Jules Massenet and Henri Cain | Cendrillon / 2018

dream and language

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jules Massenet (composer), Henri Cain (libretto, based on the story by Charles Perreault) Cendrillon / 1899; the production I saw was the Metropolitan Opera’s live HD production on April 29, 2018

 

Jules Massenet’s 1899 Cinderalla-based opera, Cendrillon, was a bit hit upon its premiere at Paris’ Opéra-Comique; but only this year received a production for the first time at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Tastes changed early in the 20th century, and Massenet’s beautiful scores, with their tributes to everyone from Mendelsohn to Wagner, with a few stops for Mozart and Strauss along the way. But the fact that Cendrillon had never previously made it to Broadway seems to be a particularly sad event.

      Fortunately, the great American mezzo-soprano, Joyce DiDonato rediscovered the work (after it had performed by Frederica von Stade) more than a decade ago and warmed up to it playing in a Laurent Pelly production (he also designed the remarkable costumes) in Santa Fe, London, Brussels, and elsewhere. As a regular in MET productions, it was perhaps inevitable that eventually DiDonato would be featured in a production in New York, and we can now hope that, given its great success, it may join the MET repertoire. Certainly, it was visionary of the MET to include it their famed live HD series, which my husband Howard and I saw yesterday in a Los Angeles movie theater, and which may help make it a production which audiences will embrace. Clearly, the elderly audience with whom we saw it loved the production, and I think their grandchildren might equally enjoy it.

     Unlike Rossini’s better known La Cenerentola (in which DiDonato has also performed the Cinderalla role), the Massenet version does not focus as much on the young stepdaughter’s ill treatment as it does on the fairy-tale elements of the work, going back to the original Perreault story for its source. The mean stepmother is this version, although with her two fawning and fairly ignorant daughters, is much closer to the mother and daughters of Beauty and the Beast than the wicked figures of Rossini’s world.

     Like Cocteau’s Belle, Massenet’s Lucette (Cinderalla’s real name in this version) basically accepts her life as a cleaning woman to the vain stepmother, Madame de la Haltière (the always wonderful Stephanie Blythe) and her almost-idiot like stepsisters, dressed in comical-like balloon-like dresses that evidently stand for the haute-couture of the day. In comparison, at least in the early scenes, Lucette looks like a peasant woman from a Verdi opera. And despite her hard life, she is deeply loved still by her weak-willed father, Pandolfe (Laurent Naouri) who, after his wife’s death, inexplicably chose this monstrous woman of what she claims is a royal background. It may be that his little farm in the forest was simply not successful enough to pay the rent. Now the man simply suffers for his horrible mistake, his daughter paying the punishment for the crime.

     Most of Lucette’s life, when she isn’t busy cleaning up the story-book-like house—set designer Barbara de Limburg has covered the walls of the constantly shifting rooms with phrases from the Perreault tale—is spent sleeping and dreaming; and, in fact, she has a hard time, as we may as well, in knowing whether her experiences are real or simply dreams.

      It is certainly a dream of an opera, with the soaring phrases of beauty, suddenly transforming into more comic passages, and moving back again into glorious romanticism, which conductor Bertrand de Billy described as “particularly French in style.

 

    One, moreover, cannot imagine a more remarkable cast: besides DiDonato, Blythe, and the long-performing Naouri, the remarkable soprano Kathleen Kim (playing The Fairy Godmother) and another regular MET performer Alice Coote (who performs the “soprano de sentiment” role of Prince Charming). It may be true, as The New York Times reviewer Zachary Wolfe argues, that Coote’s “voice is too blunt to expand over the score’s long lines,” but in the production I saw, she came off amazingly real in her trouser role as the unhappy prince who cannot find anyone in his kingdom to love. And when he does meet his love in the form of a surprise guest at the ball, Lucette in a stunningly beautiful sequined white gown which gradually cascades into darker colors at the bottom (all others are dressed in comically outrageous versions of red) she/he sings in quite beautiful awe about the event.

