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GLENN LONEY'S SHOW NOTES
By Glenn Loney, December 30, 1998
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Caricature of Glenn Loney
by Sam Norkin.
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[01] Nicole Kidman in The Blue Room
[02] The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told
[03] Passionate Women
[04] Trainspotting
[05] Spread Eagle-Dead Eagle
[06] Hope is the thing with feathers
[07] Freedomland
[08] The Memory of Water
[09] Stop Kiss at the Public
[10] Mercy at the Vineyard
[11] Electra Revised
[12] Waiting for Godot at CSC
[13] Joe Orton's Loot
[14] Signature's Bosoms and Neglect
[15] Young Vic's Grimm Tales
[16] Tilly Losch at DUMBO
[17] Hal Prince's Parade
[18] Monsters of Grace at BAM
[19] Cathy Rigby's Peter Pan
[20] On the Town Inside
[21] Trouble in Tahiti
[22] Jews & Jesus at LaMaMa
[23] HERE's Cry Pitch Carrolls
[24] Ten-Month Season for SF Opera
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Last Days of Auld Lang Syne-
Time to Turn in Dated Xmas Shows
And Enjoy Old Stories in New Plays!
The Room Is Blue- [***]
A Long Way Off from Schnitzler
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Iain Glen and Nicole Kidman in "The Blue Room" (photo: Joan Marcus)
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Nicole Kidman, clothed or partially unclothed, has made The Blue Room the hottest ticket in town. As most of the action occurs in fairly dim light, you have to look hard to see her bare her talent.
Her partner, Iain Glen, shows it all, including a nude handspring. These frank disclosures-or exposures-seem to have inflamed the adjectives of many critics.
The original author of the play on which this banal British updating is based, Dr. Arthur Schnitzler, would surely be astonished.
He was writing a wryly ironic comedy about the sexual round-dance in fin-de-siècle Vienna. His Riegen showed how sexual passion-not love-can, through passing partners, link a girl of the streets with a duchess.
The rigid social structures of Alt Wien and the even more confining clothing-especially for women-proved no bar to an effectual class-leveling through casual sex.
Of course Schnitzler was also offering a disguised sub-text, demonstrating how venereal diseases can be easily communicated, even by people who think they and their partners are "safe."
In the Age of AIDS, it might have been really courageous of David Hare to direct his adaptation more to this danger.
But he obviously was more interested in drafting an ironic sexual comedy. The production gimmick is to have just two actors play all ten of the roles.
That offers the excitement of quick costume-changes. And the challenge of quick changes of character and mood.
As such, these are more in the nature of theatre-stunts than demonstrations of artistic versatility.
All the critics seem to agree that Nicole Kidman is one of the most beautiful actresses now performing.
That a young Hollywood star of her incandescent magnitude would hazard her fame by appearing on stage in a real play seemed a very brave thing to do. Actually, she trained for the theatre, appearing in Sydney, Australia, in Steel Magnolias and Frank Wedekind's Spring Awakening.
Newsweek's Jack Kroll, even wrote a most interesting cover-story on her talents and aspirations. This report appeared as the sold-out show opened, after previews featuring traffic-jams of super-long limos before the Cort Theatre.
She is not only a lovely lady and an interesting actress, but she's also married to the ardent Scientologist and actor, Tom Cruise.
Her first fall appearance in New York was in the dreadful Wicca potboiler film, Practical Magic. This was a waste of time and talent for all concerned.
Morgan Le Fay surely put a curse upon it.
So it is good to report that Kidman is both self-confident and thoroughly competent in the five roles David Hare has crafted for her. The amazing thing is that she can be so consistent, never losing the sub-text of Nicole Kidman in the changing characters.
Arthur Schnitzler's dramatic concerns were deeply serious, though concealed in the form of Social Comedy. Initially, he passed the manuscript around among friends, for he knew there was no chance the play would be performed in Imperial Vienna.
Premiered two decades later in Vienna, Riegen was closed by the police. In Berlin, it was the subject of an obscenity trial. Spreading warnings about the spread of venereal disease was hardly the issue. The casual sexual-round was bad enough.
In the current production, staged in New York as in London by the innovative Sam Mendes, sex rather than syphilis is both text and subtext.
In case any in the audience miss the comic point of the various liaisons, the stage goes dark during the Sex Act. And the exact Time To Orgasm is flashed on the scrim.
It is safe to say that both Dr. Schnitzler and his Vienna colleague, Dr. Sigmund Freud, would have found this a bit tacky.
And yet one reads some reviews which suggest that the original drama is fusty and no longer relevant. Sadly needing this trendy updating.
Curiously, when Max Ophuls made his justly famous film-version, the Carousel of Love, La Ronde, interest in producing the original play was rapidly aroused.
But it has even been asserted that Schnitzler's play could only succeed now as a Period Costume Drama.
On Broadway, it has almost been reduced to the level of a Sex Joke. Although it does suggest what playwright John Guare meant by Six Degrees of Separation.
And the room is indeed blue, misty, gauzy blue. With blue neon accents, thanks to designer Johan Engels.
The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told- [***]
And God Created Adam & Steve and Jane & Mabel!
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Alan Tudyk, Kathryn Meisle, and Amy Sedaris in Paul Rudnick's The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told.
Photo: Joan Marcus
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Some sanctimonious Fundamentalist Divine coined the memorable quasi-Biblical quote: "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve."
Whether the original credit should go to Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, or Oral Roberts is now moot. For Family Values Senators and Congressmen have taken up the refrain.
It is a sure-fire Crowd-Pleaser out there in America's Heartland.
Which is surely why playwright Paul Rudnick knows better than to premiere his new and highly irreverent account of The Creation in Kansas City.
No, the New York Theatre Workshop in the East Village is the right place to try out parodical critiques of Christianity's most deeply cherished beliefs.
Rudnick, of course, is not mocking the Sacred Scriptures as much as he is parodying the pious pronouncements on them by pompous politicians.
And, as his title suggests, he's also having a bit of fun with popular summaries of Biblical Lore. Those which reek of The Readers' Digest.
And especially that former Best-Seller, Fulton Oursler's The Greatest Story Ever Told.
Rudnick has also recycled earlier comic treatments of Bible Stories. Adam and Steve naming the animals is right out of Mark Twain.
That the First Siblings Cain and Abel have been transformed into the lesbians Jane and Mabel only shows Rudnick's concern for Women's Rights.
Nor does he laboriously Deconstruct the entire Old and New Testaments.
He rapidly shifts forward in time to a holiday party in Greenwich Village. Center stage in a wheelchair is the lesbian Rabbi Sharon. She even has a call-in Talk Show.
Talk about Terminally Trendy!
Even though this amusing show-staged by Christopher Ashley-is designed as holiday entertainment, it won't soon replace A Christmas Carol in regional theatres.
