opera

OperaHub’s Christmas Dinner

I’M late with a report on OperaHub‘s recent production of Hindemith’s The Long Christmas Dinner, based on a libretto by Thornton Wilder. I haven’t caught up with OperaHub in a while, whose youthful, witty, intelligent, and savvy spirit manages to make opera pretty damn cool and accessible. Their productions are free (not to say they don’t require your support) and, perhaps as a consequence of that, fleeting. Running typically just for a weekend, their shows fill small houses with local opera geeks and kids alike. These are small shows, but each feels like a triumph and is put on with impeccable standards.

The Long Christmas Dinner is pushed along quickly by the rapid succession of births and deaths in Wilder’s Libretto. Sometimes light, though not very comic, the opera traces an upper middle class Midwestern family dynasty through the generations at, as the title suggests, one long Christmas Dinner. It’s actually a lot of Christmas dinners squeezed into one. We’re just not privy to what happens during the rest of the year.

The opera is kind of a philosophical one liner in its juxtaposition of holiday pleasantries and talk of the weather with heavy stuff like life & death–a storkish nanny delivers new babies to the dining room in an old pram and aging characters eventually make their way to a doorway that symbolizes death. A son eventually takes the place of his mother as the elderly, absent-minded diner and once dead grandparents return to the dining room in new costumes as grandchildren. There is of course more than a little tragedy over the 90 years of Bayard family history the opera traces, but it’s clear that the libretto’s chief concern is not infant mortality or young men going off to war and dying, but the stifling cycle of a wealthy Midwestern family and it’s father’s-shoes-filling sons, endless dinner table conversations, and the role of the family business (simply “the firm”) as a kind of invisible guest of honor at the dinner table.

The characters are, in fact, obsessed with time. While most of the recitative is pleasantries about the weather, most of the actual singing, to a score that stomps along with punches of atonality, is introspection on how long things are or have been.

Eventually, new generations break what seemed might be an endless cycle. Some seek to escape their fate, though not necessarily with triumph or success. Some even seem to have moments when they see beyond their limited temporal perspective and get a sense of the sort of time lapse view that we have. And sometimes the world outside of the Bayard’s little comfortable kingdom intervenes.

But despite all of this, there is no end for the Bayards, even though this particular ninety-year Christmas dinner might be finishing its final course, as the last occupants of an old house age towards that one particular dining room exit from which there’s no return. Turns out the family has simply set up shop in another town, where we can assume the forces of the libretto–death, tragedy, birth, repetition, and a little rebellion–can begin a new cycle.

The Midsummer What?

Highest props to the formidable Gil Rose to picking up a production of Tippet’s Midsummer Marriage left in the dust by Opera Boston’s demise and putting it on in a not unambitious semi-staging at Jordan Hall. I’ve long maintained that Gil Rose and his band, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, is the one classical (perhaps even just the one musical) outfit in town that really succeeds in doing what they like and making it work. They set an example for what the modern orchestra (regardless of their repertoire) should look like through everything from their programming to their website to their record label and releases.

All that said, BMOP’s music can be difficult and alienating and a three-hour semi-staged production of an opera with a libretto that’s far beyond even operatic standards of obscurity is no exception. Without a production to help digest the narrative, Midsummer Marriage was particularly difficult to absorb, even if one can rely on its thematic similarities to The Magic Flute. Program or liner notes will tell you that the opera is teaming with Jungian references, I’m of the mind that, for these symbols to work, they need to have some kind of visual representation in the production.

What we did get was an impressive chorus squeezed onto Jordan Hall’s stage–something a medium-sized opera company probably couldn’t pull off as well. And a few performers who did their best to convey some level of performance from behind their music stands. Baritone David Kravitz as King Fisher lent comedy and wit in his role as the opera’s beguiled and frustrated patriarch. Sara Heaton’s (as Jenifer) precise soprano was a pleasure and Joyce Catle’s diva-like descension to the stage lifted the production up, at a time when the libretto had pushed itself into a particularly weird corner. Deborah Selig and Matthew Dibattista, as one of the opera’s pair of couples, had enough of a dynamic to carry us through several prolonged asides.