      If this Massenet work is about the confusion of dream and reality—there are long periods when Lucette simply believes she has dream her entire visit to the ball and her later encounter with the Prince in the forest—this version, at least, is also all about hearing and language, the joy of being told the tale through words. Not only the walls, but chairs, tables, and the wonderful carriage on which Lucette rides to the ball are identified with their linguistic equivalents, the carriage itself made up of the letters spelling “carosse,” the old French word meaning “coach.”

       Quite vindictively, it at first appears, The Fairy God Mother refuses to let the loving couple see one another in the forest, only allowing them to hear each other’s sad pleas. Yet that’s precisely the point. Hearing and reading reality is what truly matters here, not action and adventures. The only incredible actions in this work are Lucette’s flight from the ball at midnight, whereupon she loses her shoe, and the impossible attempts to find the foot that fits her glass slipper.

     Otherwise, Cendrillon is a work of poetical and musical wonderment. Eventually, The Fairy Godmother comes to the rescue on a pile of large books. And Pelly’s and De Limburg’s direction and sets put their faith on spectral elements, allowing the Perreault tale to come alive in a way that Verdi or even the later Puccini, in their commitment to realism, might never have been able to imagine.

      The opera closes suddenly, since we already know the end, with the chorus announcing that their tale has come to an end, the loveliest close to an opera that one might ever imagine, the char-woman in the Prince’s arms and even the terrible stepmother admitting—now that Lucette has found her own royalty—that she truly loves her. If we don’t believe her one little bit, it doesn’t matter. Cendrillon is a fairy-tale, a thing of language, as the host, Ailyn Pérez announced early on before the opera began, a much-needed tonic these days.

 

Los Angeles, April 29, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2018).

Orlando di Lasso | Lagrime di San Pietro (Tears of St. Peter) / 2018

redeeming the future

by Douglas Messerli

 

Orlando di Lasso Lagrime di San Pietro (Tears of St. Peter), performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, directed by Peter Sellars / the performance I saw was at the Wallis Annenberg Center for Performing Arts/Bram Goldsmith Theater in Beverly Hills on October 20, 2018

 

The very last of the 20 madrigal and motet sections of Orlando di Lasso’s masterful Renaissance composition Lagrime di San Pietro (Tears of St. Peter), “Negando il mio Signor,” summarizes and transforms the saint’s tortuous sufferings for having denied Christ three times before the resurrection. Jesus, himself, had foretold the denials of the man who became the first leader of the Christian church, a man who might never have imagined it would be uttered through his own tongue.

      It is that tragedy, his love of Christ and his own betrayal of that love and his faith, that tortures St. Peter and constitutes his near-endless remorse as expressed in this beautiful work. That last madrigal which—as Thomas May writes in a remarkably insightful essay published in the theater program, straddles “the usual distinction between vocal compositions for the sacred (motet)” and the secular, vernacular works (often involving erotic and pastoral topics) of the madrigal, the opera form of its day—bemoans the saint’s own life-long recognition that “By denying my Lord, I have denied my life.” By betraying his beliefs, in short, he has betrayed the individual behind them, his own existence. It is such a modern psychological perception that it is almost breathtaking to hear it sung today.

       More importantly, the fact that it is not sung, as in opera, by a single individual, but by the chorus, the symbolic representation of the entire community, and, in this case, representing the early Christian community who themselves must carry the guilt and pain of their first leader’s temporary cowardice, shifts this work into another dimension. Lasso rather wonderfully, particularly through the more communal form of the madrigal, makes this an issue that shakes the entire religious community rather than simply one man facing his creator, which makes the final resolution of the motet that follows, “See, O man!” something that has meaning for all of us, not just the individual who has denied his own values.