Stimulating an Impotent Fellini-
Mario Fratti's Passionate Women [**]
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Tony Torn, Rebecca Nelson (holding camera), Maria Cellario in "Passionate Women" (Barney Yates photo)
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Reporting on Federico Fellini, Mario Fratti had the opportunity to observe him in operation first-hand. It also gave him the connection he needed to obtain the rights to turn Fellini's film, 8 1/2, into the Broadway musical, Nine.
Judging from this 1977 Fratti script, Fellini was impotent-both sexually and intellectually-when he was not obsessed with a new idea for a film.
But-rather like Germany's Bertolt Brecht-he often depended on the women closest to him for inspiration. Whether they were wife, mistresses, film-stars, or pretty girls who caught his roving eye-it didn't matter where the idea came from.
Nor was he about to give screen-credit for his borrowed inspirations. Not to mention credit to a screen-writer, who in Fratti's play, gets even by sleeping with all the Maestro's women.
The mainspring of Fratti's comedy is the plan of the various women join forces and film him in compromising situations with them.
Not so much to blackmail him as to hold him up to ridicule. To force him to see himself as they know him all too well.
Tony Torn's Nino was more pudgy and frantic than charismatic and commanding. But maybe that was the real Fellini?
Trainspotting on Stage- [*]
Next Time Try Greyhound!
It takes a strong stomach to work one's way through Irvine Welsh's hellish novel of Down & Out Druggies in Edinburgh. The film of Trainspotting, grim though it was, had a certain morbid fascination.
But why anyone would want to adapt this material for a four-person theatre-collage is a mystery. As Harry Gibson has both adapted and directed it, however, he obviously knows something his production isn't telling its audiences.
The otherwise attractive Tessa Auberjonois got to play several hopeless cases. She even got to expose her breasts, which are also attractive. But not really in this context.
Spread Eagle-Dead Eagle! [*]
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Brian Murray as an English actor South of the Border in Jim Luigs' Spread Eagle.
Photo: Carol Rosegg 1998
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The jolly English comedian, George Rose, was murdered some time ago by the family of a young native of the tropics. He had made the mistake of "crossing the line" in his restless search for male affection.
Jim Luigs' new drama, Spread Eagle, may have been inspired by this. Or similar South of the Border pay-for-hire romances.
Brian Murray plays the Brit, Toby Arundel, a fading star on both sides of the Atlantic. With a gut, a drinking-habit, a flushed face, and a temper, he is not an especially attractive candidate for love of any kind.
Let alone the one that formerly did not "dare to speak its name." Now, as in this embarrassing play, it won't shut up.
Arundel buys a Mexican villa, complete with a native major-domo and his son. This compliant young man-who has a girlfriend on the side-submits to the new owner's caresses.
The besotted and befuddled Toby mistakes this for real love at last. He plans to adopt the young man as his heir-as other well-heeled and sexually desperate Gringos have done before, to their regret.
Toby discovers the germs of real acting talent in a younger male relative of his adopted family, who also works at the villa. The boy is Cleopatra to his Anthony.
He foolishly announces his intention of taking the lad with him to New York for acting lessons, as he begins rehearsals for a new production.
At least you don't have to watch them kill him!
My guest kept sighing: "Poor Brian, poor Brian! Why did he get himself into this?"
Loudly enough, I'm sure, so Murray could hear her on stage. The WPA is a small theatre, after all.
Actors appear in odd roles in bad plays because they like to work. And get paid for it, instead of paying for studio-space to rehearse scenes just to keep supple.
And Equity members with outstanding credits must surely believe they can still turn sow's ear roles into dramatic silk-purses, metaphorically speaking.
Correction: Miss Dickinson-
Turkey Is the Thing with Feathers [**]
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The Man [Avery Glymph] and The Woman [Cynthia Nixon] in Frank Pugliese's 'Hope' is the thing with feathers—.
Photo: Joan Marcus
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Half a century ago, Hope Is the Thing with Feathers was premiered on Broadway at the Playhouse. This was an ANTA production by Eddie Dowling.
As with the new play just mounted by the Drama Department at Greenwich House, it took its title from Emily Dickinson's 1891 poem.
The estimable Drama Department has made quite a reputation for itself in recent seasons. Not least with Douglas Carter Beane's As Bees in Honey Drown.
Dowling's little show-although it featured E. G. Marshall, Will Geer, and Lou Gilbert-closed after a scant seven performances.
"Hope" is the thing with feathers-as author Frank Pugliese styles his title-also has some incandescent actor-power. Among the cast are Robert Hogan-recently an impressive Clarence Darrow, Cynthia Nixon, and Maria Tucci.
The plot is incredibly fractured, involving several couples. This is very artistic, even self-consciously so.
But one's attention is concentrated more on trying to fit the pieces together than on responding to the very real and immediate human problems Pugliese has worked so artfully to camouflage.
Why won't the good doctor eat? Is he starving himself to death? Because he touched a young girl in his office in an unmedical way?
Why is the Boy [Keith Nobbs]-with his hair standing straight up-refusing to open his chute as he plummets earthward? Why has the Girl cut off all her hair?
All may be made clear if New Line Cinema/Fine Line Features exercises its rights-as a sponsoring producer of new Drama Department work-to turn feathers into films.
Amy Freed's Freedomland- [**]
Norman Rockwell Explained
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Jeff Whitty prone in the stocks in Amy Freed's Freedomland.
Photo: Joan Marcus
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Has it come to this? That Norman Rockwell and his paintings of cute Family Values and Patriotic Pieties are so little known or so poorly remembered that lobby displays are needed to explain the Man and His Work?
Wall illustrations and text for Freedomland are more to the point.
When I first heard of Amy Freed's new comedy about a militantly dysfunctional family, I wondered if it would have anything to do with the long defunct William Zeckendorf theme-park in the Bronx.
But why would anyone want to recall that tacky evocation of American History and Civil Rights-complete with theme rides?
Surely Freed's title was some kind of word-play-Freed-omland?
Not at all. Her Unhappy Family's fondest memory is of a brief visit to the real Freedomland long ago.
As they now live-flown from the paternal nest, only to return for this contentious reunion-each is his or her own prisoner of not-so-Magnificent Obsessions.
Ferociously self-possessed Sig [wonderful Veanne Cox] paints hugely successful paintings of sad, baggy-pants, big-eyed clown hobos. She doesn't quite make the connection with the mother who long ago abandoned the family to become a real hobo.
Her wimpish younger sister Polly [Carrie Preston] can't seem to finish her thesis on the role of Powerful Women in the Trojan War.
Brother Seth [Jeff Donovan] has become a backwoods counter-culture bomb-maker.
Their pathetic dad Noah [Dakin Matthews] provides no ark for them. He is in denial about everything.
