally upright; the feet do all the work. Childs' facial expression in her own dancing is also unusual--rather than looking out at an imagined audience, she looks inward. She's doing this dance for herself and we're incredibly lucky to catch her in the act. I almost felt voyeuristic watching the video. But the live dancers on Friday dispensed with everything that made the original dancers so unearthly. Theses were rule-bound, balletic, posed. Less skittish, more robust, more effortful. They looked like they were trying very, very hard.

In case you'd rather hear it from someone who actually knows something about dance, read the Laura Molzahn review in the Trib.

Chicago Humanities Festival

2009-10-17T05:44:00.000-07:00

I'm directing a show at the Chicago Humanities Festival here on the University of Chicago campus this afternoon: come!

The show, which is improvised, is based on an incomplete fragment of a commedia dell'arte pantomime Mozart sketched out for himself and his pals to play in Vienna during carnival. Mozart reserved the role of Harlequin for himself and had his dad Fed-Ex his Harlequin outfit for the occasion. Unfortunately for us, only Mozart's violin line survived the centuries, along with an extremely spare, and often confusing scenario (including, for instance, that Harlequin goes from being alive in one scene to stone dead in the next for reasons that are not apparent, or the instruction that the "Doctor" is to exit and then that the Doctor then ... exits, again [from offstage?!])

Fortunately, the violin part alone is worthy of an Animaniacs appearance -- it does half the work of inventing action for us. Roger Moseley, who found the pantomime & engineered its musical reconstruction is jaw-droppingly good at revivifying 18th-century musical topics. He directs the ensemble from the piano bench.

I also decided to insert a couple other extraneous Mozarty bits into the score this time around: 1. Mozart's Turkish March for piano solo (which accompanies the otherwise totally unmotivated entrance of a "Turk" in Mozart's scenario, hence the appropriately out-of-place music) and 2. an aria for Columbine -- at Martha Feldman's request, Barbarina's aria from Figaro. The aria (accompanied by Pierrot) is a total red herring (no one has uttered a word thus far, let alone belted out opera), recalling, I hope, Christina Ricci's completely bizarre and wonderful tap dance in the middle of Buffalo 66, which has a similar effect.

As an additional layer, thinking the commedia relationships bear a striking resemblance to day-to-day academia (lecherous old professor, scheming post-doc, emo undergrad, innocent English major from Minnesota) the characters are dressed in U of C nerd wear.

There is a typo on the Chicago Humanities official webpage, which, alas, lists Roger Moseley as the sole director. Anyway, come, and while you're at it, try to pass yourself off as an "Educator" at the door so you can get in for free (think pocket protector, bedhead, fanny pack).

Feat.:

Harlequin: Jon Eliot
Pantalone: Greg Anderson
Pierrot: Peter Schultz
Columbine: Majel Connery
Doctor: Jonathan DeSouza
Violin: Emily Norton
Clarinet: Danny Gough
Piano: Roger Moseley
Cello: Emily M.

2p-3p

Mandel Hall

1131 E. 57th St.
Chicago, IL 60637
Adults: $10.00

Educators & Students: FREE

Monday, Oct 12 Workshop on Peter Maxwell Davies

2009-10-10T17:58:00.001-07:00

Oh, shameless plug!

My work on Peter Maxwell Davies (dissertation in embryo) is finally taking form. I'll be presenting next Monday, October 12 at a newly-constituted workshop in Theater & Performance Studies at the University of Chicago, run by David J. Levin & Christopher Wild. The paper is slated to appear later this winter (don't be deceived: it isn't actually winter outside, though it feels to be) in the Oxford University Press journal, The Opera Quarterly.

Come see me embarrass myself:

Monday, Oct 12
Germanic Studies Department
Wieboldt Hall, Rm #206
3-5:00p
there will be wine

-majel.

The French are So Unimaginative

2009-10-10T17:48:00.000-07:00

This was passed along to me by a friend of mine but it belongs in a museum. It's the graphic on the vomit bags for Polish Airlines. I haven't flown to Poland lately, but really: could there be a better way to say VOMIT HERE NOW than Torba Chorobowa? ... but then, what about Spuckbeutel? A close second. Oh, my.

ICE @ MoCP

2009-10-10T16:49:00.000-07:00

Or is it MCoP? Or MoCoP? Here's what I don't understand: Mo = Museum, right? Yes, I know, MoMA started it, and little 'o' stands for 'of.' Fine. It still looks bizarre. I think MuCPhot works much better.

ICE never does anything half-assed. David Bowlin was the only ICE'er on the program last night, but there were more in attendance. Claire Chase had an outfit that would have made David Bowie jealous if only he could fit into it. The exhibit at MoCP (MusoCoP) was spectacular and went well with the spectacular program. The image they have on the museum website really doesn't do justice to it. Behind David was what appeared (from my position 40 feet back) to be either a shattered adult toilet seat (the kind you put over top of the regular seat, presumably to make it ... more accessible to the adult butt?) or a life raft exploded into about 7 pieces. Each of the pieces had wild colors all over it & it was positioned at times more or less directly above David's head when he moved toward it, making him appear to have a psychedelic halo radiating from his brain. On the opposite end, equally thrilling, was a bird's eye view of a small city coming directly out from the wall in 3-D. The image I want is the expensive holiday cards with complicated embedded origami that shoots out at you when you open the thing. Except 10 times larger.

David played the first piece, Sciarrino's first two capricci from 6 Capricci far fresher than I've ever heard Sciarrino played. It was so fresh I kept thinking someone with a crush on Sciarrino had cribbed his style. Like the Borges story where someone other than Cervantes writes Don Quixote exactly over again, word for word. But it's somehow different, because it comes from a different person in a different time & place. 6 Capricci written by Barry Manilow wouldn't be 6 Capricci written by Prince, even if they'd written the exact same piece, because their authors are such different people. Is anyone following me? It was fresh. Fresh, I tell you! And Berio's Sequenza VIII was stunning.

The people who actually had seats experienced Nono's La lontananza nostaligica utopica futura (and, forgive me because my Italian is awful but I'm guessing the piece is something about a faraway nostalgic, utopic future) in surround sound. The piece is for 8-channel tape and solo violin, so there were four speakers placed around the audience & David's playing was seconded by violin, vocal and other unidentifiable sounds that flitted between the speakers. I'm not qualified to judge the piece because I couldn't really hear it. Nick and I got stuck in the back of the room due to the unfortunate route Nick chose to get to the museum. But I might go ahead and judge the staging of it -- yes: the staging!

