Noël Coward | Blithe Spirit / 2015

breaking away

by Douglas Messerli

 

Noël Coward Blithe Spirit / Los Angeles, Ahmanson Theatre, the performance I attended was the matinee of January 11, 2015

 

When I wrote on the film version of Blithe Spirit in late June last year, little did I know I would be seeing a stage production early in the new year—for I might have combined the two and compared them.

     Having now written on a play that I still do not perceive as deeply profound, I have little more to say. Let me just begin by admitting that, as great as it is to see Angela Lansbury exuberantly performing at the age of nearly 90—one of five memorable occasions when I have seen her perform brilliantly on stage (I’d seen her previously in Dear World, Gypsy, Sweeney Todd and The Best Man)—she cannot compare to the impervious fortress of eccentricities created by Margaret Rutherford. Despite her wonderful comic timing, and her balletic machinations as she prepares to collapse from trance to trance, she is reasonably sane when compared with Rutherford’s rendition of Madame Arcati. And, understandably, she appears a bit frail. Still, since nearly everyone, including myself, is in love with Lansbury, it hardly matters. That she is still “here,” after all these years, and her clowning through the mad séances and hocus pocus mutters of Coward’s dark comedy is enough! The remaining cast members, particularly, Charlotte Parry as Ruth, Charles Edwards aa Charles, and Jemina Rooper as Elvira are all capable and convincing. 

 

    What did strike me seeing the play version of the work, embraced in the theatrical conventions of its original subtitle, “An Improbable Comedy,” was just how serious this work really is at heart. Yes, Blithe Spirit is still funny, to which the guttural howls of the man seated behind me attested; the entire audience, indeed, laughed on cue, particularly when Charles was attempting to converse with his spectral ex-wife Elvira while explaining his extra-sensory perceptions to his understandably skeptical current wife, Ruth. And Madame Arcati is simply, as they used to say, a hoot: a wise owl who knows she’s odd and loves being so; offended only when she is described as an amateur, she knows well that, daft or not, she is the “real” thing. And there were moments, of course, in which even I could not hold back my giggles.

    Yet, as Barry Day, writing in the play’s program, pointed out, Coward’s play shares a great deal with the works of Harold Pinter such as The Homecoming or even the farces of Joe Orton (on my mind, since my companion and I recently saw a production of his What the Butler Saw). If the characters express a series of witty bon mots, they are aimed with all seriousness at one another. As Day points out, in this play Charles Condomine is not only “between women,” but is a kind of bigamist—and utterly enchanted, at least for a while, by the situation. Ruth provides him a highly organized, efficient and intelligent existence, wherein she even helps, so he declares to Elvira, with his writing. Elvira, on the other hand, imbues with life with a blithe spirit, an ethereal and comic lightness and beauty that Ruth cannot provide. In short, Ruth is the real and ordinary, while Elvira, even when she was alive, was simply spirit. The balance is perfect, particularly for a man who appears to have little to offer himself. His major occupation, we must remember, is writing rather predictable murder mysteries, such as the one on which is about to embark, concerning a fraudulent and murderous medium. The fact that Madame Arcati is neither a fake nor has any evil intentions but actually does—with the help of their hyper-energized servant, Edith—conjure up a ghost, nixes his boring story. It seems doubtful, at play’s end, that he will write again—unless it is to recount his horrifying experiences with marriage and the dead. 

     Predictably, in their frustration and anger with him and the situation in which they find themselves—particularly after Ruth as well as Elvira joins the dead, arguing that Charles, metaphorically speaking, has helped to “kill them off”—the two women begin to perceive all they have lost, the jokes grow less and less humorous as they turn into bitter jibes and lashing out against transgressions present and past. And explicably, Charles increasingly wishes to be rid of both of them. When he finally succeeds, all hell breaks loose, as his comfy Kent castle is vengefully shattered and destroyed. The real and the spiritual collide to create chaos, sending this selfish Adam out of paradise into the cold Folkestone streets and, presumably, to a long overseas voyage from which he can never safely return. A bit like the self-centered Teddy of Pinter’s The Homecoming, Charles leaves love behind in the ruins, as he moves toward what is probably a meaningless and empty life. If he has temporarily been a bigamist, by play’s end he is a bachelor, akin to his creator, free to seek out the company of his own kind. 