      The “life too guilty,” the desires for “life, go away” is not simply Peter’s cries, but those of the whole of mankind who will not be able to fully embrace their own values. Somehow this has even more meaning at this moment in history than I ever might have imagined.

  

    The fact that director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale and director Peter Sellars determined that instead of a production of this work the way it had usually been performed, with a stolid chorus standing in position accompanied by a few instruments, to instead create a truly a cappella work, conducted by Jenny Wong, and moving the chorus into vaguely conceived choreographic positions, brings a completely new perspective to this Renaissance piece.

      A friend of mine, attending the work, Nina Berson, was not certain that the choreography entirely worked, particularly given the problems of attending to the English text on a small screen placed at the back of the stage, which was difficult to scan given the various “positions of suffering” that chorus members, often facing off as two opposing groups, enacted on the front of the stage.

      And there is, I must admit, some credence in her position. Yet, those terpsichorean movements also enlivened what, later in the work—after the group retreated to chairs in order to sing the final dramatic madrigals and the last motet—I felt the work had lost some of its energy. If the dramatic bodily interchanges between chorale members might not have always made total sense, they charged it with a kind of bitter anger for their pope’s (and therefore their own) betrayals. This after all was a religion still in fight with the rest of the world, and they desperately needed to justify all their beliefs and actions, not only to the world at large but to themselves.

      Lasso, fortunately, created a work so tonally beautiful that you cannot doubt these early believers’ (or later spiritually-committed singers’) purity of intent, and their dedication to the continuance of their faith.

     Grant Gershon has continued to lead the Chorale in a remarkable direction of great singing and performance, and this is one of the very best works I have heard them interpret.

     The costumes by Danielle Domingue Sumi (mostly dark blues and grays) reiterate the concerns of the work, while the lighting by James F. Ingalls re-informs the passionate concerns of the chorus, literally enlightening them with his intense flashes of white light.

      May argues, in his program essay, that at the time of this work’s composition, Lasso himself was an elderly man, having undergone his own series of doubts and melancholy during his creation this moving work. And, if that is true, Lagrime di San Pietro might be described, in fact, as a work of old men, a melancholic composer and an older scion looking back on his atoning sainthood (despite all the younger performers and artists who this evening brought this piece to fruition). And that fact, ultimately, makes this a very sad work, a long regret for having lived a life involved with doubt and failure.

      Still, it is also a very forgiving work, a passionate plea for the younger generations to forgive their elders for their failures with a desire, so marvelously expressed in Lasso’s music, for what they have left behind. Would that all of us old men and women could bequeath such a masterwork of redemption to our children and younger friends.

 

Los Angeles, October 23, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2018).

Gob Squad | Creation (Pictures for Dorian) / 2018

the past becomes the future

by Douglas Messerli

 

Gob Squad Creation (Pictures for Dorian) / Los Angeles, REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/Cal Arts Theater) / the performance I attended with Deborah Meadows was on Thursday, October 18, 2018

 

The Berlin-based Gob Squad, as they describe themselves, “a seven-headed monster”—consisting of Johanna Freiburg, Sean Patten, Sharon Smith, Berit Stumpf, Sarah Thom, Bastain Trost, and Simon Will—have been creating, over the past few years, major performances in, as they put it, “all continents except Antarctica,” and presenting “a schizophrenic…and multiple split personality: hermaphrodite, binational, and bilingual.”

     Their newest production Creation (Pictures for Dorian) hobbles together notions from Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray—you recall, that novel in which Gray sells himself to the devil, so to speak, by allowing a hidden painting to represent his aging and morally corrupt life, while he himself remains endlessly young and handsome (see my review in My Year 2011)—with the actual lives of the performers invited to engage in this work: Mallory Fabian, Natasha Liu, Nic Prior, Dan Guerrero, Tina Preston, and Amentha Dymally, all of whom have had young and long-life careers in the Los Angeles scene.