The orchestra shook the hall with bolts of mythological thunder, took center-stage during musical interludes (or “dances”), and carried Tippet’s expressionistic and programmatic score well. Some might disagree, but I could’ve taken the opera cut down to some kind of concert scale, where the music might’ve been easier to absorb and the libretto, slightly condensed, easier to ignore during its difficult parts.

Midsummer Dreamscapes: Boston Lyric Opera’s “Dream”

For their final production of an acclaimed season, the BLO has given us a lucid Dream. That is, Benjamin Britten’s adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As much as Britten and librettist Peter Pears left the story pretty much intact, the opera is much more interested in the fairy world, and after that the amateur stage of Shakespeare’s rustic players, than the Athenian court. And it’s here that the BLO (particularly set designer John Conklin, as it is in its many sets and scenery pieces that this production is most distinctive) took it and ran. We don’t get the typical fertile forest imagery of Shakespeare’s greenworld, but a psychedelic dreamscape where giant fluorescent neon circles descend from above the dark stage, so it glows like a black light poster. Some of the constantly changing scenery is based on children’s artwork gathered in a BLO outreach program and some resembles the trippy iconography of Salvador Dalí. Metallic orbs, different moons, spray-painted murals, and the Thonet No. 14 chairs of post-impressionist cafés float around director Tazewell Thompson’s stage.

Boston Lyric Opera Britten Midsummer Nights Dream

Nadine Sierra (Tytania) and Andrew Shore (Bottom) with members of the PALS Children’s Chorus (Erik Jacobs)

Some have criticized the scenic imagery of this Dream to be a little muddled, despite some unifying symbols that appear in different incarnations throughout the opera. Well, at least one symbol; the moon, which is really convenient in signifying the night, dreams, and fertility. Of course, the dreamscape isn’t just in the sets. Tytania is sexed up like a Barbara Eden fantasy and Oberon, with his leather vest and boots, looks like he belongs in a very different kind of fantasy. Just as Shakespeare’s three slowly converging plotlines begin to separate, Britten’s music (well played here by David Agnus and band) clearly demarcates the plots and characters, allotting the most fanciful motifs for the fairy world. He saved a special fanfare for Puck, a purely spoken role poetically played here by Karim Sulayman. Although he gets around a lot, I’ve always thought of Puck as clearly a citizen of the fairy world, but Britten made him so musically unique that, despite being subservient to Oberon, he’s like Leonardo DiCaprio in Inception; he’s the master of the dream world.

On the other side of this dreamscape is a hilarious rendering of the rustics’ production of Pyramus and Thisbe, which gets a long treatment at the end of the opera. I suppose it’s there, in a way, to wake us up. But even their rehearsal exits in the psychedelic dream space. Huge set pieces labeled “TREE,” etc. are wheeled out mimicking Bottom and company’s issues with the illusions of theater.

Since most of the play is here, and the language is all Shakespeare’s, the opera feels a lot like a production of the play and I think I’d actually like to see these sets used in a theatrical production. They’re so far from the plain Jane stock backdrop scenery we see in too many operas. A particularly large cast, mostly out-of-towners, act and sing well, channeling not only Britten’s music, but the original text’s characters. Acting is something this production does exceedingly well. Highlights include Nadine Sierra’s Tytania, John Gaston’s Oberon, Karim Sulayman’s Puck, and Susanna Phillips’ Helena.