The piece itself is ages long and so the sheet music that corresponds is likewise long. 6 stands long, to be exact. Rather than having David play from stand 1 through to stand 6 all in a row, which one would expect, the stands were instead distributed around the playing arena at odd angles so that when he finished with one stand, he would then be forced to head off to the next. But someone had had the bright idea that he should not simply move to the next, he should be gripped by the need, the desire to find the next stand! He should be compelled by a strange interior voice: where, where is your stand, David? Thus, one ream of music finished, David would stop playing and pull a sudden, odd "what's that smell?!" face, and then would appear to be following the sounds of the music coming out of the speakers as though they sang a sweet, sweet tune only he could hear, as though the music, not he, was leading him blindly on. Then suddenly (what, ho!) he would land smack in front of the correct stand in the sequence and then begin playing again.

I'm making it sound funnier than it was. It was actually just a little hokey, so my thought, I suppose, is that actors should act, and musicians should play music.

Anyway, the concert was fabulous, and I'm sorry it was only one night.

Officially the Funniest Thing I've Seen in Weeks

2009-05-28T15:08:00.000-07:00

Adrian Jevicki is a Wild Man

Fortunately for me, Movementpants is choreographing Opera Cabal's brand new Vesalii Icones (by Peter Maxwell Davies, 1969) this summer. Get ready, Chicago.

Cliff Notes Carmen at COT

2009-05-13T19:48:00.000-07:00

It's no use pretending. Peter Brook is a genius, but there's no Peter Brook in the recent La tragédie de Carmen at Chicago Opera Theater. In fact, last night's production proved a long unsubstantiated theory of mine that Peter Brook's younger brother, also somewhat unimaginatively named Peter Brook, wrote La tragédie and passed it off as the work of his older brother, hoping to ruin the poor man's career. How else to explain a canned version of Carmen that seems programmed to put people to sleep? If you sit back and close your eyes, which I'd advise you to do if you go to the final performance tomorrow, you might even hallucinate that you never left home ... drifting off in ye old armchair listening to "Renee Fleming: Great Opera Scenes," the iPod shuffle randomly selects "Carmen: Hottest Hits" and away you go ....

There were two moments of potential greatness in the production, when I thought or maybe just hallucinated I was dealing with the real Mr. Brook.

Hallucination no. 1: About 20 minutes into the opera, Carmen has already sung three arias back to back, and it starts to seem like something might be wrong. She finishes one and then, whoa, it's another aria from Carmen! And another! But then I thought, ah, yes, how clever (here's where the hallucination begins) ... the insinuation is that Carmen is literally a singing fool. She has to keep looping the same arias endlessly because the forward motion of the opera depends upon the enchantment her voice produces. The minute she stops, everything spirals out of control and her hot-headed lovers start killing each other. This theory of mine also (brilliantly!) explains why Carmen would fall for the slightly metro Escamillo instead of Marlboro Man José. Why? Because Escamillo is also a singing machine. Obviously! The girl who belts out the Habanera has to go home with the guy who sings "Tor-e-a-dor en ga-ha-ha-harde!" They're made for each other (until they run through their entire playlist and then discover they don't actually know one another ... no, wait, that would be the Sondheim Carmen). José's problem, like Eminem in 8 Mile, is that he can never get up the guts to sing in public and then when he does, it's just not very catchy. His only good aria comes too little too late, and Carmen's offstage anyway so she misses most of it. Oh, no ... I'm coming out of my reverie and ... it's a terribly choreographed fight scene! Aack!

Hallucination no. 2: I thought I detected a little prank, directed at the ultimate 19th-century tragic opera cliché -- the way the audience always knows what's going to happen, but the characters never catch on until it's too late. The same conceit drives scary movies. (We think: don't open the door, for chrissake! Don't answer the phone! Stop! He's got a knife! But of course the door is opened, the phone is answered, everybody dies.) It works the same way with opera. Except that the last scene of Carmen violates the rule. In the final duet, José plays the hapless lover who still believes he can make things work. Carmen is the dejected ex-lover who thinks it'll never work.... but then, suddenly, Carmen looks out at the audience ... she seems to know how the opera will end ... she's stepping outside the operatic frame! Carmen is half audience, half Carmen! She knows how it's going to end, but she still has to play out the scene. But José, poor boy, he's still trapped inside the tragic spiral. Their dialogue becomes strangely disordered. He says he isn't going to kill her. She says just do it! He says he loves her, they should go. She says, hey man, will you just drop it? José gets angry and kills her but not because he wants to. He kills her because she threatened suspension of belief, because Carmen was about to kill the very premise of opera itself! Oh, no ... the man behind me just snorted at Garcia's totally hilarious fake death.

I know, I know. The ravings of a madwoman. None of these things happened. But really, now, I'm trying to be funny, because I'm sad. I tried, I really tried, watching this production, to find a reason to like it. Actually, there's one reason: no intermission.

Office Space Opera

2009-05-02T07:38:00.000-07:00

I witnessed an understudy performance of Clemenza di Tito yesterday afternoon, behind the Harris Theater mainstage. It was produced by the various assistants (to the conductor, the director, even the rehearsal pianist) who get together with the understudies to the main roles, and in the space of one week develop their own reading of the opera. But there are caveats. The performance lasts one hour, instead of two and a half. And there's no stage, no backstage, and no lighting. The performance happened in a kind of dance/conference room with space enough for about twenty people, two upright pianos, a handful of chairs, classroom track lighting, a trashcan, a clock, bad ventilation, and a couple exit signs. In other words, a lot like the last place on earth you'd wanna sing an opera. Unless you're Peter Sellars. (His infamous Marriage of Figaro, set in New York City's Trump Towers, substituted an uncomfortable opera-in-your-dorm-room kind of thing for the stop-everything-and-just-sing decor typical of a [say, 1998] Met production of the opera.)

R.B. Schlather, who assisted Christopher Alden on the set for Tito, did a good job of using what he had, i.e. next to nothing, rather than fighting it. Characters who were supposed to be offstage either sat lifeless at the long conference table planted in the center of the room, or huddled in the weird, dark exit corridor at the back. Rabihah Davis sang Vitellia's last aria (which maybe ought to have been sung from inside the corridor) slouched against the long dance mirror stage left, playing with her reflection. It was a nice effect, since Vitellia at this point literally retreats into a world of her own. Other characters, with no recourse to escape heady dramatic confrontations, occasionally turned face-first into the wall and remained there in an abrupt gesture of total helplessness.

The scenes that worked against the anti-operatic qualities of the room were less successful. In the finale, Sesto is about to be condemned to death and he/she simply walked up to the table and laid down on it. It would have made more sense, given the space, if he had been condemned to a paper shredder and a Kafka-esque never-ending stack of bills. No one, to my dismay, pointed a gun at the microwave, threatened to tear down the clock (which ticked and shuddered noisily throughout the entire "production"), or shouted at the pianist, who was four feet away, to play play more like an orchestra. There wasn't actually a microwave, but you see my point.