This play looks and sounds like Nicky Silver whacked Amy Freed with his fairy-wand. If he had only tapped her lightly, this fantasy would not seem so heavy-handed and derivative.
On Forgetting The Memory of Water [**]
Long ago, when I was the late John Gassner's assistant, writing critiques for Broadway in Review, he reminded me that "Forgetting is also a form of criticism."
His point was not to take any notes and only report on the remembered extreme highs and lows of productions when it came time to write about them weeks later. Our collaborative column appeared only quarterly.
Well, I have tried that with varying results over the years. It is true that when I write a report immediately after seeing a production, it can run to ten pages. When one or two paragraphs would be quite enough.
Alas, as a result, I don't remember the plot of Shelagh Stephenson's The Memory of Water at the Manhattan Theatre Club. They didn't give me any photos, so I can't trigger my memory that way.
I do remember that J. Smith-Cameron, Robin Moseley, and Susanne Bertish-who would be wonderful in almost anything-were individually interesting as three sisters reunited for the funeral of their mother.
They had had their differences, and had not resolved or let go of some of them.
They made much fun of their departed mother's often garish, even ridiculous, wardrobe. Each costume recalled an episode in her and, often, in their lives.
Costumer Jess Goldstein must have had a lot of fun assembling these outfits.
As a counterpoint to the sisters' sometimes ungenerous memories, the mother appeared to one of them to set the record straight. In a nice visual touch, she always looked quite smart or adorable in her outfits.
So her story was gradually revealed through a kind of costume-parade. Memories flowing away like water...
Hey, that's not so bad for no notes!
But I cannot give you details of the plot. And the charming production, staged by John Tillinger, definitely did not put me to sleep.
The problem is probably with the play itself. It did not make a deep impression.
Liaison Dangereuse-
Stop Kiss in the West Village [****]
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Jessica Hecht and Sandra Oh relax in Stop Kiss at the Public Theatre.
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Jessica Hecht is a somewhat scatter-brained Callie at home in her loft, but she's totally focused when she's out in the helicopter checking out traffic for radio listeners.
Sandra Oh, as Sara, is a dedicated young teacher who has come from the midwest to teach in a ghetto school.
Both have had boy-friends who are still waiting in the wings, but they prefer their own independence.
And they are both in awkward and offhand denial about the attraction they feel for each other.
Unfortunately, their first impulsive kiss, late at night in the West Village wilds, arouses the ire of one of those men trolling around for sex in the raw.
He brutally attacks Sara, almost killing her. This helps Callie to focus and see how much she loves Sara. And how much she is willing to do to help her regain some motor-skills.
The story is told in flash-back fragments, which adds both interest and tension.
Diana Son's affecting drama-not without its lighter moments-has been sensitively staged by Jo Bonney at the Public Theatre.
Please Have Some Mercy-On the Audience [0]
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A cute moment from Laura Cahill's Mercy, featuring Amelia Campbell [left] and Matt Keeslar [right].
Photo: Carol Rosegg 1998
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The four peculiar young people featured in this static drama of an impromptu party on the Upper West Side are not remotely interesting, either as individuals or types.
Their trivial comments show no insight, humor, or imagination. So there was not much to be gained by listening to their chatter.
In fact, the stasis of thought, emotion, and action almost overcame the audience. Some of those who were not slumped catatonically in their seats at least had the energy to head for the exit at the interval.
William Barclay designed a raffish apartment which was rather more interesting that Laura Cahill's play. Or Loretta Greco's lackluster staging of it.
That this should be showcased by the Vineyard Theatre-which has such a good track-record for mounting interesting new scripts-is puzzling. Was the Dramaturg asleep when this one came through the mail-slot?
Raising the Dead and Merely Dormant-
Frank McGuinness Revisits Sophocles-
With Zoë Wanamaker an Electrifying Electra [****]
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Zoë Wanamaker in Sophocles' "Electra," revised by Frank McGuinness.
Photo Copyright & Copy Joan Marcus 1998.
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When we are told that Orestes needs to "get this House back on its feet," it is suddenly clear that the talented Irish playwright, Frank McGuinness, is more at ease with Ireland's "Troubles" than with Attic Athens.
Of the modern Irish Bards, perhaps only William Butler Yeats could transmute Sophoclean poetic rhetoric into effective modern stage discourse. His Oedipus Rex remains a modern masterpiece.
McGuinness' Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching Towards the Somme is also a minor masterpiece. But I wasn't too keen on his translation of Ibsen's A Doll's House. Although it won all kinds of awards, including 4 Tonys.
Because much of McGuinness' Electra text is furiously ranted, other contemporary dialogue clinkers pass rapidly by.
Fortunately, this is a Minimalist Postmodernist production of such raw elemental acting-power that niceties of text are hardly an issue.
Zoë Wanamaker, as the humiliated and debased Electra-looking more like an angry street-urchin than the daughter of an assassinated King and Hero-gives a memorable performance.
Claire Bloom, as her murderous, aldulterous mother, Clytemnestra, is regal in her elegant long red gown.
It is not a Great Idea that only one of the Chorus speaks its lines. But Pat Carroll gives them her considerable All.
Michael Cumpsty is a competent Orestes. And he does what has to be done to his wicked mother.
In the Attic Greek Theatre of Dionysus, such scenes of horror were concealed from audience view. Director David Leveaux has similarly spared his spectators some possible horrors.
Zoë Wanamaker shows herself to be one of England's finest younger actresses. This is something of a triumph for the Wanamaker Family.
Her beloved late father, Sam Wanamaker-who sparked the reconstruction of the Bankside Globe Theatre-was always disappointed that the British press referred to him as "the American actor-director." He longed to be recognized as a Brit, even if only one who came as an immigrant. a fugitive from McCarthyism.
Waiting for John Turturro
And Sam Beckett at Classic Stage Co. [***]
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Samuel Beckett's Didi and Gogo, played by Tony Shaloub and John Turturro, in the CSC revival of Waiting for Godot.
Photo: Dixie Sheridan 1998.
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Having seen the definitive production of Waiting for Godot, staged by Samuel Beckett himself, with actors of Berlin's Schiller Theatre, later, lesser interpretations have always seemed to me distinctly less inviting.
With the possible exception of a later Schiller production, based on Beckett's directorial vision, which was shown in New York at BAM.
Then there was that Lincoln Center version, featuring Steve Martin, F. Murray Abraham, Bill Irwin, and a completely outclassed Robin Williams. That was more about celebrity than existential riddles.
When it was announced that John Turturro and Tony Shaloub would impersonate Estragon and Vladimir-Gogo and Didi-at the Classic Stage Company, the Shadow of Celebrity loomed again. But not quite so large...
This production, staged by Andrei Belgrader, has been roundly denounced by knowledgeable critics. Notably by my esteemed colleague, Michael Feingold, who deftly dissected its shortcomings.