Boston Lyric Opera Britten Midsummer Nights Dream

Chad A. Johnson (Lysander), Heather Johnson (Hermia), Susanna Phillips (Helena), Matthew Worth (Demetrius), Ann McMahon Quintero (Hippolyta), Darren K. Stokes (Theseus), Andrew Shore (Bottom), and T. Steven Smith (Peter Quince) (Erik Jacobs)

Sex and the City (of Rome): BLO’s “Agrippina”

Handel’s “Agrippina” describes the title character’s attempt to install her son Nero as emperor, or at least heir, to her husband (and uncle) Claudius’ throne. You might remember something similar from the last episode of I, Claudius (and Claudius the God), but Handel’s librettist Cardinal Vincenzo Grimani had his own take on things and it certainly isn’t one of a scholar or even a novelist. Grimani casts these historical figures in a hilarious comic light, one that the Boston Lyric Opera‘s current production (through the 22nd) teases every last laugh out of. Director Lillian Groag, as well as the rest of the cast and crew, have blended riotous comedy with exquisitely beautiful music and high production and musical standards. As many have said, technically speaking, it strays far from being a historically informed performance, but perhaps in its spirit it is more historically accurate than most period performance.

Agrippina (soprano Caroline Worra who, in addition to rich powerful arias, brought a lot to her recitative), a femme fatale empress who sleeps with a gun under her pillow, hears false news that Claudius has died at sea and quickly moves to put her faux-hawked man-child of a son Nero (countertenor David Trudgen, with a piercing voice he pushed into the upper ranges–the role is historically for male sopranos) in the throne. Just as she enlists the assistance of her clowny freedmen Pallas (David McFerrin) and Narcissus (Jose Alvarez), who both have the hots for her, Claudius returns safely thanks to a heroic rescue by the boyish officer Otho (countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, with a sweet, soft, and wavering voice) whom Claudius has named his heir as a reward.

But, Otho is a lover not an emperor, and has his eyes set on Poppea (soprano Kathleen Kim, who delivered an outstandingly acted comic performance along with her deeply colored voice–characteristics that match the mostly fun and lighter music Handel gave the role). Nero and Claudius feel perfectly comfortable with power and Poppea and most of the plot is centered around Poppea’s bed after Agrippina manipulates her into being the crux of a plan to ensure Nero is named heir. This is where things get funny and the slapstick really kicks in. There’s even a ’round the bed chase!

Nero/Nerone (David Trudgen) (Jeffrey Dunn for BLO)

John Conklin’s set (originally designed for Glimmerglass Opera along with the beautiful and numerous costumes) features at least four cardboard cutout busts of a young Claudius that are swapped in and out, almost as if the real Claudius is on-stage watching these satiric historical reflections–even the dim dinner jacketed one of himself (bass-baritone Christian Van Horn). In one aria, Agrippina elegantly dances around three smaller ones.

Perhaps the biggest triumph in this production is making all the comedy work consistently, even though the opera itself moves quite slowly. As one expects, long arias (and other portions of music) are devoted to elongated character development where the narrative (mostly carried by the recitative) pauses. This leaves singers on stage with little to do but sing. Of course, that’s not bad, but in a production trying for comedy, the laughs are going to come from character interaction. Here, they’ve filled many of these comic holes in with props and gags; Poppea furiously brushes her hair, Claudius gets undressed and dressed again and has some trouble with his shoes, Agrippina generously pours drinks.

Agrippina is a comic romp of a crowd-pleaser that represents another great installment in the BLO’s solid season, which continues on April 29th with Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Poppea (Soprano Kathleen Kim) and Claudius/Claudio (Christian Van Horn) (Jeffrey Dunn for BLO)

Meta-Minimalism and OperaHub’s “The Four-Note Opera”

It’s long past the short run of OperaHub‘s production of Tom Johnson’s 1972 The Four-Note Opera, but I owe a few words to this hilarious show from a company that’s doing big things in the fringe opera scene. This production marked the close of their season, as they move to rename and re-orient themselves (and I presume expand) as Hub Collaborations, whose revised mission has not yet been stated. For a company that started four seasons ago by putting on Idomeneo in a church basement and most recently took over the BCA Plaza Theatre, they’re growing quickly and putting themselves on the map. Their shows have a youthful energy and edge–things that aren’t easy to come by in the opera world–without being awkwardly fringy. They’re setting an admirable example of young people coming together and making art happen with their sights set high and the talent and assiduity to match. I’m sure we can look forward to more and better work and an enlarged mission as they move forward under this new heading, so keep your eyes on their website for updates and shows.