Ultimately, the condensed aspect of the performance was its most bizarre feature. How do you slim down a Mozart opera to one-third its original size? The production team solved this dilemma by eliminating everything except the recitative until halfway through Act II. At that point the characters suddenly began singing arias, precipitating a swift return to operaland. The problem with recitative-only opera is that Tito, Mozart's late return to buffa style, depends for its effectiveness on moments of pause -- the arias, which give space to thoughts and feelings. With nobody pausing for reflection, with nobody pausing, period, the characters ran around for the first forty minutes speaking very quickly to one another like they were acting out some weird Italian theatrical form that died out centuries ago because it didn't make any sense.

Especial pplause is due to Julia Hardin, who played Sextus like a champ, especially given the circumstances.

Baby Bro Goes for Broke, Takes Bank

2009-04-28T05:08:00.000-07:00

Drew Connery, a.k.a. my brother, is a performing fool. After hunkering down in relative isolation for years -- years during which our family quietly wondered what the hell he was up to and I was forming an avant-garde opera ensemble -- Drew emerged from his cocoon this past weekend with a couple single tracks that are so good I almost cried. The studio execs over at 89.4 in Omaha ("The River") must have wept, because Drew's hit single, "Omaha," went straight into regular radio play yesterday, skipping the usual months-long vetting process.

In spite of their name, there's nothing avant about Drew's group ("Random"), unless you count the fact that in addition to singing like a lark, he can also rip out high-pitched melismatic vocal lines as good as the best Hindustani classical singer. And he can rap. Drew specializes in what an old teacher of mine, Daron Hagen, calls doing cliché well. Hagen used to say that the problem with 99.9% of composing artists is that in trying to be wildly creative and different, they lean too far in that direction and end up composing stuff most people wouldn't give 5 seconds of their time to. The creative genius is the person who creates art within the boundaries of the known. Drew's talent is to absorb the essence of a musical genre, its unmistakable imprint (in this case, Third Eye Blind, with hints of Led Zeppelin and Eddie Vedder [Drew, by the way, can I have my CDs back?]) and then churn out perfect facsimiles of the songs these guys ought to have written. Maybe he's spent the last several years creeping into the bedrooms of famous rockstars and writing down the stuff they say in their sleep.

In any case, I'm proud as hell, Drew. Listen to RANDOM on MySpace.

Mozart's Carnival

2009-04-23T16:56:00.000-07:00

A few photos from a recently concluded project involving the improvised reconstruction of a pantomime for Mardi Gras never finished by Mozart. Roger Moseley, a younger version of Robert Levin, and resident 18th-century improvisation fanatic at the University of Chicago, unearthed what remains of the score: 1. the first violin part and 2. an extremely sketchy scenario, written by Mozart in German. In other words, not much.

Roger headed up the music side of things, and recruited me to be the project's stage director. Maybe it's my bad German, but the scenario I inherited contained a few leaps in logic. It wasn't immediately obvious how to effect, for instance, an unprepared transition from "Dottore sieht auch zärtlich" to "Pantalon, Piero und Dottore liegen auf der Erde." (The Doctor "looks tenderly" at an undetermined object, and then the next minute everybody's lying kicking and screaming on the floor). Or what about when "Pantalon and Doctor go off" and suddenly "Piero comes onstage loaded with weapons." What?! Well, on one level, this is Commedia dell'arte, not Shakespeare. The scenario isn't supposed to make sense -- or rather, the fact that the characters do things that don't make sense is what makes it funny. But the best non sequitur in the scenario is also an embarrassing reminder of Commedia's historical trajectory, and the social hierarchies it pokes fun of. After depositing his cache of weapons, Piero is instructed (presumably to our great amusement) to "spot the Turks." For Mozart, as anyone who's seen the Orientalist classic, Die Entführung auf dem Serail, knows, Turkish folks step up as the dead-ringer bad/stupid foreigner stereotype in a lot of Mozart's operas. Sadly, the stereotype exists in Germany today more or less unchanged, maybe with slightly more sublimation. (For productions of this opera that attempt to render transparent or completely ditch its colonialist fantasy aspect see Entführung on a yacht, Calixto Bieto's infamous staging or [my personal favorite] Neuenfels' production for the Staatsoper Stuttgart, available on DVD -- yipee!) If I were as bold as Sasha Baron Cohen, I might have used the Turks moment to make a political point about how far (or not) we've come since Mozart, but I tried to bail Mozart out by simply giving everyone mustaches, à la Groucho Marx.

Here, the cast (Shawn Keener as Pantalone, Jonathan DeSouza as Doctor, Alyssa Mathias as Columbine and Peter Schultz as Piero), armed with kitchen utensils, sneaks up on an unsuspecting Harlequin.

Columbine, a kind of urban-dwelling hipster, is being sneaky.

Pantalone, à la Billy Crystal's "You look marvelous" lounge lizard, is also very sneaky.

Pierrot (here, Lenny from Of Mice and Men?) is never sneaky, even when he tries to be.

The show is ended (Harlequin-cum-Afghani aerobics instructor [me], far right).

La clemenza di Christopher Alden

2009-04-19T13:31:00.000-07:00

Go see this opera. Now. Go see it now. Please. Don't do it for my sake. Just trust me.

When I first heard Christopher was coming to town to direct La clemenza di Tito, my first thought was, "Yeah ... hmm, Italian ... Mozart ... sounds familiar ... sort of ... wait, what's it called again?" I went to the library to get a recording and discovered there are actually a couple a-v recordings floating around. A VHS exists of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's Tito, which, apparently having been hit by the stupid bat, I somehow decided not to watch in favor of a DVD made-for-TV version by the BBC. I grew up on "I, Claudius" (which, confusingly for a first grader, they spell the fancy Roman way: "Clavdivs"), "Upstairs, Downstairs," and "Brideshead Revisited," and came away mightily persuaded of the superiority of British acting. (According to the rule by which things denied us as children become addictions in adulthood, I am now incapable of skipping an episode of Law and Order.) So when I watched this particular Tito and decided it was one of the worst operas ever written, it didn't dawn on me that it was the fault of the production. I assumed, as it has been common to assume since Mozart's death, that it's a completely lame opera. In fact, British television actors just can't sing.