Nonetheless, as one who really did not look forward to waiting-along with the cast-for a Godot who never comes, I found both Turturro and Shaloub lovable and charming in this mounting.
Those qualities, of course, have very little to do with what Beckett had in mind. His vision at the Schiller was of contrasting physical and emotional types, Mutt & Jeff. With vaudeville & music-hall routines to while away the time.
Turturro's idiosyncratic gestures and tics were not absent, but at least they seemed subordinated to his inner vision of his character.
Christopher Lloyd was a truly alarming Pozzo. A caricature of caricatures-but never boring.
Richard Spore, as the unlucky Lucky, was the only one in the cast who might have won Beckett's grudging nod.
That the Boy was played by a very boyish Amedeo Turturro suggests some nepotism in casting.
Even if you have already read or seen this puzzling play, saying you "know how it all comes out" is no proper excuse for avoiding yet another production.
No one, least of all Beckett, knows how this endlessly repeating scenario will ever end. Or when or why or where.
Plundering Joe Orton-
Loot at the Jean Cocteau [**]
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Charles Parnell and Tim Deak in "Loot" (Jonathan Slaff photo)
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Speaking as one who both knew Joe Orton and who has seen the major productions of his plays, I still believe Loot the least successful of his full-length Black Comedies.
The Broadway premier was a lugubrious disaster, in fact. The fault there was largely that of the endlessly self-congratulating director.
So what went wrong at the Jean Cocteau?
Scott Shattuck has previously proved himself an able director of Orton and Stoppard. His What the Butler Saw and Rough Crossing were both among the best Cocteau productions in recent seasons.
He may have been seduced by a John Lahr quote insisting that Joe Orton was a realist. His program-note reproducing the quote is headed with Orton's own pronouncement: "Loot is a serious play."
Granted, but "serious" doesn't necessarily imply true-to-life or mirror-up-to-Nature dramaturgy. This blackly bizarre comedy, with a corpse in a closet and stolen banknotes stashed in its coffin, is Absurdist, rather than Realist.
It is true that way back in 1966, director Charles Marowitz saved Loot from provincial failure, making it a moderate West End hit. Orton was certainly grateful for this.
But he told me Marowitz's limitation was his inability to see and stage the wilder imaginings implicit in this script. And in Butler as well. Marowitz's comic sensibility was too earth-bound.
In the performance I saw, many obvious laugh-lines went for nothing. Some of these are as good as Oscar Wilde's epigrams. And, like Wilde's, they can work quite well, detached from the playtexts they illuminate.
Like Queen Victoria on that famous occasion, the audience was obviously not amused.
Things warmed up a bit in the second half. But Craig Smith's implacable Inspector Truscott was less a comedic maniac than a seeming fugitive from a Gestapo Interrogation Unit. Fiercely labored, but unfunny.
Others also seemed miscast or misdirected. Better Loot luck next time.
John Guare's Unfairly Neglected
Bosoms and Neglect Scores at Signature [*****]
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A momentarily exuberant Henny, played by Mary Louise Wilson, in John Guare's Bosoms and Neglect.
Photo: Susan Johann 1998
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Mary Louise Wilson recently triumphed as the stylish, trend-setting, fashion-editor Diana Vreeland. Now she triumphs again in a role that is the antithesis of everything Vreeland believed in or valued.
As the aged, stubborn Henny, dying of cancer, she gives a manic performance which can challenge Kathleen Chalfant's-in Wit, also as a woman dying of cancer-come awards-time.
Rather than bother a doctor or her frantic son, Scooper, with her problems, she has tried to heal the ugly sore in her breast with prayers to a small statue of St. Jude and application of sanitary napkins to the suppurating wound.
St. Jude is the patron saint of really Impossible Causes.
Fortunately, Scooper is confronted with his mother's condition in time for him to help ease her pain.
But he has plenty of pain of his own-partly thanks to his nutty mother. His life itself is almost an impossible cause.
So much so that he has become bizarrely dependent on the couch and ear of Dr. James.
After months of watching her, he suddenly becomes involved with another of Dr. James' patients, Deirdre, who runs a rare-book business from her tome-cluttered apartment.
David Aaron Baker and Katie Finneran are manic farceurs in the ensuing encounters between these two advanced paranoiacs.
This can be classed as a Screwball Comedy, but it is both stranger and more serious than anything Preston Sturges ever created.
Just under the riotous laughs lurks a great sadness. And, with the enthusiasm for literature both Scooper and Deirdre share, this is a play that makes an hilarious appeal to the intellect.
Nicholas Martin has staged with a pace and energy that never lets up. James Noone's settings are superb, given the intimate space of the Signature Theatre.
When Scooper goes on a book-tearing rampage and Deirdre's bookcases begin to topple, it looks like the staged-hands will never have it cleaned up by the second act.
Even in Guare's most absurd plays, there is always an autobiographical element. Bosoms and Neglect looks like an attempt to come to terms definitively with childhood, Mom, and masculinity.
This provocative play was a commercial failure in 1979, at the Longacre Theatre. But it should never have been mounted on Broadway.
In its current John Guare season, Signature has given the play at last a production which makes it sing. This is worthy of a transfer to Off-Broadway.
Grimm Tales Are Grim & Grimmer Fun-
The Young Vic at the New Victory [****]
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Linda Kerr Scott with very long nails in the Young Vic's Grimm Tales at the New Victory.
Photo: Tristam Kenton 1998
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If you are still baffled at the monstrous inhumanity of Nazi gas-ovens in their Death Camps, you have forgotten where those methodical killers first got such ideas. Not exactly with their mothers' milk, but probably from Grimm's Fairytales.
After all, where did the Wicked Witch get all those gingerbread corpses to make her fence of boys and girls? Human lampshades were only a later refinement.
If it's quite OK for Hansel & Gretel to turn the tables on the old hag and push her into the fiery oven instead, well then, what kind of example does that offer impressionable German kiddies?
Both Adolf Eichmann and Adolf Hitler were surely exposed to the brutal children's fictions the Brothers Grimm gathered from ancient story-tellers in many remote areas of Germany.
We didn't need Bruno Bettelheim to remind us of the mythic qualities of fairytales. Especially those recorded by the Grimms.
Or of the wonders of longing and wishing, and of the horrors and terrors of unreasoning fears, and of the cruelties of the revengeful imagination.
It has long been apparent that Myths-on a more metaphoric adult level-and Fairytales-on a simpler, more elemental childish level-embody our Highest Hopes and our Most Terrible Fears and Angers.
The admirable Young Vic ensemble came recently to the New Victory on New 42 to regale old and young alike with their lively retellings of some of the Grimm and grimmer tales.