Tom Johnson’s The Four-Note Opera is a one-hour spoof on the conventions of opera. You’d think anyone looking to parody the form would poke fun at its love triangles, stock characters, and plot holes, but Johnson takes a different route. Characters, hilariously performed by a cast that well over-shadowed some of the park and barking we sometimes even see on Boston’s main operatic stages, named only for their voices (a soprano, tenor, baritone, bass, and a mezzo-soprano) sing inner monologues complaining of a lack of stage time, boredom, and discomfort. These are inside jokes, but the humor is as accessible as YouTube’s literalized music videos.

Other than literally describing itself and putting back-stage antics on stage, Johnson’s libretto is about duration and the repetitious nature of opera. Entire arias are made up of nothing but counting off measures, bars, and variations. There are others about waiting and others about repetition. An entire aria surrounds a single strike of a woodblock. There are lyrics about note length; “I sing the short notes,” “I sing the long notes,” etc. In the last chorus the characters, all of whom have at this point died at the hands of the lethal and suicidal ribbon-dancing soprano (I’m not sure if OperaHub added the ribbon dancing or not), complain in tedious, but very funny repetition about their uncomfortable final positions and the length of the scene. (They’re the ones waiting for the show to end!) Sometimes it’s like the counting in Einstein on the Beach, but just not so heady.

As the opera’s title suggests, the score is Minimalist. At one point the harpsichordist (the only instrumentation) struck the same chord over and over. Even this seemed to be in parody. The music itself is nothing special and that’s probably why this worked so well for OperaHub. Fringe productions always suffer when they try to assemble a full and capable and well-rehearsed orchestra without the required payroll. What makes The Four-Note Opera so good, other than its laugh-out-loud comedy, is its answer to finding a Minimalist narrative that fits a Minimalist score, without being tiresomely abstract.

To complement Johnson’s brilliant pairing of Minimalist music with a comic and reductive meta-narrative, set designer Stephen Dobay pulled together a clever set that exposed a “back stage” area where singers warmed up, drank water, and thumbed through the score. Spikes were marked not only with tape, but with signs reading “spike.” Other signs labeled the harpsichord, the supertitle screen (although there were no supertitles). Boxy geometric sculptures sat on stage as icons to the Minimalist movement like the abstracted walls common to much contemporary opera scenery.

You should be sorry if you missed this, as OperaHub should be your first stop if you want to step away from the Theatre District warhorses.

Death in Atlantis: The BLO”s “Emperor of Atlantis”

Boston Lyric Opera is nailing it with its Opera Annex productions. Last year’s Turn of the Screw was a hugely anticipated smash hit and this season’s production of Victor Ullmann’s The Emperor of Atlantis is something of a surprise hit, continuing the record of sold-out runs. Obviously, the BCA’s Calderwood Pavilion doesn’t make quite as interesting an annex as Turn of the Screw‘s Park Plaza Castle, despite set designer Caleb Wertenbaker’s efforts with strings of work lights and sheets of white plastic to make the theater appear under construction, and the whole production ad hoc–like it is in some unheated South End warehouse. They’ve already meta-ized the whole idea of an annex production…but I’m sure constraints outside the scope of artistic merit limit location choice.

Although Emperor was an outstanding success, the first course of the night came off lukewarm. Commissioned to fill the hole Emperor, which only comes in at about an hour, leaves in a full program, Richard Beaudoin’s The After Image takes death much more seriously and much less embodied than the program’s feature. The music has chops, but the heady libretto, drawn from the texts of Rilke and the like, doesn’t mesh so well with the cabaret comedy of Emperor. Director David Schweizer attempted to connect Emperor with this story of a girl singing to a photograph of her dead father and the photo singing back, with a bit of performance art consisting mainly of mock ushers and some comic housekeeping announcements that did little but confuse people. What did work splendidly was The Emperor of Atlantis character of Death (Kevin Burdette) appearing on stage during the applause for After Image to applaud the cast with a superiority befitting of his character. The mock ushers returned again to tear down sheets of plastic, exposing Caleb Wertenbaker’s set that made the theater appear even more like an annex than it began as.