     Nic Prior, who evidently identifies—at least in one role he played, as he recounts—with a kind of transgender identity, serves as the young Dorian, perfectly willing to transform himself into a stage figure with whom we can all identify; he presents himself as a kind of shifting gay/female figure with whom the audience might find intriguing, and plays the central figure with the alluring ambiguousness of Wilde’s hero.

 

   Fortunately, however, this is not a story of a hidden-away painting that reveals the major figure’s moral bad behavior, but, through the multi-generational actors’ recounts a true tale of the desire to engage with the spectator—we the audience. These are, after all, theatrical figures, bigger than life and smaller than life simultaneously, who want to engage us in their personal histories or, at least, the figures they perform as representations of their personal lives. Young and older, they are determined to face the audience (they turn away at various personal demands), despite their doubts and fears, to create the notion that Wilde proclaimed what art is all about: “It is the spectator, and not life, that art truly mirrors.”

      Through the wonderful probings of the narrator, demanding dramatic endeavors and personal answers for their life-time behaviors, the actors in this work gradually reveal their relationships to theater, their favorite moments, their serious doubts, and their always intense desires to be front and center-on-stage for most of their lives. Each revelation is slightly devastating: a moment when the younger Preston studied with Jerzy Grotwoski (she has also performed in major works by contemporary playwrights whom I’ve published, including John O’Keefe, Maria Irene Fornes, John Steppling and Murray Mednick), Harlem-born Dymally recalling a moment with her co-actor in James Baldwin’s The Amen Corner, and, perhaps most touching of all, Dan Guerrero’s memory, at the age of 24, (as the play jokes, he is caught in the 1960s), of his appearing in a summer-stock production of The Fantasticks, where he was a bit unsure of his heterosexual relationship performance of the wonderful “Soon It’s Going to Rain.” He achieved it through taking out his co-actor to a park bench, perhaps explaining why he later turned to a career as an agent, only later to return to performing in ¡Gaytino! (see My Year 2012).

   

 

    These now somewhat elderly figures, at least in their bodies, may seem trapped in another time, consigned to their own performative eras, just as Dorian was in his locked-up painting, yet they remain, so they proclaim, to hold their youth still within their souls. Indeed, the narrator defines some of them as the future, while describing the younger figures as the past.

      Perhaps stage actors are more alive as they age than the younger figures desperately attempting to create their new images for the audience. Certainly, the beautiful Prior, the model-actress Liu, and the talented Fabian, are prettier for our eyes; but the elders live on, like Dorian, keeping their own beauty in their hearts and—yes—through their continual actions upon the stage, not only the theatrical one but upon the theater of life.

      We all know that the past will be become the future, that the younger talents designated as something now gone will soon become the talents we want to see. But as Wilde demonstrates through Dorian Gray, they too will too quickly become something embalmed in their own talents. It’s sad; but surely that is the way of life, and it energizes this tragi-comedy to become a celebration of life.

 

Los Angeles, October 19, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2018).

Luis Valdez | Valley of the Heart / 2018

let us now praise famous men

by Douglas Messerli

 

Luis Valdez Valley of the Heart / Los Angeles, Mark Taper Forum / the performance I attended was on November 7, 2018

 

Let me begin by saying the obvious: playwright Luis Valdez—a major force in American theater and the very heart of California Chicano theater, a man who, working in the fields with Cesar Chavez in the mid-1960s, taught migrant workers how to perform plays we wrote for them, produced on a flatbed truck—has never been a subtle playwright. As in his beloved Zoot Suit, perhaps the longest running play in Los Angeles history and recently revived at the Mark Taper Forum (see My Year 2017), Valdez’s talents lay in how he makes history come alive, infusing his works into a political context and a sense of emotional feeling. The families he portrays, often with the generational tensions between the Mexican-born or, in this instance Japanese-born, elders who must come to terms with their US-born children and vice-versa. Even in their assimilation with their world, the younger generation must also pay homage and learn from their elders. He represents the kind generational pulls that are at the center of almost every immigrant family.