They artfully act out the various tales with narration, pantomime, dance, music, and song. Even spiteful meanness and downright cruelty have a comic edge. Especially as all the Bad People will Get What Is Coming To Them.
Both kids and adults like to see bullies brought to heel. Especially if they have just tried to kill or maim.
The Young Vic players' version of Aschenbrödel-called Ashputtel in this production-points up the far more savage rendering of the German tale contrasted with the softened English Cinderella.
Trying vainly to shove her big foot into the glass slipper, one of the Unkind Step-Sisters cuts off her toe. No Luck!
The other cuts off her heel. Still No Luck and lots of bleeding.
Younger brothers may be beaten up and cheated by older brothers. But they get even and often become princes.
And sweet little girls who do not obey their mothers get eaten by wolves with very big mouths. Some learned scientific papers have been written on the sexual subtexts of the fable of Little Red Cap, or Rotkappchen.
That story is Monica In Reverse.
Speaking of which recent Current Event, there was a prize each performance for the child or adult who could guess how a husband knew which flower in a field was really his enchanted wife.
As each wonderful night came to its end, she had to return to the field and spend the day as a flower. If her husband could discover her among all the myriad blooms, she would remain his forever.
As acted out in The Riddling Tale, each flower emitted the same ping when he stroked its head. Yet he made the correct choice.
How did he know?
I muttered: "By the semen on the stamen."
Several who overheard urged me to write this down for the competition, even if it was obviously not the right answer.
I refused on the grounds that Kenneth Starr had already done enough damage to the innocence of our children with his endless probings of Oral Sex with Monica.
The correct answer was more like the Absence of Semen. His wife had no dew on her head, unlike the other flowers, as she had been in bed all night!
GAle GAtes' Tilly Losch Recycles [****]
Joseph Cornell, Casablanca, and Andrew Wyeth
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Michelle Stern as a fugitive from Casablanca in Tilly Losch at DUMBO.
Photo: Michael Counts 1998
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Tilly Losch was a very beautiful, erotic, and sophisticated dancer. The apotheosis of Central European Mystery and Beauty.
Forget Magda Lupescu, King Carol of Rumania's femme fatale mistress!
Captured in elegant photos in exotic dance costumes-or in smart street-wear against Art Deco furniture and decor-Tilly Losch was an epitome of High Style.
So it was a bit of a disappointment for me to discover that Michael Counts' latest foray into the Super-Avantgarde World of Performance Art has nothing at all to do with the real and luscious Losch.
No, Counts borrowed this title from Joseph Cornell, who in turn appropriated it from the dancer for one of his collage-boxes. In this particular one, a woman balloonist soars through the imaginary air of Cornell's Miniature World.
But it become more than merely a title.
At one point-as a crippled girl slithers into a field of dry grass, with some farm buildings in the distance-the woman in the hot-air balloon soars above the barns.
Yes, Joseph Cornell has an unlikely meeting with Andrew Wyeth. And we now know what Christina is so longingly looking for in his masterpiece, "Christina's World."
If you have long loved this painting-or even been bothered by it-the opportunity to see it recreated in three-dimensions should alone be worth making the tortuous trip to DUMBO and GAle GAtes in Brooklyn.
DUMBO is the anagram for Down Under Manhattan Bridge Overpass. It is the newest potential ArtScene in New York.
Michael Counts' group-which incorporates GAGA from his beloved grandmother-has an immense space at 37 Main Street. Just a few steps from this is one of the most marvelous night-time waterfront views in all the boroughs.
One looks out at the apex of a seeming triangle of swooping lights, as the Brooklyn Bridge and the Manhattan Bridge appear to meet on the East Rivers Manhattan shore.
The plot of ground on the waterfront is now a parking-lot. But it could become a wonderful civic park with artworks and cafés.
One developer-who foresees an innovative entertainment complex here-already owns seven of the great brick loft buildings. In which a number of low-rent artists are already working.
So a trip to DUMBO to check out the area is excuse enough to take the subway to Brooklyn. But the chance to see Tilly Losch and Casablanca as well make the journey almost imperative.
This movie masterpiece is also part of Counts' unusual entertainment. With the actual soundtrack, scenes from the film are intercut and vignetted with other visual surprises.
Field of Mars, Counts' last show in this vast loft-space had numerous scenes, some on wheels, and many simultaneous. The audience moved-or was nudged-around to follow various actions and images.
This time they sit in a small, narrow tier of conventional movie-theatre seats, facing a small improvised proscenium-opening. But this opens up, thanks to sets of shutters and drapes to an almost infinite perspective.
Forty or fifty feet away from the spectators' seats, there is a long row of identical seats. Spectators over there seem to be watching Casablanca from the other side of the screen.
The row of seats begins to move towards the right. And it just continues to move onward into the wings, never ending. We even re-encounter the same spectators.
Last seen going off to the right, they now scoot on from the left-hand side.
Tilly Losch has been so well received that the show has been extended to 16 January. But there are only 70 seats per show-all of which cost a flat $25.
It plays at 9 pm, Sundays and Mondays excluded. For tickets and subway information, call: 718-522-4597.
Before moving over to DUMBO, Counts and his acolytes were performing Wine-Blue-Open-Water on virtually an entire floor of a Financial District skyscraper! This was a magical multi-stage evocation of the Voyages of Ulysses.
Counts' work is Beyond Robert Wilson, though it does have some similarities in haunting imagery. And it is way beyond the iconic imaginings of George Coates in San Francisco.
Marching on Towards the Millennium!
New and Old Musicals and Operas
Lighten Our Uncertain Way into the Future
Hal Prince's Lincoln Center Parade- [***]
Marching to a Dark & Different Drummer
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Brent Carver as Leo Frank, backed by the cast of Hal Prince's Parade at the Vivian Beaumont.
Photo Copyright ©—Joan Marcus 1998.
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Harold Prince is not a frustrated opera-director. He is an experienced director of both traditional and innovative operas. He has shown his light touch at the New York City Opera and his heavier one at the Met, with a brooding Faust.
But he is still trying to master the minefields of Crossovers between the Broadway Musical Theatre and the Opera Stage. He revived that original Broadway flop, Candide, in marvelously intimate avant-garde production in the reconformed Broadway Theatre-the actual playhouse bearing that name!
Then he revived it again in a hugely expanded, even inflated, production for the New York City Opera in the NY State Theatre at Lincoln Center. Then, recently, he revived that scenery for a return to Broadway, this time in the cavernous Gershwin Theatre.
Even a delightfully ironic musical satire like Candide doesn't take kindly to crossing over so much. Some day, it may just Pass Over definitively.
It is, however, a traditional truism that really serious real-life or fictional subjects should be musicalized as operas, not as musicals. Horrific as "Sweeney Todd" was, it was still a bitterly ironic Black Comedy set to music.