Soprano Kathryn Skemp (Soldier Girl), tenor Julius Ahn (Solider), tenor John Mac Master (Harlequin), and mezzo-soprano Jamie Van Eyck (Drummer) (Jeffrey Dunn for BLO)

Andrew Wilkowske gave a Chaplin-esque performance as a great dictator safely hidden away in several levels of well furnished scaffolding as he wages a bloody war against the world, giving orders over the phone. Frustrated with the Emperor’s “motorized, gas powered legions” Death, no longer able to keep up, calls it quits and refuses to let anyone die, leaving helpless legions of “living dead.” Here, they’re basically portrayed as contemporary zombies, sans the usual gore. (I guess Ullmann and his librettist Petr Kien beat that trend by about sixty years.) Death only breaks his strike when the Emperor agrees to sacrifice himself, thus ending his war.

Emperor was written while Ullmann and Kien were locked up inside Terezin concentration camp and, on top of that, they were sent to Auschwitz soon after trying to put it on. As much as the BLO has worked to produce the opera under its own merits, rather than as a piece of Holocaust art, it’s incredibly difficult to ignore its historical context. Satire can be a tricky thing to read, but the opera’s thesis on death as a relief from an in-between undead state is disturbing when one considers where it was thought up. The libretto has the walking dead begging for death, referring to it as holy law and as a means to teach life’s joy. “Thou shall not take the name of Death in vain” is even sung. When death does come, it’s lamely represented by a dozen or so zombies blowing out candles, but their undead state is gruesomely and simply represented by continual falling as they walk towards the front of the stage.

I don’t really know what to make of this and the other reviews I’ve read haven’t either. The opera’s satire is so complex that we wish death upon those it was initially unnecessarily thrust upon in war, through the noble act of the man solely responsible for that war. And the end of that war and the slaughters it would have caused, only come with the merciful slaughter of the undead. Where once the Emperor killed so many in malice that he provoked Death himself, his change of heart brings him to give the world back its death in an act of benevolence.

Burdette, Wilkowske, John Mac Master (as Death’s harlequin companion), and Jamie Van Eyck (as the pro-war Drummer and the Daughter in After-Image) all offered exceptionally well sung and acted performances. Vocal highlights included Kathryn Skemp as the Soldier Girl. The accessible music is more or less a pastiche of quotations of Weinmar-era cabaret, the relevant political anthems, Germanic themes, and Weill. It’s highly cinematic and was augmented here with some creative digital effects that played on the idea of technological warfare.

Tenor John Mac Master (Harlequin) and bass Kevin Burdette (Death) (Jeffrey Dunn for BLO)

Operatic Beastiality: Guerilla Opera’s “Heart of a Dog”

With the limited seasons of Boston’s operatic warhorses, it’s encouraging to know there’s such a thriving fringe scene practicing a form that, I think it can be fairly said, is in a much tougher spot today than the theater. That said, the fringe opera scene can be hit or miss. Though they usually require less in terms of production, contemporary operas are notoriously inaccessible for most audiences, while doing something everyone’s at least heard of–Marriage of Figaro or Carmen–takes a lot to keep the show going, and the audience awake, for 3+ hours. It’s usually the bands that miss mark in these productions and understandably so. The vocal talent is about and willing, as is the technical personnel, but assembling a decent orchestra on a shoestring budget…

The best fringe stuff is usually the small stuff, where they know what they can and can’t do; where they keep it intimate, relatively short, fresh, and focused. Guerilla Opera seems to have this figured out. Their currently revived first production, Heart of a Dog, by artistic director Rudolf Rojan, comes in at about 45 minutes, has a cast of 4 (plus your guide), and just 4 musicians. This is enough to make it work. If it was 3 hours long, I might have a different opinion.