 

     There is almost a dance of these generational tensions in Valdez’s retellings of historical events, and in his newest play, the first in nearly 13 years, the field workers, both Chicano and Japanese, literally dance in patterns as they make their way up and down the broccoli fields of the Central Valley, in this instance the pre-World War II Valley of Heart’s Delight, now known as Silicon Valley.

       Valdez’s newest play, first performed in 2013 in the little mission community of San Juan Bautista, now having finally reached its core audience in Los Angeles, is also a kind of “Romeo and Juliet” story, without that work’s tragic family consequences. Well, that’s not quite true; there are certainly tragic consequences that result from the immediate love that overwhelms Benjamin Montaño (Lakin Valdez), the son of hard-working Cayetano (Daniel Valdez) and Paula (the always resplendent Rose Portillo). Benjamin’s younger brother, Ernesto (“Tito”) (Moises Castro) and sister Maruca (Christy Sandoval) also get swept up in the tragic events, on both a personal and national level.

       Yet, in this later-life play (Valdez is now 78), the author shifts his focus to another ethnic group, people who may own the land on which the Montaños work, but suddenly are far more vulnerable that the migrants who work the fields. The Yamaguchi family are only slightly better off than the laborers; they have a great wood-heated stove, an in-house bathroom, and a large wooden sauna. But immediately after Pearl Harbor they are in even greater danger than their faithful workers, as, Valdez emphatically reminds us, they are gradually rounded up, men before wives, children soon after, to be taken away to nearly insufferable Japanese detention camps, where they are forced to live in inhuman conditions, sometimes in California race-horse barns and, finally, in this case, the Heart Mountain Relocation Camp in Wyoming, where the dust and snow (depending upon the seasons) are nearly endless.

 

    By the time that Thelma (“Teruko”) (Melanie Arii Mah), her parents Ichiro (Randall Nakano) and Hana (Joy Osmanski), along with Thelma’s younger brother Joe (“Yoshi”) (Justin Chien) are forced into detention, Thelma and Benjamin have been secretly married and she is pregnant with Benjamin’s baby.

     Although her mother is aware of her daughter’s nearly insufferable “transgression,” her father is clueless, having already been sent away from his family to another detention camp in Louisiana. What can you do? You simply try to survive, the young farm foreman, Benjamin, promising to keep the farm until their return, while still attempting the impossible visits to her mother and the woman he loves—all made more complex by the fact that the man her family had wanted Thelma to marry, Calvin Sakamoto (Scott Keiji Takeda), is interned in the very same camp.

     The far more assimilated and culturally dismissive Calvin mostly serves as comic relief, proving himself again and again as someone totally unsuitable for the caring and thoughtful Thelma—that is until, refusing to sign the terrible “loyalty oath” demanded from a government in which many of internees had thought of representing their own country, he is imprisoned. The Yamaguchi family became “yes-yes”-ers as opposed to Calvin’s alignment with the “no-nos.” Thelma’s brother Joe even agrees to serve in the military.

      Meanwhile, Benjamin and his family, having moved into the former Yamaguchi house find that they love the small improvements in their lives, and Benjamin becomes increasingly torn between his commitment to his now almost always drunken father and his wife’s family and their condition. The farm succeeds, he selling many of its now extensive fruits, squashes, and other vegetables to the American military. His brother, as well, signs up for service, and his sister, joins the WACS.

 

     A visit he makes to Wyoming to see his wife and son, Benjirou, ends badly when the re-united father orders him to leave, the now suffering elderly father unable to accept the marriage between him and his daughter. Both families suffer tragedies when Ernesto is killed in battle and Joe is killed in Europe, both awarded purple hearts. And even after the war, which also ends in the death in camp of Thelma’s father, she must remain with her mother who is in danger of being returned to Japan.