The true story librettist Alfred Uhry has adapted for Parade might have worked much more powerfully as a straight drama, or as an opera. It is somber, unpleasant stuff for even an ironic musical.
Its effectual climax is the lynching of a wrongfully accused factory-manager by a Georgia Cracker crowd of anti-Semites. Leo Frank, a Brooklyn-born Jew, has married into the family that owns the pencil-factory he runs.
A young wage-slave teen-age Irish girl is raped and murdered in the basement of the factory, after she has collected her pitiful salary from Frank upstairs in the office.
As staged, it's suggested that the factory sweeper did the dirty deed. But a rabble-rousing editor, a drink-soused reporter, and a prosecutor-politician on the make would rather pin the crime on an Outsider.
The real killer was never accused. Though he has possibly been recently identified.
This sad and disgraceful event has captured the imagination and indignation of a number of writers and film-makers. From Mervyn LeRoy to David Mamet.
But does it make a musical?
Leo Frank, by all accounts, was something of a loner, quiet, thoughtful, and certainly not charismatic. He was no Hail-Fellow-Well-Met. Grim and even anal-retentive.
Some of his prison letters hint at a wry sense of humor, even facing a life sentence without possibility of release.
Both Uhry and Jason Robert Brown-who wrote the score and lyrics-have tried various ploys to humanize Frank. And to show a developing love between Frank [Brent Carver] and his shy young Southern Jewish wife [Carolee Carmello]. This includes a Conjugal Visit in prison, to certify physical consummation of their marriage.
One lively fantasy dance-scene shows Frank cavorting with his sub-teen factory-girls, something of which he was accused, but which certainly never occurred.
Thus, the diligent efforts of Uhry, Brown, and Prince seem concentrated on making Frank as appealing as possible, given the facts as known. And on making this grim, ugly story as entertaining as possible, given the conventions of musical theatre.
I believe this would have made a far more effective opera. The recent and impressive revival of Carlisle Floyd's opera of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men demonstrates how effectively this can be done.
Rodgers and Hammerstein could have turned Steinbeck's Depression Era novel into a Broadway musical. But they knew better than to try that.
Even the new show's title, Parade, suggests a colorful, exciting, musical event. This choice of title seems almost deliberately misleading.
But the audience certainly gets its money's worth from the titular March-Through. The clever two and three-dimensional floats and marchers troop across the Vivian Beaumont stage not once, but three times!
But the bitter irony of this annual Old South Celebration of a Lost War and a Lost Cause is rightfully emphasized in counterpoint to the simmering hatreds and discontents of the defeated Georgia Rednecks.
Prince's resourceful staging and the a propos choreographies of Patricia Birch-made reality by an able cast-give this strangely sad show a professional finish worthy of any stage, wheher musical or opera.
Brown's lyrics are serviceable, if not memorable. And his score is also generically acceptable for Broadway.
But neither have the soaring lyricism such a powerful subject could and should evoke on a much more serious Music Theatre stage than that of the Vivian Beaumont.
Obviously neither I nor most of the audience walked out of the theatre humming any Hit Tunes. And I have not gone out to buy the sheet-music to learn the songs on my own pianoforte.
Monsters of Grace at BAM- [**]
Polaroid Glasses for Philip Glass
And Animated Illusionist Robert Wilson
At least when we were wearing cardboard spectacles with one lens red and one green, we could look forward to a first-class exercise in 3-D scene-chewing by Vincent Price.
And, to enhance the effect of Stereopticon Photo-Slides in action, Price could bounce a rubber-tethered ball repeatedly In Your Face! House of Wax was and remains a classic of its time.
Now, however, the 3D Effect has been rediscovered by Robert Wilson. And it has been forcibly conscripted to do aesthetic visual battle in the Wars of Culture.
For all of Wilson's Epic Entertainments-or Performance Art Installations-he has always made detailed sketches, virtual storyboards, for their scenic imagery and slow-motion development.
Among his many moneyed and devoted admirers, these soon became high-priced collectibles. Indeed, some of his more mysterious images now appear in major museums and galleries.
Yet, to me, there has always been something rather childlike, even cartoonish, about some of the Canon Sketches. Of course, a fausse naif style, or even downright clumsiness, no longer bars an artist from the Pantheon.
It is true that the 3D dragonfly artfully buzzes out toward you in the BAM audience. And the immense chopsticks seem monstrously real, even when they are busily buzzing with black scriggles.
But these occasional effects of Computer-Animation-done better live years ago in House of Wax-by no means make a consistent stylistic match with a huge Yellow Harp standing on the bank of an animation river.
Down which floats a soft-edged geometric form of a house with people on its roof.
Without the 3D glasses, it looks like two sets of fuzzy images laid over each other. Which is exactly what it really is.
I tried several pair of powerful distance glasses, but Wilson's images still looked elemental. Despite the many hours and days spent creating them on a complex computer with even more complicated software.
Some critics were transported by a slowly moving image of an indistinct boy on an old-fashioned bicycle.
He was riding toward BAM audiences with very dark leafy tree-shapes on one side and paper-box houses with some yellow-lighted windows curving around on the other side.
George Lucas and other Computer-Animation Technocrats do this stuff far more skillfully and with much greater imagination and fantasy.
The images accompany-or they are accompanied by-Philip Glass's Generic Minimalist Score, with the Philip Glass Ensemble, conducted by the Master himself.
Whether this Glass is Half-Empty or Half-Full remains a bone of contention. The music is hypnotic enough for the slowest-moving Wilsonian Images.
It stakes its claim as Opera with its Coleman Marks sung texts, taken from the erotic and religious lyrics of Jalaluddin Rumi, a 13th century Anatolian Mystic.
These are sung in the orchestra pit, not on stage, however. And they do not involve dramatic discourse or debate.
There are thirteen lyric sections with visuals. Among the provocative titles are Where Everything Is Music, Don't Go Back to Sleep, In the Arc of Your Mallet, My Worst Habit, Like This, Stereogram, Let the Letter Read You, An Artist Comes to Paint You, and Boy on Fire.
Rumi may have been the original Whirling Dervish. Wilson used to feature Dervishes in some early works.
In the Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, they whirled silently on the BAM stage for a solid hour, part of a 12-hour performance marathon.
In the process of creation-before all of the scenes in the current work were animated-some were performed live on stage. This production has a number of prestigious Performing Arts sponsors, so it has already been seen in various developmental stages.
It might have been more interesting-if more expensive-to have retained some of these live contrasts in the current and apparently definitive production.
The non-opera's title is a Wilsonian Freudian-Slip. When he was rehearsing his One-Man Hamlet, he often said "Monsters of grace," instead of Shakespeare's more sedate phrase, "Ministers of grace."
This show is something of a Monster, but it could have used a lot more Grace. And some Whirling Dervishes as well.
