Saturday, April 27, 2019

Lady in the Dark

There was a time in the history of American musical theatre when not only were music and story integrated so that the songs moved the plot ahead--the classic instance being Rodgers and Hammerstein's initial collaboration, Oklahoma--but some went further. While musicals had a significant past in operetta, mostly in the first twenty years of the 20th century, some in the 30s and 40s began to range into what had until then been operatic realms.

Porgy and Bess remains the most significant example. To this day, argument persists as to whether it is really an opera or a musical. Answer: it's both, because Gershwin's genius drew on folk music and jazz as well as other musical and cultural sources to produce an inimitable masterpiece. Kurt Weill also looked in this direction. His Street Scene has usually been performed by opera companies and The Threepenny Opera, for which his librettist was Bertholt Brecht, thrives in a place all its own.

Last night, enjoying the middle of three performances at City Center in New York of a revival of Weill's Lady in the Dark showed how composers, writers, and directors were exploring new ways of expanding the musical stage. When Moss Hart met with Weill to discuss his idea for a musical play that dealt with a woman executive's effort to deal with depression through psychoanalysis, neither was interested "in doing a how for the sake of doing a show..and the tight little formula of the musical comedy stage held no interest for either of us."

As the director and conductor Ted Sperling points out in his note in the program, Lady in the Dark was structured to fit its subject: "At a time when musicals were experimenting with linking songs and scenes more tightly, Lady in the Dark does the opposite--it segregates the music to the fantasy world." There's a lot going on here--and at the finale, the music does expand out of the fantasy world into what looks to be the core of the story.

It's a marvelous show. The credit Hart and Weill deserve is shared with the great lyricist Ira Gershwin, whose participation in the 1941 show was his first in any theatrical project following the untimely death in 1938 of his greatest collaborator, his brother George. Gertrude Lawrence was the original lead. Today we may have difficulty grasping how her incredible charm seduced audiences who paid little attention to his very constrained vocal range and technique. She went on to great success in The King and I, which she headlined until shortly before her death.

This show progresses through three dream sequences, all with spectacular production, choreography, and music. Victoria Clark, playing Liza Elliot, the focal character, performs admirably and has a delightful voice. Everyone else is excellent, including the veteran Amy Irving in the somewhat thankless role of the analyst.

Two famous songs come near the end: "Tschaikowsky," a perfect show-off piece for the talents of Danny Kaye, and "The Saga of Jenny," where Weill's sprightly music and Gershwin's clever lyrics take off, Another earlier song, "One Life to Live," also should be familiar.

It's a wonderful show, whether or not you are enthralled with psychoanalysis. It presents some good plot complications and the MasterVoices company brought it off with panache. Some Encores productions have moved to Broadway for limited runs, including Finian's Rainbow, which I saw a few years ago. This production at City Center was in the spirit of the Encores ones, but was wholly its own thing. Even the credits showed some style: gowns for the female dancers courtesy of Radio City Music Hall, tuxedos for male dancers by Brooks Brothers.

Thursday, April 18, 2019

Burn This

I've liked Lanford Wilson's plays although it's been some time since I saw one until catching Burn This in New York recently. The earlier dramas Talley's Folly and The Fifth of July were set in the Midwest, Missouri, where I believe Wilson came from. To me, he demonstrated an ability to get beneath the surfaces that usually keep any two people who think they may be in love as well as all of us from understanding each other.

Although I hadn't had the chance to read much about this play--which had premiered on Broadway 32 years ago with John Malkovich--the presence of Keri Russell in one of the two leading roles made it attractive to both of us. She had been the key character in the cable series, The Americans, for several years. In that she was outstanding in conveying the many issues her character, a Soviet spy implanted in the U.S. with a husband provided by the KGB, with whom she has had two children.

This play puts her in another complex role. Anna is a dancer now turned choreographer. Others in the play attest to her talent but she is insecure in her new work, especially since her prime colleague, also a dancer, has just drowned in what clearly had been an avoidable accident. On top of this, she is trying to decide whether to pursue a relationship with a successful writer who seems enamoured with her.

A major complication bursts onto the scene when the dead man's brother, Jimmy, who wants to be called Pale, bursts into her Soho living space, which she shares with a congenial gay man. He is from the Midwest and is very assertive, if not dominating. She is affronted by his attitudes and behavior, yet it is clear that he has lit a spark in her that had not been there before.