Christopher Alden arrived in Chicago last month announcing that in this new production there would be none of the usual flouting of all historical referents. As he put it, "I'm over that." His Aida at the Deutsche Oper last year is a good example of what he's apparently over. Aida was an exotic-looking maid who worked for an unhealthy little cult of Evangelical power mongers hunkered down in what looked like a Radisson convention center in the heart of gun country, U.S.A. Christopher's particular brand of flouting has over the years attracted a lot of critical attention, and while the majority of people seem to hate what he does with his operas (Berlin booed Aida till they were hoarse, so I think it's safe to say that they're also "over that"), enough people with intelligence and political nerve think he's the greatest thing since sliced bread that he's gotten himself quite a reputation, if a mixed one. Whatever. Press, as we all know, is press. During the intermission of the Tito dress last Thursday, a man on my right mumbled, "Well, there's just absolutely nothing right about this opera," while a woman on my left shrieked, "Whoever this director is, I wanna marry him!"

Part of the problem is that Christopher's reputation precedes him, which means that a cast generally has a pretty good idea of what they're in for before the thing ever gets off the ground. Christopher's instructions to his singers usually ask for a recreation of something like the group therapy sessions in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: a bunch of crazy people on the verge. You know, one person's trying to figure out how to throw himself out of the window, someone else is losing it in the corner. Which, let's face it, is what operas are written about. But singers, especially accomplished ones in the European circuit, offer up a fair bit of resistance to this. You can't teach an old dog new tricks (like, how to act). But because Christopher's overall conceptions already demand a lot imaginatively of the audience, without everyone's participation on stage it can't get off the ground. In Berlin, there were a bunch of old-school singers rattling around like ghosts in a production where they simply didn't belong. I've always wondered what a Christopher Alden production would look like if his singers dared to act like he wanted them to...

The brilliance of the Chicago Opera Theater model is that, like Rome under Titus, absolute monarchy works when the ruler is a pretty awesome guy. Brian Dickie effortlessly commands devotion and loyalty from the people who work for him, and he's talented at assembling knock-out young singers into cutting-edge casts. COT is the MacBook Pro to the Lyric's PC. It's lighter, it's cooler-looking, and it frigging works. It was a little startling to walk into the first run-through and realize that these singers were literally in their twenties. But far more astonishing is that by opening night (last Saturday) they were all doing a pretty good job of embodying Christopher's wild-eyed schizophrenic thing. The scenic conception is a little lose. If you squint, it looks a little like sixties neo-Greco architecture: Lincoln Center, is how Christopher put it. And the costumes are, I dunno, I guess they're a little confusing. There are togas, but then Servilia has dreds, Titus is in his jammies, and Sextus has a kind of Kenneth Cole/runway thing going on. But the personal dynamic between singers, especially Sextus/Titus, is riveting. It just doesn't get better than this. There's opera, and then there's Christopher's Tito.

Three more performances. No excuses. Go.

Note: For a review of the opera (what you've just read, as Brian Dickie helpfully pointed out, is in fact a "review") see Andrew Patner's take.

Eight Songs for a Mad Queen

2009-04-04T12:31:00.000-07:00

Last Thursday I stepped out for a little late-night Maxwell Davies. Back in 2005, the International Contemporary Ensemble developed a reading of Eight Songs for a Mad King with director Lydia Steier. Last week's resurrection of the same production took place at the hip new Poisson Rouge in Greenwich Village (what is it about venues with color-coded animal names? Remember the White Dog Café?) Fortunately for me, Eight Songs, which was wild and incendiary when it was written in 1969, is still weird enough in 2009 that hip young groups like I.C.E. are willing to take it on. I have yet to be underwhelmed by these folks, who pulled off Xenakis's bizarre Oresteia last year at the Miller Theater with what I can only call style. For the Davies, they actually went to the trouble of memorizing the score. So it was somewhat disappointing that in spite of such a colossal feat, the instrumentalists were deliberately sidelined in the production by the King's antics.

Davies' idea for the original production had the King (modeled on King George III, the sole singer in the score) interacting on stage with each of the instrumentalists, who are all in cages, representing the bullfinches that crazy George III allegedly played with during his 60 odd years of royal insanity and seclusion. There are no cages in Steier's production. And the question of whether the King is performing at all (is he performing nuts, or is he just nuts?) is updated into the psycho-scape of the ultimate vanity press: YouTube. The instrumentalists crouch on either side of a giant stage-size screen onto which the King's singing face is projected. The King himself sits behind the screen (we cannot see him, but we hear his voice), but the liveness of his performance is belied by the intervention of a camcorder. What we see is much less like a performance, and more like a blown-up home video of a guy screwing around in his bedroom.

Steier's conceit is that the singer gradually makes himself up as King George. Over the course of roughly 45 minutes, he applies a generous white base, pencils in eyebrows and beauty marks, does up his lips, and finishes off the costume with a powdered wig (which he powders, hilariously). Partly because of the making-up bit, and partly because much of the vocal part lies in a falsetto range, the effect is a bit like Dame Edna after five tequila jello shots. Peter Tsantis is a creditable singer and his rendition is not coincidentally very singerly. He has exceptional technique and despite all the noisy racket he's required to make didn't appear to be straining. The problem is that without the sense of geniune strain, the sense of genuine madness flies out the window. Other interpreters of the role (Roy Hart or Julius Eastman), have voices that seem literally to come apart as the King's reality comes apart. With Tsantis, I wasn't on the edge of my seat. (Although that may also have been due to the unwelcome narration from the man behind me who felt obliged to fill in long and goofy explanations for the benefit of his young girlfriend: "Now, you know which one's the cello, right? ... Oh, this bit's from the Messiah! Do you know the Messiah?" I turned around at one point to ask him if he'd like to step outside to fight, but came face to face with a waitress presenting him and his girl-teen with an enormous Lobster Crostini plate. Don't go to the Poisson Rouge if you like your voyeurism without the annoying chatter.)

If you're familiar with the piece, you know that the King has to emerge from under the screen at some point because there's the bit about him breaking the violinist's violin. He does eventually come out, appearing onstage in the flesh for the first time. This ought to be a big moment and it is. The screen is simply a backdrop now, and we're in the familiar world of theater. The King dutifully smashes the violin. But then, oddly, Steier has him return behind the screen, and finish the rest of the piece from there. In retrospect, the entrance onstage appears not to have been an interesting staging choice (shattering the YouTube illusion and replacing it with real-time theater), but merely the shortest way to get the King and the violin close enough for the one to beat the other into submission. The problem is that having once tossed out the YouTube conceit, it makes no sense to have the singer step behind the screen again. Once we know that the Wizard of Oz is the guy behind the curtain, he has to stop doing the schtick behind the curtain and come out and face his audience like a man. Or a queen.