Cathy Rigby IS Peter Pan! [****]
The Cross-Dresser Who Wouldn't Grow Up-
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Cathy Rigby—as Peter Pan—teaches the three Darling children to fly.
(Photo: Craig Schwartz 1998)
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For Scrooges too cheap to take the kids to the Marquis Theatre, the whole family could stand in line outside the animated Peter Pan Windows at Lord & Taylor on Fifth Avenue.
Featuring some of the most effective scenes and bizarre characters in James Barrie's celebrated childhood tale of the Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up, the windows were a great holiday treat in themselves.
But they were an even better advertisement for the larger Live Show on Broadway. And this production will continue to be a great treat long after Christmas has been stowed away for next December.
In fact, I saw Cathy Rigby as Peter Pan some seasons ago at the Shakespeare Festival Theatre in Alabama. Or someone who looked a lot like her, in a production that looked a lot like this one.
Peter Pan is a hardy perennial, and this show has so much of the story on stage, that it's almost more than little kids can sit still for. Where do they find room to hide all John Iacovelli's colorful set-pieces when they aren't on view?
And the profusion of wonderful costumes, designed by Shigeru Yaji! The chorus must be in a continual frenzy of costume-changes backstage. One minute they are Indians. Suddenly they are pirates.
Paul Schoeffler makes Captain Hook an oily and malicious foil to the exuberant Peter. Elsa Sagardia is a lovely Wendy. Indeed, all the children are a delight.
Moose Charlap's score has become a kind of small-scale classic. Carolyn Leigh's inventive original lyrics have been enhanced by new verses from Comden & Green.
After all, it doesn't have to be Holiday Season to enjoy a lively production Peter Pan! This is a show that can tour till the sets and costumes wear out.
Which may be the Master-Plan. Or for as long as Rigby and Company retain their energy and enthusiasm.
The Show Is On the Town- [****]
And It's Better Inside Than in the Park
I must confess I was less than delighted with the original Public Theatre revival of Leonard Bernstein's On the Town in Central Park. Already overhyped in the press, it seemed even more hyped in the actual production.
The open-air Delacorte Theatre should certainly have opened up a grand vista of New York, but the production seemed oddly unfocused. After all, it covers Manhattan uptown and downtown.
That's a lot of territory. What focus there was came from a great cross-stage bridge, with the orchestra aloft, in the middle of the span.
Of course, the frequent presence of lyricists Adolph Green & Betty Comden added vintage authenticity to the proceedings. Not on stage, but in the audience, where they generously received plaudits and tributes.
New York, New York is not the same town it was when young sailors were on their last Shore Leaves, before going off to war. The real war, the Big One.
Then, there was a sense of urgency about the quest for Miss Turnstiles. This really is an exercise in Nostalgia now. What the show has to say to those born from 1960 onwards is a question.
So I made no plans, initially, to see the revised show, which took more than a year to make its way to Broadway. Now at the Gershwin/Uris, it won raves from the usual ravers.
But John Simon, New York's demanding critic, told me he found it 60% improved over the park staging of the summer of 1997. We were waiting to go inside to see Electra, to which he gave a considerably lower percentage of praise.
Confined to a proscenium-box, the show now has a focus and center it seemed to lack under the stars. The abstraction of the Brooklyn Bridge is still there, and its lofty presence dominates the lively proceedings with a benevolent majesty.
I'm not assigning percentage points, but director George C. Wolfe and choreographer Keith Young have greatly tightened and improved the production.
Lea DeLaria is a force of nature as Hildy Esterhazy, the take-charge cab-driver. Tai Jimenez is lovely as Miss Turnstiles aka Ivy Smith. As the passion-propelled Clair DeLoone, Sarah Knowlton is a crazy charmer.
As the three Fancy Free gobs, Robert Montano, Jesse Tyler Ferguson, and Perry Laylon Ojeda are a continual delight.
For the record, the capable designers are Adrianne Lobel [sets], Paul Tazewell [costumes], and Paul Gallo [lighting]. These production values are just another very good reason not to miss this high-spirited revival.
If you are too young for it to work as Nostalgia, let it become a wonderful glimpse of the Romantic Legend of New York. A Musical History, with song and dance!
Leonard Bernstein Once Again!
Trouble in Tahiti at Manhattan School [****]
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Art Deco elegance in the Manhattan School of Music revival of Leonard Bernstein's opera, Trouble in Tahiti.
Photo: Carol Rosegg 1998.
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Bernstein's evergreen mini-opera of marital problems doesn't take place in Tahiti. That's part of the joke.
The title refers to a Technicolor motion-picture the wife, Dinah, has just seen. She regales her bored husband with its splendors in "What a movie!"
As the wary, claustrophobic couple spar at breakfast, a Greek Chorus jazz trio, hovering behind their chairs, burbles "Suburbia!" It's the same tune Bernstein used in On the Town's "New York, New York."
As they move separately through their day, Dinah longs for "A Quiet Place." And Sam, named for Bernstein's father-whose marriage was an unhappy mismatch, as in this opera-wants nothing more than to win a handball trophy.
He misses his son's school-play, just as Bernstein's dad missed his son's debut as a solo pianist with the Boston Public School Orchestra!
This still relevant portrait of modern marriages in the metropolis was paired with Gustav Holst's Savitri. This is a setting of a scene from the great Hindu Epic, the Mahabharata.
It makes a charming curtain-raiser for Bernstein's unhappily marrieds. Death comes to claim Savitri's husband, Satyavan, whom she deeply loves. Death warns her beforehand, but she is powerless to prevent him dying before her eyes.
Showing herself unafraid and reverent before Death, he is so impressed he offers her the gift of Life. But only for herself.
She then tells Death that Satyavan is her life, so he is tricked into restoring him. Happy Ending!
As usual, the advanced students in the Opera Theatre program of the Manhattan School of Music were outstanding vocally and dramatically.
Although-as with the Juilliard Opera Theatre productions-there are only three performances each of these annual fall and spring stagings, they are mounted and performed as though prepared for a permanent professional repertory.
Glen Barton Cortese conducted both works, with Michael Montel staging. Designers were Mark Nayden [sets], David Zyla [costumes], and Marilyn Rennagel [lighting].
Jews & Jesus at LaMaMa- [***]
Not a Religious Hustle or Conversion Mania
Oren Safdie [book] and Ronnie Cohen [music & lyrics] need a new title for their very amusing musical about Mixed Marriages.
The current one suggests everything from the Sanhedrin rejecting Jesus as the Messiah-and demanding his death-to those earnest young Jews who want to convert other Jews to Christianity.
Various friends I invited to see the show all turned me down. They were all Jewish and all thought it must be a show about JEWS FOR JESUS. "No thank you! I don't want any part of that!"