Adam Driver plays him, and he's good, whether or not he proves to be as exciting a performer as Malkovich. The play does give both him and Russell the chance to expose their feelings as well as their challenges and attitudes. I found it both entertaining as well as providing a lot to think about. Russell's character, Anna, also complicated, because while she is fully engaged in the dance world and cherishes her friends, she is clearly open to something more. One gradually realizes that the more predictable route to happiness wed to the writer might not give that to her.


Monday, April 1, 2019

Contrasts in Opera

This weekend provided two very enjoyable operatic experiences. The Met's much-criticized "machine" production of Wagner's Ring is being revived after a few years: Saturday afternoon we went to an HD presentation of the live performance of Die Walkure in the movies. This, the second opera in the four-opera series, is the strongest of the tetralogy. 

While it continues to story of the Ring of the Nibelung, it introduces the two most important female characters in the operas: Brunnhilde, the Valkyrie of the title, and Sieglinde, sister and wife of the hero Siegmund, and most significant as the mother of Siegfried, star of the last two operas and the hero whom Wotan, the increasingly beset king of the gods, hopes will do no less than save the world.

Two fine singers filled these roles. Christine Goerke, an American soprano, rose to the demands of Brunnhilde's mightiest appearance (she, as with Witan, appears in three of the four operas--not the same ones) and Eva-Marie Westbroek rendered a sparkling performance as Sieglinde, who, with Wotan, a resolute Greer Grimsley, holds the stage for the longest stretches.

The opera presents in stark form the moral and ethical trap in which Wotan finds himself ever since he stooped to trickery to take possession of the ring forged by Alberich who stole the Rhinegold from the Rhinemaidens. One might almost conclude that there was no good way to resolve this story since if Wotan had returned the ring to the Rhine--we are constantly reminded that the world will not be at peace until that occurs--what would have prevented Alberich or a similar-focused villain, from stealing it again and starting the whole cycle over.

Now Wotan has sought to set the stage for a great hero, who will be Siegfried, to save the gods and the world, but he is undone by his wife, Fricka, jealous of his romantic dalliances (one of which resulted in the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde, the Walsungs), who insists that Siegmund lose the battle with Hunding, the snarling and snivelling basso who is married to Sieglinde, taken from the burning house he and his comrades had inflamed.

The message of the Ring often seems to be that no one's really all good or bad--well, not exactly: no one: Alberich the dwarf, his son Hagen, and brother Mime are unremittingly evil. Wotan is forced by his moral code to cast out his favorite child Brunnhilde (also the result of a dalliance with an unidentified woman not his wife) when she follows the message of his heart rather than his direct order and tries to save Siegmund.

Although the third act starts with the famous Ride of the Valkyries and proceeds to the magnificent Wotan's Farewell and Fire Music, the first two acts in this Met revival played wonderfully both dramatically and musically. Siegmund and Sieglinde brought the first act to exciting levels with their singing and acting, and Brunnhilde's appearance in Act Two enlivens the opera immediately. Even Jamie Barton, in the unsympathetic role of Fricka, was marvelous--she is younger than she looks as she won the Met's National Auditions only a few years ago. As always, the Met Orchestra, brought by the now non-person James Levine to its high level, performed Wagner's challenging score magnificently.

Sunday afternoon I saw music and drama students at Catholic University present Handel's early-17th century opera, Julius Caesar in Egypt, in a fine production at the Hartke Theater. It is amazing to realize that not only were countertenors often principal singers in the opera seria produced most notably by Handel (the roles were written for castrati) but none less than the might Julius Caesar is played by a countertenor.

We seem to be in an age when the revival of baroque has brought countertenors to the fore after a couple of centuries of being omitted from opera. Last year it was delightful to hear two countertenors singing Handel in a Broadway production of Farinelli and the King starring the great Mark Rylance. The performance, part of a three-day run at CU, was entirely student-performed, stage-managed, and designed: it was superbly done. Baroque opera, even by Handel, is a definitely different species and one which takes some getting used to. The harpsichord accompanying the recitatives also shows how some half a century or so later, Mozart would refine this standard of baroque into a more amazing technique in the three DaPonte operas.