    What has begun as a kind of domestic comedy, accordingly, ends, quite misogynistically, as a tale of man who, having finally weaned himself away from the women he has used and abused all of his life, is condemned to wander the earth just as his wives are doomed to inhabit his now ruined habitat. One might also argue, on the other hand, that Charles has finally entrapped his women in the domestic world at which he saw himself as the center, but which he is now free, however pointlessly, to escape. Whatever is “out there” may be without love, but it possibly may provide new adventures nonetheless, a life he formerly could not imagine.

 

Los Angeles, January 12, 2015

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (January 2015).

Nico Muhly, Nicholas Wright,and Winston Graham | Marnie / 2018

tumbling through their own sentences

by Douglas Messerli

 

Nico Muhly (composer), Nicholas Wright and Winston Graham (libretto), Michael Mayer (stage director), Habib Azar (film director) Marnie / 2018 [Metropolitan Opera live-HD film]

 

I should begin this essay by admitting that I never much liked Alfred Hitchcock’s 1964 film Marnie, mostly because of its hack psychological story, as retooled from Winston Graham’s 1961 novel by screenwriter Jay Presson Allen. I have never much liked her film-writing and doctoring, including works such as The Prime of Miss Brodie, Travels with My Aunt, Forty Carats, Cabaret, Funny Lady and other box-office successes.

     What she basically does is take important novels and plays and “re-fix” them in ways that exaggerate their characters, Liza Minelli’s portrayal of Sally Bowles in Cabaret being a perfect example (she complained that director-choreographer Bob Fosse didn’t much like the Bowles figure, and if you properly read the Isherwood book, why should you?) Although she was known as someone who might re-write and improve works, I think she often turned them into glossier versions of what were actually darker pieces of writing, and Marnie, in particular, seemed like a film, under Hitchcock’s handling, about a tortured psychotic whose problems were simply explained away with a childhood incident in which, seeing her prostitute mother being attacked by a sailor, she took up a fireplace poker and clubbed the intruder to death, the sudden remembrance of which frees her to remain with her husband, Mark Rutland, as her protector instead of facing jail time for her numerous acts of robbery in her past.

      I attended the new Metropolitan opera live-HD production yesterday, accordingly, with some consternation and a great many doubts. Although Muhly and his librettist Nicholas Wright immediately embraced the idea of turning Graham’s novel into an opera, I still feel it’s a highly confused and second-rate work. Even if we discover the heart of Marnie’s problems are quite different from the movie, it doesn’t still quite explain her hatred of all men and her insistence upon robbing them and turning much of her evil gain over to her detestable mother (a bad woman through and through as even her performer Denyce Graves admitted in an intermission interview). But, at least, in refocusing on the novel, Muhly and Wright, along with director Michael Mayer, have given us a much stronger and denser work, which takes the celebrity luster off both the Tipi Hedren and Sean Connery characters, exposing their far darker natures.

      Fortunately, Isabel Leonard (as Marnie) and Christopher Maltman (as Mark) are remarkable singers who take their cues from oboe and trombone intrusions all colored with Muhly’s lyrical explorations that occasionally remind us of Bernard Herrmann’s scores for Vertigo, and other Hitchcock scores, including Marnie.

      That is not to say that Muhly’s score is not original. In fact, along with Wright’s libretto, Mulhy pulls the work away from the great film director’s version, taking its figures deeper into the shadows of human behavior by not only repeating the heroine’s seemingly pointless behavior, but revealing the ugly manipulation of Rutland, who, after discovering Marnie’s role as a serial thief, forces her into a marriage and who, finally in frustration, he tries to rape. The end of Act I ends violently with her attempt to slit her wrists in rejection of his advancements.

     The introduction of Mark’s rather sleazy brother, Terry (played by countertenor Iestyn Davies), moreover, takes us into yet another dimension. This Cain-marked man—a red patch crosses his face from birth—also allies him to the outsider if nearly-perfect looking Marnie. As Davies recognized about his character, although he is another detestable figure in this tale of anti-heroes, he is the truthteller, determined to make Marnie realize who she truly is.

 

     But, obviously—given the fact that Muhly and Wright have literally split Marnie’s character into four other madrigal singers, dressed and with hair coifed in a similar manner, simply wearing differently colored coats, representing a few of her various identities—it is nearly impossible for her to discover who she is. If Terry sees her as simply a liar, she perceives herself primarily as a survivor, someone who is attempting to stay alive by challenging all the dominant men (and women) in her world who tell her, time and again, that she is not only worthless but an evil being.