Actually, they missed a hilarious series of situations with Jews-and their Christian lovers and mates-trying to respect each others' traditions. Not to mention placating their families, opposed to mixed-religion matches.
First-timers at Roman Catholic services, for example, should be warned that only the clergy wear yarmulkes. Ordinary men-even Jews-must have their heads uncovered.
[In Christian Iconography, you'll never see Jesus wearing a skullcap. The Pope, maybe, but not the Christ! Why? God only knows.]
Both the songs and the situations are very funny, sometimes even touching. Playing a variety of roles, Sean Power, Hope Salas, Dee Ann Newkirk, Kevin Merritt, Mary Ann Conk, and Teddy Coluca were all believable and lovable.
This is certainly not the Oberammergau Passion Play. Instead, it's a fast-paced play for our times about Loving-and coming to terms with Faith and Tradition.
The Cry Pitch Carrolls at Christmastide- [**]
Can They Replace Hansel & Gretel and Nutcracker?
If you have not yet visited HERE, you are missing some of the kookiest and most unusual of avant-garde theatre experiments in town. There's even a café for those hungry for more than cutting-edge cultural epiphanies.
HERE also has a long room-through which you must walk to reach two of its theatres-which doubles an art-gallery for creations which range from the sublime to the appallingly ridiculous. To retread a previously coined phrase.
During the recent holiday season, The Cry Pitch Carrolls, a most unusual snowbound musical was on view. But the carols were not from Angels anyone has heard on High.
Ruth Margraff's fertile fantasy imagined the libretto, with a charming score by Matthew Pierce. Someone may have been high, but it was certainly not any of the Traditional Angelic Pantheon.
In an intimate show-box-designed by Allen Hahn-there were three tiny houses, each with a pointy Gothic roof and lots of snow. These were inhabited by three women who looked like White Rabbits in their snuggies, equipped with ears.
The central house/shrine featured a stained-glass window of a White Poodle. The actual Poodle seemed to be an object of worship.
But He [or She-it's hard to tell with stage-poodle-puppets] rose magically in the air and disappeared from this Idyllic Winter Scene. To the immense distress of the three women.
They were identified in the program as the widowed Mrs. Earl Coppenan, Mrs. Norman Aho, and Mrs. Lloyd Racine. Their husbands had of course shuffled off this mortal coil. Killed in the Arctic Winter Aftermath of a nuclear disaster.
The program was even more specific: "Real names of widows pictured in original slide of the first congregation of Rev. Paul D. Margraff, Christmas 1972, Bible Baptist Church basement in Ipshpeming, Michigan."
An alternative Object of Veneration to replace the White Poodle was soon offered by The Amazing Bible Smuggler's Wife.
She was dragging a large child, sprawled over a child's red wagon, with obvious effort. The program identified Him as the Small Christus.
Alas, there was No Room at the Inn all over again! The suspicious widows did not want to make the Woman and Child welcome.
But the Risen Christ, at last, seemed to replace the widows' lost husbands. Or something like that...
Well, this libretto is a distinct change from the sentimental juvenilities of Amahl and Hansel & Gretel.
But if HERE-or any other group-is looking for an annual Holiday Pageant, an Alternative Nativity, Ruth Margraff really needs to share some more information about what went on in her parson-father's church basement a generation ago.
The music is both haunting and charming. And it was very well performed by singers and orchestra. Tim Maner staged in this peep-show space. Basil Twist designed the Puppet Poodle.
You really had to be there. Words cannot describe, etc.
A New Year's Gift from the Coast-
San Francisco Opera Announces 10-Month Season!
Because the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House [1931] is one of the world's most handsome houses for Music Theatre, the fact that its season is so short has always seemed a real aesthetic loss. And not only for Bay Area music-lovers.
Add to that the excellence of its productions-in design, staging, and casting-and it seems almost a cultural crime that more opera fans cannot see them over a longer period of time. Outstanding San Francisco Opera casts include not only the greatest voices-and acting talents-of the present, but also the Stars of Tomorrow.
So the news that the SFO proposes to launch a dynamic new ten-month season this coming fall will surely be most welcome around the world. For many opera connoisseurs abroad, it hasn't been possible, or convenient, to fly out to the Golden Gate for the all-too-brief fall seasons. Or for the short Summer Festival.
Lotfi Mansouri, SFO's General Director, has planned a season stretching from 11 September 1999 to 2 July 2000. This will be the 77th season, with 84 performances of 11 opera productions.
Way back when I was a UC/Berkeley undergrad-and an usher and a super at SFO-the season lasted a bare three weeks in fall, with a couple of nights in Sacramento and Los Angeles.
But even then, under Maestro Gaetano Merola, great European talents and astounding new voices were heard at the San Francisco Opera well before they were invited to the Met. And both new operas and works long forgotten were given handsome productions at the SFO before other American opera organizations would take a chance on them.
This spirit of innovation and experiment, of inspired risk-taking-continuing under the ebullient and resourceful Mansouri-has made San Francisco one of the world's important Opera Cities. And added immeasurably to its cultural appeal.
There was a time when even the Metropolitan Opera toured to San Francisco. But the Quake of 1906 put an abrupt stop to that. The photo of a glum Enrico Caruso seated on his trunk outside the ruins of the Palace Hotel explains it all.
But, bit by bit, the Met cut back on its regional touring schedule. And its New York season has become shorter as well. In fact, the Met's annual season is almost laughably shorter than those of most provincial continental opera houses.
In Europe, a ten-month season is the rule. Not that operas will be sung on stage every night. The Opera Ballet must have its turn. And opera orchestras also like to have concerts to show off their talents where they can actually be seen.
Opera buffs will want to book soon Marilyn Horne and Friends, scheduled for 3 October. This is Jackie Horne's farewell performance at the San Francisco Opera. She will be joined on stage by her friends and colleagues Renée Fleming, Ruth Ann Swenson, Carol Vaness, Frederica von Stade, Jerry Hadley, and Samuel Ramey.
The three new productions-among the eleven operas to be staged-will be Charpentier's Louise, Verdi's Nabucco, and Wagner's Parsifal.
In addition to the established SFO roster of international stars, War Memorial debuts are planned for Barbara Bonney, Sonia Ganassi, Andrea Gruber, Vesselina Kasarova, José Bros, Michael Eder, Gwyn Hugh-Jones, Mark Lundberg, Ramon Vargas, and Christopher Ventris.
Considering the hullabaloo which accompanied the recent SFO world premier of Andre Previn's A Streetcar Named Desire, it's interesting to note it will not be on the roster of revivals.
Unfortunately, a close reading of the production schedule suggests that the coming season will not be one of opera performances spread over ten months. But rather one with productions scheduled from September to January. And from June to July.
Still, that is a lot better than the old three-week season!
For further information, consult the SFO Website: www.sfopera.com
[Loney]
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