There was also very little ... no, I'm gonna go with no attempt made to integrate what was happening on stage with Randolph Stow's lyrics, which are thoughtful, bizarre and strong, and which will contradict what you're doing if you're not careful. (Why would this particular King, dressing up as a woman, suddenly start raving about Esther, his queen? Whoops!) I'm all about artistic license, but if there's no attempt to align what's going on action-wise with what the King is saying, it becomes Eight Mumbles for Some Sick Sonofagun, which isn't half as interesting as what's printed in the score.

I'd still tell you to go see it, but that was the only performance. Next time.

Cav & Pag at the Lyric

2009-03-29T05:23:00.000-07:00

My understanding of the philosophical method consists of a line of inquiry introduced to me by Mark Johnston, a Princeton professor, in 2001. To avoid the trap of making assumptions that anything in this world is simply the way it is, we imagine ourselves instead as outside observers coming fresh to the world and finding it strange. Beaming into the upper balconies at the Lyric what, Lord have mercy, would aliens have made of Cav and Pag?

Having off-beat or at least against-the-grain tastes regarding opera (what is avant-garde opera anyway?) I spent the entire concert thinking about aliens instead of opera. What could save Cavelleria rusticana? I imagined each of the singers doubled by massive, larger-than-life helium puppets who wobbled and bobbled behind them, sporting similar hair-dos and mimicking their ground-level melodramas from 20 ft up in the air. The problem is that Italian verismo is inherently funny, or ought to be -- what is realistic opera? -- and when you suppress that fact it's bound to gum up the wheels of production. The Road Runner is irresistible when he races around to Rossini because cartoons resist seriousness by design; refusing to take opera seriously, cartoonishness starts to get at the essence of operaness. Which is another way of saying cartoons are a lot like opera.

Carlo Ventre (Turridu) has all kinds of quintessentially tenorish moments in Cav, flinging his torso around like Darth Vader taking an acting class, and Dolora Zajick weaving in small circles around him like a tugboat... There was one particularly bad/awesome bit of acting in the first act. Dolora is instructed to grab hold of Carlo's jacket (lying on the back of a chair) to prevent his departure, but Carlo/Turridu violently intercepts her hand, precipitating dramatic tension. Instead, what happened was that Dolora made for the jacket, but Carlo missed his cue. Operatic singers aren't hired for their improv skills, and Dolora, unsure what to do, simply froze in an awkward "I'm gonna grab that jacket" position for about 10 seconds till Carlo caught on.

The libretto doesn't help the situation. It's high-stakes from the moment go with everyone hollering about "Traitor!" and "Vendetta!" so there's really nowhere to go.

Mascagni's music is a great example of the fact that opera is the mother of film. Cav is basically a soundtrack. Is it a coincidence that the opening scene of the opera, an extensively choreographed people-bustling-about the town square sort of thing (I love watching singers try to act the "silent" conversation onstage), so resembles the opening sequence of Walt Disney's Beauty and the Beast? This particular scene is also a lot like the complicated goofing off that precedes the entrance of the magician/uncle guy who presents Clara with her Nutcracker doll in the Tchaikovsky ballet. But at least in Beauty and the Beast and The Nutcracker the protagonists are attempting to escape the trauma of the everyday (in Beauty's case, into an less provincial, more individualistic habitus, and for Clara into a genuinely strange and hallucinogenic dreamscape). Saturday night at the Lyric the audience was trying to escape into the play.

Look: I'm a minority. If everyone felt the way I do about operatic staging the Lyric would be dead and gone and the people who donate to the Lyric, if not dead and gone themselves, would have to give their money to, oh, UNICEF. Which, of course, would make the world a better place, but who's paying attention. The huge surprise of the evening was that, made to stay against my will for the second half of the program by David Bashwiner (fellow U-of-C'er and film komponist), Pagliacci was absolutely brilliant, the best bit of comic acting I've ever seen in an operatic production. And, unless I traveled on an alien spaceship Saturday night, it apparently happened at the Lyric Opera of Chicago.

Where and when it was meant to be set was lost on me (and on the singers I interviewed afterward). I'm guessing some kind of fairground/playground on the outskirts of interwar Italy... And I had one flashback to a recent Three Tenors broadcast during Pagliacci's big aria. Otherwise, the Commedia players (the Lyric hired first-rate professional clowns, but the opera people absolutely held their own next to them) in the second act erect a flimsy carnival stage and proceed to entertain the hell out of the townspeople. Frumpy Nedda looks very hot in her Colombina outfit (which includes an enormous blue wig), and I audibly BAAH-HAH'ed when Canio, the creepy old man who woos her, opens his mouth and ends up hemming like a donkey.

If you can get in at intermission, do it.

How Many Kinds of Artist

2008-12-28T18:12:00.000-08:00

Matt Morgan, are you out there in cyberspace? You need to know how profoundly happy I am to have discovered George Steiner, and my gratitude to you (as the intermediary who arranged that discovery) runs deep. I had started to think that religious feeling meant academic suicide. God + academia = lost cause. But lo! As it turns out, one can turn to academia, and, in the best of cases, do it precisely as a theologian.

But there's more! And more important: George knows about art.

Art is life. For me. I'm not trying to be pretentious. And here's how I know I'm not being pretentious: it's a drawback. It doesn't win friends.

I can't stop acting. Or, can't ever make the feeling of acting go away. It doesn't mean I'm faking the whole way through life. It's just how it is. If I were a book binder I would be binding up things all over the house and if I raised butterflies for a living I would sleep in butterfly gauze and dream butterfly dreams.

George says that all art is an attempt at communication (not necessarily communicating, but definitely trying). And why? The dread of solitude. "The rapture of Narcissus is, tautologically, that of suicide." Ack! We who need other people need art because we're hopeless at talking to other people. We'll try anything. But whoa there! Some people who need art ... don't need people. {??!!}

Yes, George. There are! "The notion of a poet writing verse in a private tongue or destroying what he has written, of a painter refusing to show any canvas to an eye other than his own, of a composer 'performing' his score in mute, purely inward audition, is conceivable" but unlikely. You're implying it doesn't happen, George, but it does! (George says that Gogol burned the second half of Dead Souls out of fear of the "other's intrusion." I'm doubting.)

There is another kind of artist, the kind I am not, the kind I envy with all my heart. How many artists I know crave aloneness and lavish their attention on the gritty pleasure of making. Not making for. These are the good little players who as four-year-olds sat all day around tiny creations arranging, enacting, dissecting. I spent my childhood terrorized by lonesomeness. I have a terrible imagination.

When I'm afraid of isolation I drive around all night to be surrounded by other people driving. I'll sit in an airport to see people walking around.

George, as far as I know, you've written a lot of books. Which means you probably spend a lot of time alone too.