      The worst of these is her own mother who has convinced her daughter that she has jealously suffocated her baby brother soon after his birth—an absolutely horrific possibility completely exorcised from Allen’s screenplay. But Mark’s own mother (Janis Kelly) is not much of a less monster for him, deciding that despite her distaste for his appearance and morals, that Terry is perhaps more ruthless and, accordingly, better able to run her son’s printing operation. If Kelly, in an intermission interview saw her character as only being “strong” instead of evil, the book, in which Mark’s mother is secretly buying up stocks in the company in order to oust mark, makes it apparent that she too is a kind of monster. In short, no one in this opera version is a truly good person. Each wants something from the others.

 

    Strutt, the first we see among the many Marnie has robbed, wants only payment, presumably endless, for her having broken the illusion that she was an extension of his ego. Others in her past creep out of the woodwork, represented by the group of black-suited men who dance always around Marnie and her four symbolic selves (with wonderful choreography by Lynne Page).  Is it any wonder that Marnie hates men?

      Relocated from Virginia and Maryland back into its original location of the English countryside, it makes total sense for Marnie to be a horse woman who prefers the beast to men. Her horse, Florio, she luminously sings, is the only being she truly loves. But even here she is betrayed as, when she is disgusted by the hounds who are attempting to rout out a vixen from her den—surely a cornered beast with whom she can identify—she turns Florio away, sending him on a wild race away from the hunt, which ends in his disastrous stumble over a wall, Mark’s own fall into a hospital bed, and Marnie being forced to take out a gun and kill the only thing she ever loved.

     She is now finally ready to continue her criminal career, stealing Mark’s keys and breaking into his safe. Yet something has changed; she can no longer put the easy money she discovers into her purse. Perhaps the very fact that he has stayed by her side, even knowing the truth, has altered her perception of men. He may have brutally used her to capture her as a bride, yet he has remained a kind of gentleman of sorts.

     The discovery of the truth, after her mother’s death, that it was Marnie’s mother who herself strangled her newborn, the central character of what we now realize is a kind of study in morality in a world with little morality to offer, beauteously thrills of her freedom at the very moment that handcuffs are placed around her wrists. Again, unlike the film, Marnie is not “saved” or even protected by Mark’s chauvinistic actions but must now make her own decisions of how to salvage her life, becoming perhaps the only character who is truly free from the ugly controls imposed upon others. If in her robberies she might have imagined she controlled the men for whom she worked, she now perceives that they simply ruled her behavior, and in that recognition becomes a kind of feminist figure able now to go her own way, wherever that may lead her.

     Marnie may still not be a great opera, but it is certainly a fascinating one, where the composer and librettist rarely permit their characters to sing out full sentences in a world that won’t entirely allow them to speak out any true emotion or truth. Tumbling through the mostly exuberant score, the singers come at last to a kind of peace with their own inabilities to express the fullness of their lives. And Muhly’s opera transcends its own somewhat pedestrian story.

 

Los Angeles, November 11, 2018

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

Gian Carlo Menotti | The Consul / 2017

is there anyone to whom the heart can be explained?

By Douglas Messerli

 

Gian Carlo Menotti (music and libretto) The Consul / Opera Long Beach, performed at the Centinela Valley Center for the Arts, Lawndale, California / I attended matinee with Howard N. Fox on October 22, 2017 

 

For several years now Opera Long Beach has been the most innovative opera company in Southern California and one of the most notable in the US. Recent productions include John Adams’ The Death of Klinghoffer and I Was Looking at the Ceiling, Philip Glass’ The Perfect American, Akhnaten, and Hydrogen Jukebox, David Lang’s The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, and Duke Ellington’s Queenie Pie, to say nothing of notable revivals of works by Purcell, Stravinsky, Bernstein and Poulenc, along with numerous other works. It is obviously run by an energetic artistic team, led by Austrian-born Andreas Mitisek, who stages many of his own productions in both Long Beach and at the Chicago Opera Theater, which he also directs.

     The fact that Mitisek, himself, is an immigrant (he became a naturalized US citizen as recently as 2015) is particularly relevant in the case of the company’s newest production, The Consul, by Italian born composer Gian Carlo Menotti.