      I know this history well. I edited and published Violet Kazue de Cristoforo’s ground-breaking memoir of the camps and anthology of Concentration Camp Kaiko Haiku, May Sky: There Is Always Tomorrow on my Sun & Moon Press in 1997 (see my obituary comments on her in My Year 2007), but it is also clear that many younger and even older Americans don’t recall when American citizens were arrested and imprisoned simply because of their race.

      And, in this year of 2018, when another American president threatens the same fate upon the future Chicanos of our world, perhaps there could not be a more appropriate play; for despite all their impossible differences, Thelma and Benjamin did survive as a couple; their Romeo and Juliet relationship produced Benjirou (who, played by the same actor who acted as the young Calvin, is told by the now ancient Benjamin, that he looks too much like Calvin, producing guffaws in the audience) and his several children, some gay, some straight. Benjamin’s younger sister is also clearly now a lesbian.

       I told you Valdez is not a subtle writer, and he gives his audience what they (we) want to hear when, late in the play, one of his central characters states: "California is now half Latino and Asian, and there's not a damn thing anybody can do about it." When the lights went down and came up again, the audience, made up of some of the old-time subscribers, but also, amazingly, of a audience of Japanese men and women and Chicano couples, some even dressed in their native attire, hollered out with screams and hoots for their complete appreciation of Valdez’s work. His is truly a theater of the people, something perhaps we need in these terribly divisive times. Valdez’s play is about bringing communities together, and it works. Let us now praise famous men.

     And I should remind my readers of the wonderful sets of Japanese-like sliding screens by John Iacovelli, the projections by David Murakami.

 

Los Angeles, November 8, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2018).

Claude Debussy | Pelléas et Mélisande / 2016

the outsiders

by Douglas Messerli

 

Claude Debussy (composer, based on the play by Maurice Maeterlinck) Pelléas et Mélisande / the performance I saw as a concert version with partial staging by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor / the performance Howard Fox and I attended was at the Walt Disney Concert Hall on Sunday, February 21, 2016

 

Claude Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande is work primarily about outsiders. The work begins with the sad Mélisande sitting near a stream where her beautiful crown can be seen in the waters below. Is she an unhappy princess, rejecting her kingdom, or a queen purposely abandoning her marriage? We never know, and she remains a mystery throughout, an outsider not only without a home but, apparently, without a family.

      Prince Golaud, who comes upon her, has been hunting, and is now lost in the strange kingdom of Allemonde. When he suggests he might be able to retrieve the crown, Mélisande refuses his help, obviously disinterested in returning to her former position, whatever it may have consisted of. We also suspect that she has been sexually abused by the fact that she refuses to allow Golaud to touch her.* But we learn nothing more, only that she is willing to follow Golaud to his own country, where his grandfather, Arkel, reigns as King.

       But even there, Golaud is still somewhat of an outsider, having refused to marry the woman his grandfather had chosen for him. Since he has now married Mélisande, he must beg forgiveness from his grandfather for his disobedience and ask for their acceptance of his new bride.

       Arkel, who is the only being in the work who seems to know who and what he is, being centered in the world in which lives, readily grants his forgiveness, since Golaud is a widower, and his elder grand-child is permitted to return.

       Moreover, as we soon discover, Golaud’s mother, Geneviéve is now married to another man, who is seriously ill. The younger son, Pelléas, is his offspring, and Golaud’s beloved half-brother.

  

    But even Pelléas, although living in the castle, clearly feels at odds in its dark and foreboding home, wherein his grandfather lies in illness. His youth, finally, keeps him from a leadership position, not to mention that the castle also contains Golaud’s son, Ynoid, sired by his first wife. Is it any wonder, accordingly, that there is a deep tension between all those who now live within the castle walls?

      By the end of the opera, we discover that all have been deeply affected by the unhappiness that has been inflicted upon family members, which we see played out in various journeys throughout the countryside, and into the dangerous vaults that lie beneath the castle itself. Even a trip to a nearby fountain, said once to heal the blind, but whose waters now are apparently ineffective, presents certain dangers, and becomes the place of the final destruction of the Pelléas and the beautiful Mélisande.