At least I have the endless vault of cyberspace to project my woes into. What would I do without you?

Lipstick on a Pig

2008-10-02T08:37:00.001-07:00

Sarah Palin needs to run back to her ice floes and Iron Dog races. Let's just enjoy the thought of that ...

"Lipstick on a Pig"

Written and directed by David Bashwiner, performed by David Bashwiner, Majel Connery, Richard Whaling and an unknown party; video and editing by Ben Kolak.

The Olympics: A Review

2008-08-25T06:54:00.000-07:00

I have always had a creeping intuition (the devil that sits on my left shoulder, or maybe it's the one that's lodged in my bellybutton; I think the OCD devil sits on the left shoulder -- anyway, I forget, there are so many of them) that something is wrong with the Olympics, or that something was BECOMING wrong with them. Now, don't misunderstand. I love the Olympics. So much so that, not being a TV owner myself, I have had to wrangle forced TV sittings out of certain best friends during these last couple of weeks (their generosity should not go unnoted).

But here's the thing: I don't watch other sports. At all. But there is something about the Olympics that goes beyond the merely sportly. The Olympics is myth: Olympia! Gymnastic feats! Wrestling three-headed dogs! Breaking down the gates of Hades with your discus and javelin power tools! The Olympics is not about courts and scoreboards and whether the female volleyball players' tankinis are actually just bikinis. It's about pure and simple might; domination. Outrun that guy. Jump higher. Pull a ridiculous extra fly stroke out of nowhere and beat your opponent by a millisecond. It's about the simple feats that the human body (the BEAUTIFUL human body, O Lord) can accomplish without brand name gear in bare feet with bleeding sockets and foaming mouth. So, now, when I see badminton become a part of the Olympics, let alone basketball (excuse me, but don't they have enough TV coverage already for chrissake?) the chagrin starts to set in. My purist's event has a dirty strain in it and it's called organized sports.

Now, my friend Laura has a boyfriend named John who is full of chagrin. And what I'm about to post here, well, these are not my words, but sadly, the words I want to have written but couldn't put into terms concise and biting enough for my taste and so, twice sadly, left them unwritten. Here's John on the Olympics:

"The Rules: only those sports that measure strength or endurance or both are allowed. The use of simple mechanical devices is okay (bicycle, rowing shell). Any sports that simulate warfare are acceptable (boxing, taikwondo). No sports that are too cool (like snowboarding, moto-cross, demolition derby or whatever they had in Turino). No ball sports.

Tennis. No. Didn't we just have Wimbeldon? What the hell is the Olympics for?

Table tennis: Obviously no, unless the players are too drunk to drive legally. Then it's okay.

Volleyball: Only if they play the top gun soundtrack on repeat. Otherwise, no.

Diving: Only if the contest is about how high you can jump from and survive.

Equestrian: The horse deserves a medal, too, if not more so.

Field hockey: Only if they're hot and wear plaid skirts. And that includes the men. All field hockey players wear skirts. No sweating allowed. Attractiveness counts. Otherwise, no.

Waterpolo: No. too . . . weird.

Basketball: No. Kobe Bryant gets enough attention.

Synchronized swimming: Come on. Let's be realistic about this.

Sailing: The boats should be equipped with cannons.

Trampoline: See 'Diving', but in reverse.

Softball: No. Can you imagine someone working his ass off to become a male Olympic softball player? Sounds like a Will Ferrell / Ben Stiller movie. (It's a women-only event, but I like the image. Still a ball sport, so not allowed).

Badminton: Absolutely not. I don't care how much the Chinese love the sport. Even if the shuttlecock or whatever isn't precisely a ball, it's close enough.

Canoeing: Only the events that don't go downstream. Why not dump them out the back of a plane? Flat water events only.

Handball: Are you kidding? Is it restricted to six-year olds? No.

Baseball: No way. We always lose anyway. Embarrassing."

A man after my own heart. Thanks, John. You said it exactly.

Back to the Past

2008-06-06T15:28:00.001-07:00

Readers, I love you.

Thanks for your support, glib jokes, criticism, threats and angry rejoinders. Happy to be back for the summer in Chicago, where no one thinks I'm Norwegian, I'll be posting on the Opera Cabal main page.

I'm suffering for content, people ...

2008-05-28T01:25:00.000-07:00

Seventh grade was probably the worst year of my life. All my fears -- about everything -- originated in junior high school. Among other absurd things I wish I could forget about this period of time was a class I took called Reading. I have no recollection, apart from the obvious, of what we accomplished in this class. But I do remember that on Mondays we were expected to show up with a book, any book, and to sit and read silently for the duration of class. Much as, as an adult, I would now consider this, like required nap time, to be a class sent by God, it's really shocking how hard it was for our teacher to organize an activity as progressive as silent reading when it involved a bunch of 12-year-olds. First of all, after a weekend of who knows what you do when you're twelve, what preteen could remember to bring a book to school (like, where do you even find those)? And did she really expect 25 kids to sit quietly for an entire hour? It's not that it was an inherently bad idea. It's just that ... IT WAS AN INHERENTLY BAD IDEA! If you've been a junior high teacher for longer than about nine minutes, you would know that this would never work. And sure enough, after the inaugural Monday silent read session, during which three or four kids got kicked out and probably half the rest of us given detention, she probably should have taken another angle, like, I dunno, reading out loud. But she stuck to her guns and made herself and us miserable for the rest of the year.

I wasn't one of the bad kids in the class, but I was the kid who never remembered, not even once, to take a book to class, and every Monday afternoon I had to walk up to this teacher's desk, look at my shoes, express my regret, and ask to go back to my locker to retrieve the book that I, along with the rest of my fellow students, would then not read for the next hour. This teacher did not understand my forgetfulness, and her displeasure with me for some reason made it more and more unlikely every week that I would ever actually remember to do what I was supposed to do. Negative reinforcement? Doesn't work.

One Monday about five or six weeks into the term, I was so mortified at having yet again neglected to bring my f-ing book that I decided, rather than announcing what I'd done, I would instead PRETEND I that I did have a book in my lap, and I would pretend for one, long hour to read it. Acting quickly, behind my desk I scrunched up my legs into a tight ball, placed my imaginary book in front of them, and stuck my face down close to my legs and the "book" and didn't look up for a second. I'm not sure if I really believed this would work, but it certainly would have been easier to pull off from the back of the class since there at least I would have been hidden by the level of activity going on in front of me. Unfortunately, in my desperation to become a better student I had chosen a permanent seat in the first row of the class. Still, for awhile it seemed to be working except that the kid next to me couldn't control his laughter. I calmly scanned from one side of my legs to the other and tried to look engrossed. The thought crossed my mind that I wasn't actually sure I could stare at my legs for an hour, but then I realized I'd been found out. How, I don't know, but I looked up, and the teacher was staring at me with the kind of irritation that if I remember correctly is common among long-since faded and resentful people who regret having chosen to work with children. She asked me, "Majel. What are you doing?"