I didn’t see the initial 2007 production, so I have no idea were this one stands compared to that, but Wikipedia has taught me enough about the source material; a 1925 novel by Mikhail Bulgakov satirizing the Communist Party’s ideological archetypal ideal of a Soviet citizen. In the book, a scientist transplants the pituitary gland and testicles of a man into a dog, thereby transforming the canine into a satirical man/bad house guest. The Soviet higher-ups didn’t take kindly to this satire, so the book wasn’t legally published until 1987. Since then, it’s been adapted into two operas; Rojan’s and one by Russian composer Alexander Raskatov, which saw a production in Amsterdam in June.

Aliana de la Guardia as the Dog in Guerilla Opera's Heart of a Dog

Aliana de la Guardia (as the Dog) (Anthony Scibilia Photography)

The arcane satire of Bulgakov’s text has become, I assume, something of a historical relic. Perhaps not entirely irrelevant, but now more relevant and appealing in its bizarre literal plot, rather than whatever politics and agenda that plot once served. So, like most good opera, Heart of a Dog departs from its source material, turning the dog-man into a slutty dog-soprano (Aliana de la Guardia)–a role that demands a lot of acting, with the audience only a few steps away in the intimate confines of the Boston Conservatory’s basement Zack Box Theater. Guardia plays it up well, and rather perversely, while attached to a simple Bunraku dog puppet for most of the show.

I know that the Amsterdam production of the other adaptation employed puppets as well (they also seem to share plays on silent movies), but here puppets make a lot of sense. I’m guessing Bulgakov’s dog has more in common with Candide than Frankenstein’s monster (and that would extend to the supporting characters), so character development is tossed aside here, but not so much for caricature, because there’s nothing to caricature but the original caricatures, as the opera also forgoes Bulgakov’s original satire. That leaves us with a meta-satire that eventually turns in on itself in a trippy last ten minutes where the characters are once more evacuated of themselves. Giving it away would just be a spoiler.

So what actually happens in the opera? More or less a series of perverse tableau in Halloweenish Kabuki makeup set to highly percussive and vaguely Japanese music that’s brilliantly physicalized in this extraordinarily well-acted production, even compared to a million-dollar Tremont Street production. It’s a prime and rare example of opera properly compounded with theater. The audience is guided through shifting curtained-off rooms around the stage space by a sort of sideshow barker, who delivers hilarious emitological pre-show banter. There’s something of a haunted house vibe, like we got in Sleep No More last year, but that doesn’t cheapen it.

Highlights include Ken O’Doherty’s (who steps out of from behind the band’s curtained partition to play one of the Dog’s suitors) athletic sax playing and Glorivy Arroyo’s (who sang in Tancredi last season) outstanding performance as the disapproving housekeeper. The acoustics of the space aren’t perfect, and with such a loud, percussive band in close range to both the singers and audience, the music can be overbearing at times, droning out some of the singers. Like Sleep No More, though on a much smaller scale, a roving audience presents some technical challenges, although here it’s due more to the timidity of the audience, rather than Sleep No More’s cutthroat get-to-the-front-of-the-line attitude. Heart of a Dog is smart, quirky contemporary opera with a lot of talent, creativity, and professionalism behind it, and I look forward to the Nicholas Vines opera in May. Props to Guerrilla Opera for sourcing music locally.

Guerilla Opera‘s Heart of a Dog runs through September 26th at the Boston Conservatory’s Zack Box Theater (8 The Fenway, Boston, MA). Tickets: $15 general admission, $10 seniors, and free for students; tickets can be purchased the Boston Conservatory box office at 617-912-9222 or online at bostonconservatory.edu/tickets.

Brian Church (as the Doctor), Aliana de la Guardia (as the Dog), and Patrick Massey (as the Assistant) in Guerilla Opera's Heart of a Dog

Brian Church (as the Doctor), Aliana de la Guardia (as the Dog), and Patrick Massey (as the Assistant) (Anthony Scibilia Photography)

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