      In this world of outsiders, each individual seeks some other being to cling to, Golaud depending upon Mélisande to make his life meaningful, while Mélisande becomes attracted, quite naturally, to his younger brother who eventually returns her love. It hardly matters than the relationship between the young Mélisande and her brother-in-law may be chaste and that their love is closer to that of children than to a real passion that is at the center of so many operatic works. No one, in this frightening cold and dark world, can accept anything outside their own personal needs.

      Indeed, Mélisande’s loss of her ring in the Fountain of the Blind, even though it arises from the simple childish action of her tossing it into the air to see it shine in the sun, parallels the first scene of the opera where she has lost her crown. Was that too a rash action that meant far more that it might seem? Certainly, the fact that she is spending that day with Pelléas, at least symbolically, suggests that he has usurped Golaud’s place in her heart. And, at the very moment that she loses the ring, Golaud’s horse throws him, seriously injuring him. The fact that, after he ring is discovered to be missing, the two are commanded by Golaud to undergo a dangerous night-time voyage to a cave where she claims to have lost the ring, only brings the couple closer together.

     In short, Golaud’s increasing jealousy and ultimate stabbing of his brother, seems almost predetermined. In order to survive he must find a way to maintain the status quo of his life, and any impediment to that must be sent away or destroyed, as Pelléas had already come to perceive in his final announcement of his determination to leave.

        But in many senses, this is no one’s home except Arkel’s, who wisely determines that even Golaud and Mélisande’s newborn child must similarly be sent away so that she can live her own life.

  

     The Los Angeles Philharmonic concert production of this opera, directed by Esa-Pekka Salonen, revealed all the shimmering beauty of Debussy’s remarkable score; but in David Edwards’ somewhat wooden direction, which featured a whole ghostlike chorus of badly sculptured manikins, and which required each singer to move into position for their arias from a long staircase leading to the back of the orchestra, merely reiterated the disjunctive lives of the characters within the tale.

      All the major singers, Stéphane Degout as Pelléas, Laurent Naouri as Golaud, Fecicity Palmer as Geneviéve, Camilla Trilling as Mélisande, and, particularly Willard White as Arkell credibly performed their roles—although from the high balcony seats where Howard and I sat it was often difficult to completely hear their voices over the resonant sounds of the orchestra, this despite the hall’s wonderful acoustics. The addition of narrative passages, pulled from various writing of Maurice Maeterlinck, although well read by Kate Burton, seemed intrusive and often even further blurred the already vague story.

      It is clear that in the slow-moving and minimal action of the opera that a full performance of the work is, as always, a difficult thing to achieve. Much like Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, the music tells the story far more than the singers’ actions or movements, which, in this case, consists primarily of holding hands or sharing gentle kisses. Accordingly, it is perhaps just as effective to present a “concert version” such as this one. But it might have been better if the characters were seated in from of the orchestra and simply stood for their moments of performance than trotting them up and down the Walt Disney Concert stage.

      This was, nonetheless, a memorable afternoon in the revelation of the music and meaning of this innovative turn-of-the-century opera.

     

*Maeterlinck himself wrote in Ariane et Barbe-bleue that Mélisande was one of Bluebeard’s wives, who had escaped from his castle.

 

Los Angeles, February 22, 2016

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2016).

Hotel Modern | Kamp / 2018

toys

by Douglas Messerli

 

Hotel Modern (theater group) Kamp / Los Angeles, REDCAT (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) / the performance I saw with Deborah Meadows was opening night, September 20, 2018

 

The Rotterdam theater troupe Hotel Modern, who over the past few years have been touring the US, have produced yet another important document about the Holocaust, and, even more importantly, tell its story in a way that appears to a younger audience who may not completely be acquainted with the horrors and the German, Polish, and other European Nazi death camps. If the audience at Redcat last night is any indication, they are reaching an audience of teens and 20-year-olds who most need to hear this story.