The reason I'm telling you this story is because it actually relates to our work here at Den Norske Opera. We had our dress rehearsal last night, and while I won't say it was a complete and utter ruin, Christopher came damn near close to walking out even before the curtain. For weeks he's been telling the folks on the technical team, all Norwegians, that he needed to see the English and Norwegian translations they were were planning to use as subtitles for the libretto, and insisting they do a trial run with the subtitle screens on the backs of the chairs in the audience BEFORE THE DRESS REHEARSAL. The problem with a brand new opera house is that all the technology is also brand new, and nobody has any idea how to get it to work. The orchestra pit wasn't even built when we moved into the stage space, and people are continually falling off the steps into the pit. The curtain stopped halfway across the stage the first time we used it. There aren't even any house lights. When you're in the audience and you need to see anything, they have to turn on a big halogen bulb that could burn your eyes out, and that's suspended from the ceiling on a big power cord. No one seems to know where anything is, or even if they did know, how to do the right thing with it. Poor Paul, the stage designer, asked five weeks ago for a few patches to be mended in the wood panels on the back wall of the set. It's still not done and one day before the premiere, it's not looking like it'll get done. Last night, the poor fool running the subtitles kept blowing all the big lines by getting there too fast. They have 24 hours.

Descending into L'Orfeo

2008-05-20T03:52:00.001-07:00

Orpheus loves Eurydice. Eurydice doesn't love Orpheus. He pines and finally, he woes her. On their wedding day, she's gathering flowers and stumbles into a nest of vipers, and like all dead Greeks, Eurydice descends into Hell. But Orpheus, no quitter he, suffers from the force of such denial of her death that he goes to the portal of Hell, where, having no money, he charms free passage by singing Charon a song. Down in the land of the dead, Orpheus softens the heart of Persephone,* who persuades Hades to allow Eurydice to go with Orpheus back up to earth, provided he can prevent himself from looking at her on the way up. As in all stories with an impossible object, Orpheus fails.

The variations of the Orpheus myth are legion, especially when it comes to Orpheus's big blunder. According to Plato, Orpheus was right to doubt that Eurydice accompanied him back to earth -- Hades had actually sent something back with him that sounded like Eurydice, but it wasn't actually the real thing. Virgil's completely unsympathetic telling has Orpheus actually making it back to earth without turning around. But then he forgets that Eurydice has two more steps to go and loses her just at the moment she comes into the sunlight. And in Aeschylus, Orpheus's OWN death is about as bad as it gets. First, he's torn to pieces, and then, if that weren't bad enough, his decapitated head, floating gently down the river Hebrus, keeps ... on ... singing. GAG!

And let's not forget the variations on the ending. Though Joseph Kerman famously (well, if you're a musicologist, famously) found Monteverdi's ending a bit Hollywood (Orpheus and his Dad, Apollo, ascend to heaven to some of the most mechanical and undramatic music Monteverdi ever composed) but Gluck's he thinks is just downright offensive (Orpheus, having in a strange twist decided to commit suicide over his wife's death, is suddenly told that the whole thing was a fake and Eurydice simply wakes up).

Christopher Alden's staging of L'Orfeo (the Monteverdi version, the earlier version) works for me. But if you get online and look for reviews of past productions at Glimmerglass and Leeds, they're all scathing. People hated the production. Even people I know and love hated it. And believe me, I understand why. Christopher is avant-garde to the nines. His characters smoke and drink cocktails on stage; they wear sexy outfits; and probably worst of all, there's oftentimes not much of a relationship between the libretto and his dramatic conception. Sometimes, there's almost none. Forget what you thought you knew about important climactic moments. The arrival of the messenger who informs Orfeo that Euridice has died? Nah, she doesn't arrive. She's been sitting on the sidelines right in the same room with Orfeo. She didn't even see it happen. And Orfeo's ascent to heaven? Yeah, actually, he's just gonna sit brooding pathetically in a chair center stage, until the last blackout. Oh, and Euridice is on stage with him. I mean, she's dead but ... she's still there.

Christopher paints in broad strokes. It's the difference between plot, what happens blow-by-blow (which, in this opera, we already know and DON'T need to be reminded of) and drama. And by drama I mean stuff happening. You're sitting on a park bench and two people are having a strangely animated conversation. You can't hear the words, but you're watching anyway. It's drama. There's a car crash. It looks horrible. You try to look away, but you can't: it's drama. I've gone to a lot of theater in the last couple of months where I didn't understand a word, and couldn't have described the plot to you if you'd hung a brownie sundae on a string in front of me and begged me to. But drama is the STUFF, people! You don't need language. It's better with, obviously. But that's not where the tension or the electricity or the bodies or the tears are, and to all you libretto people out there I'm sorry that I'm a slobbering disciple of Joseph Kerman but that's how it is with me.

So, what happens if you take plot out of Orfeo and add drama?

Well, Act I of Monteverdi's L'Orfeo basically boils down to a bunch of people hanging out together in a really weird looking room having a really weird looking party. Like all parties that are worth their weight, there are some drinks, and partial nudity. Period costumes are boring; here it's more like half and half: half Greek, and half something else. Renaissance ruffs, leopard print tights, biker gear, army-navy supply store paraphernalia ...

So far so good. Now, Orfeo loves Euridice. But isn't it a little strange that he had to pursue her for so long? And isn't it a little strange that after refusing him for so long Euridice would suddenly just ... change her mind? So why don't we just state the obvious. Orfeo is a complete obsessive! He should've gotten over her a LONG time ago! And Euridice has problems. In fact, she's depressed. It's not a healthy relationship.

In Act II Euridice leaves to hang out with her friends while Orfeo stays with the boys for awhile. It's a bachelor party. Everybody gets tipsy, they take off some clothes. And then the messenger shows up with bad news.

But come on. We all know this play. Euridice doesn't actually have to die; how boring. Better yet, let's duct tape her to the wall and call that "Dead" and then draw one enormous line down the center of the stage and call one side "Hell" and the other side "Not Hell." Orfeo can't cross the line.

And he pulls out a hoodie so he won't be tempted to look at anybody.

Anyway, you see how things begin to get a little out of hand. And of course there's more. Apollo walks around the entire show with a microphone pointed at Orfeo to record everything he sings, bootlegging all of the big musical moments. When Orfeo puts Caronte to sleep, the cast cheers and paper dollars start falling out of the sky like he'd won the lottery.

The difference between me and the other REAL reviewers out there is that I see no harm in these things. Moreover, I challenge YOU to come up with a challenging reading of a billion year old myth, one that engages with the same old basic tale and wrestles something strange and unexpected out of it. It's an experiment, people. It won't hurt you. Who wants to see the same sappy story again? Give me opera that goes out on a limb, or give me the death of opera. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: it WILL happen.

*Incidentally, it's a pretty a good thing that Persephone happened to be serving her yearly six-month sentence down in Hell when Orpheus arrived with his sob story. But wait a minute. If Persephone is in Hell, and you can ask Edith Hamilton if you don't believe me, then it has to be winter upstairs. But if it had been winter when Orpheus and Eurydice tied the knot they wouldn't have been zipping around in flowering fields waiting to run right into a big, fat snake den. Has anyone ever noticed this? PERSEPHONE SHOULDN'T EVEN BE THERE! HA HA, OVID!

**Lest the excellency of the photographs I post here deceive you, these are not mine, but George Mott's, taken during preparations for the opera at Glimmerglass in 2007. You can see more pictures of the opera on Christopher's website, which is where I found them.

The 17th of Maj

2008-05-17T03:24:00.000-07:00

Today, May 17th (or Maj, in Norwegian) is National Day in Norway. It's a holiday with only one problem. National *what* day? National Pleather Day? But like all holidays that don't begin and end with santas or bunnies, the complexity of something like an actual object of celebration isn't really what's important. Just stick to the basics: Engage in group behavior. Beer is involved on a massive scale. Eat as much as possible; don't sleep until it's over. And in Norway, bring your karaoke machine.

Oslo is small enough that the whole town turns itself into a college campus overnight. I was out till three a.m. yesterday having the night of my life and fully intended on getting up at 9a with the rest of my Norwegian ingroup to make the trek down to the palace where every 17th of Maj the royal family stands and waves from the royal balcony at passers-by. But my baser instincts kicked in and instead, waking two hours too late for Champagne Breakfast (the first event of the day), I settled down snug and warm to watch Channel 3. Channel 3 involves a young woman seemingly from Southern California, but speaking perfect Norwegian, sitting in a director's chair looking at a single-view camera. It's a very simple show. She tosses her bleached hair and wriggles in barely-there clothing, giggling and shouting unholy commentary into the camera for hours nonstop. It's like spring break for a party of one. I'm probably the only person who watches this channel. It's terrible.

My window looks out on the main street. Grown men and women are staggering around singing drinking songs and waving flags. A few older people are peering out over their balconies with fear in their eyes. National Day would be better known as National Blow-off Day. Or National Regression Day. I thought I might do some laundry.

But first, a quiz. For one point: can you point to the Norwegian flag? Bonus question: which flag isn't the Norwegian flag, and what is it?

Stockholm

2008-05-11T14:38:00.000-07:00

What's blue and white and red all over?

The next new and improved stage piece for Opera Cabal?

Maybe! But until we can afford this guy, this sculpture garden will have to remain the absolute best thing I saw in Stockholm. Who can explain what is going on here?

In the same way that Strindberg for me wins on a basic man-to-man level over Ibsen, against the coherent and striking solidity of Stockholm, Oslo is conspicuously lacking. In fact, a few days ago I was sitting with a brimming latte (which this particular cafe puts into bowls so that you actually have to pick the whole thing up with both hands to sip it) and the case of Oslo suddenly became clear to me. I figured it out, as an old pal of some of ours used to say.

I had just met my first depressed Norwegian. His English wasn't great; he works with some kind of dissident group to return power to the working class in Norway, not that they ever had it. Norway itself, on the whole, is still new to the game of self-rule, he reminded me (or was I only learning this for the first time -- yikes!), having only been separated from Sweden as late as 1905. I told him I worked at the new opera house downtown and he gave me a shattering look. The government is trying to build a small New York City in downtown Oslo, he said, and the new opera house is part of that. "Norway is the largest protectorate of the American empire."

Unlike Stockholm, which felt grounded and self-confident, Oslo lacks its own basic self-concept. It doesn't know who it is.

I spent my day in Stockholm by the harbor with no inclination to leave and explore the rest of the city. Lotta water in Stockholm.

The funny thing about this beautiful part of the world is that it must really and truly be ab-so-lut-ely horrendous here in the winter. And now that the sun's out .... How else do you explain sunbathing on a train platform?

Or this?

But on a more serious note, Stockholm is home to a game I've never seen played before, but which with your help will be played in Hyde Park, Chicago this summer. It's a blend of croquet (it requires croquet equipment and semi-formal dress) and jousting, and it's played piggy-back.

Find a level, grassy area. Choose two opposing teams with at least four members on each team. Between the four players of each team, the two lighter players should each choose a friend to mount. The lighter player receives a croquet mallet.

Next, rush the opposing team and swing your croquet mallet at any balls you see.

If a player from one team hits a ball, rush after him and his mount to prevent the ball from going through your team's hoop.

Run this way and that.

Eventually someone will fall down, and you start the next point.

Nichols park, people. May 31st. Be there or be square.

It's the 13-and-half hour rule

2008-05-10T13:34:00.000-07:00

Hanging out here in Oslo on the set of L'Orfeo, Christopher Alden's third production of the show after stagings in Leeds & Glimmerglass, I'm feeling a little like the village idiot. Unlike the rest of the production team, I don't have duel citizenship in multiple European countries. My dad isn't a shipbuilding tycoon. I didn't just cut a CD. The cast is also confused about me. The Norwegians think I'm Norwegian and keep asking why I'm using this weird American-sounding accent. The Italians are convinced I'm supposed to be choreographing them.

But rehearsals are at a standstill because for the second time since my arrival in Norway, the country is having a national holiday. It's a little bit like Christmas followed by Easter. By the time I leave, it will have had a third. So it's more like Christmas followed by Easter ... followed by Christmas. Finding myself with another three-day weekend on my hands I briefly considered taking a plane to Iceland. It's closer than you'd think. But that thought was forged in the fires of the adventurous side of my brain, and the flabby, panicky side of my brain immediately gave a fearful little kick. So instead, tonight I sleep in Gothenburg, which sounds like Gotham, but is just beyond the border between Norway and Sweden on the Swedish side.

On my way to my hotel room tonight, I paused hungrily outside my next door neighbors' room where their breakfast tray hadn't yet been cleared away. It was close to 10:30 at night. It looked like they'd eaten some bacon and eggs. But the roll basket was more or less untouched, or so I gathered. I grabbed a roll. It's a little crusty but what the hell.