       The three performers, two women and one male dressed in gray robes (Pauline Kalker, Arléne Hoornweg, and Herman Helle), tell the horrific story in this case not through a barrage of reportage, but silently. Having created what feels like a completely accurate miniature reaction of Auschwitz, they move trains into the set, unload hundreds of passengers, move them into detention and into the gas showers, show them at work, trying to survive on the gruel they were fed, beaten to death, and even electrocuted on the fences as one man tries to escape, all my by hand-manipulating tiny figures within this landscape while filming them through a tiny camera that imposes their images in large form upon a wall that covers the entire back of the proscenium theater. 

       Somewhat like a silent film, we see these ghoulish figures, whose bodies are so wasted that they appear—as they truly are—as stick figures, while their faces are contorted into open holes of mouth and eyes a bit like Edvard’s Munch’s The Scream and even more reminiscent of the Expressionist German paintings before and after the great wars. I saw another of their “war” dramas, The Great War, in 2015 (and, in fact, my review in My Year 2015 was called “Toy Soldiers.”)

      Despite the lack of dialogue, however, sound is extremely important here: a saw against wood, a Nazi Billy club hitting the head and other body parts of a victim, the thin soup being poured into the prisoner’s bowls, the shovel against the poison that is tossed into the showers, the drunken songs of the German guards, the train chugging its way into camp. Only the prisoners cannot be heard, much as in real life for those of us outside the camps (it’s fascinating that the 2015 film, László Nemes’ Son of Saul gives us a vision of that same hell with endless voices of the damned).

      But these figures, brought in and out in large interconnected blocks are clearly interchangeable puppets, like the toy soldiers of a children, are hefted in and out much as the Nazi’s themselves treated them, as indefinable groups rather than individualized beings. More than anything else the “puppeteers” themselves reveal how life in the camp was lived; people were subject the idea of the entire Jewish (gypsy, gay, etc) communities, unworthy of being perceived as separate from their groups. Hitler had already established categories of people which this presentation reiterates. The mechanized behavior of the prisoners is played out in this drama simply through the larger human beings, who control and set up their miniature figures, with little concern of the figurines and separate representations of being.

      And in that sense, the regulation of the set becomes its own statement about the nature of the actual human beings’ lives. Lights are turned on, one by one, throughout the miniature camp, fences are set up at seemingly illogical places, masses are gathered into different spots in the prison without logical explanation—but all with a superhuman regularity, as if these “players” are gods. I have never before seen a better signification of what it actually means when boys and girls take out toy soldiers and trot them through their imaginary and often meaningless gatherings.

     The wars these children play out are as arbitrary as all human wars and the sufferings those involved must endure. The representations of actuality are made to be utterly meaningless in the act of play itself.

      I suppose for those of my generation, most members of whom well know of the true horrors of the destruction of millions of Jewish citizens and others, that this retelling of the tale might seem almost unnecessary or, at the very least, repetitive. We have been there in our imaginations and in our readings so very many times. But by demonstrating the complete control the Nazis—who thought of themselves as superhuman gods—had over their prisoners, or playthings, we come to realize that the people gassed, shot, and beaten in the camps were, as the Hotel Modern group makes clear, were just that, toys to be played with, not beings of blood and flesh.

       This group has found the perfect to entertain younger generations while simultaneously revealing the terror of the children and child-like adults of every period in life.

       After the performance, the group invited the audience to come up to their miniature Auschwitz to see it up-close and even take pictures. My guest, Deborah Meadows, and I instinctively ran off in the other direction, not so much because we were hurrying back to our homes from the hour-long performance, but because, I believe, we could not imagine ourselves as tourists to such a dark past.

 

Los Angeles, September 21, 2018

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (September 2018).