     The decision to produce this opera—originally performed in Philadelphia and, then, on Broadway, in 1950 (it won both the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Music that same year)—is utterly brilliant given the current governmental administration’s emphatic determination to oust thousands of undocumented people from our shores and delimit those who might be legally allowed to enter or shores.

       In the post-World War II Europe millions from all over the globe found themselves in great peril in a time of changing governments, including the Communist take-over of many Eastern European countries, shifting allegiances, along with the simple desperateness of life in countries that had suffered so much loss. Menotti’s tale was spun out of a news item about a 38-year-old immigrant Polish woman, who, when, waiting on Ellis Island, was denied entry by into the country by a special inquiry board, hung herself in a detention room.

       I had previously seen the production only on a DVD-version, produced for television by Jean Dalrymple in 1960 (I missed that broadcast as a child on TV, but had often watched Menotti’s televised productions of Amahl and the Night Visitors, the Christmas-based opera, written a year after, that, over the 1950s and early 60s became an annual television favorite). The 1960 broadcast starred the original Magda Sorel (the opera’s central character), brilliantly performed by Patricia Neway. I watched most of the tape, once again, yesterday evening, after seeing this new presentation at the Centinela Valley Center for Arts in Lawndale (Opera Long Beach is determined to present their productions in a number of local venues).

       As I correctly recalled, the 1960 version, as I described it in a piece I wrote in 2017 upon Menotti’s death, was “a drab, gritty, black-and-white” realist drama. Magda lived in a dreary flat and was daily forced to return to an equally dreary consulate with the hopes that someone might hear her pleas and allow her to immigrate to a foreign land to where, evidently her husband has escaped because of his activities in the local underground. She, clearly, is seeking political asylum in the country which seems impervious to her cries.

      The TV version is highly dramatic in its more direct, one-on-one interchanges between Magda and the Consul Secretary (Regina Sarfaty), and the very drabness of everything seems to reiterate the noir-like aspects of her terribly fated life.   

      Mitisek, in his role as costume designer, his scenic designer, Alan E. Muraoka, and the lighting designer, David Jacques take a different tack, creating a world, as Muraoka describes it, from the perspective of Magda, wherein everything has become a space akin to Kafka’s nightmare landscapes. No wall seems affixed to any other, windows are dangerous things (after all, as the evil Secret Police Agent [Cedric Berry] warns Magda, you can see a great deal through a pane of glass), and the Consulate Secretary’s desk towers like a kind of expressionist tower of babel (or, to put it more succinctly, a “tower of babble”) atop which the Secretary (a marvelously dark, but also vulnerable Audrey Babcock; her later aria “Faces” demonstrates, late in the opera, her guilt in the destruction of these immigrants’ lives), hovers, making it nearly impossible to scale except for few lucky ones.

      The problem is that the Consul Secretary and the “foreigners” with whom she comes in contact speak entirely different languages. As I put it in my earlier review, speaking of Magda’s and her husband’s goodbye duet early in the opera, “This couple’s sorrowful duet of departure, transformed by John Sorel’s mother’s participation into a trio,” presents us with some of the looniest lyrics ever created:

 

     Now, O lips, say goodbye

     The word must be said but the heart must not heed.

      …..

     The rose holds summer in her winter sleep.

     The sea gathers moonlight where ships cannot plough,

     And we will the heart retain endless home…

     …where time does not count, where words cannot reach.

     Let no tears, no love laden tears dim the light that charts our way.

     Leave the tears to the starless one who wanders

            Without compass in the night.

 

“Despite being nearly drowned in metaphors, the audience recognizes that this is the language of believers, of the heroes Sorel and his wife represent. John’s only straightforward advice to Magda is to visit the Consul.”

      But this too is a delusion. The consulate Secretary can only report to the desolate Magda (in this production, the always startling singer/performer Patricia Racette, clothed in a dark blue dress), “Your name is a number, your number a case.” “Please fill out the paperwork, bring me your documents.” Magda’s impassioned pleas—filled with outrageous metaphors—and the efficient business woman in the high tower simply cannot intersect. There is always, day after day after day, another bar to those who wait below, some unable to speak the language at all, others unable to put their powerful fears and desires into the language of the bureaucracy or even normal logic, and still others, such as The Magician (Nathan Granner), believing their remarkable talents alone should permit them entry into the magical world that is continually eluding them. No matter what these folk try to do, they might never meet the impossible requirements that those holding power demand. The Consul, himself, seems never to be within; and when, finally, in Magda’s impassioned plea for humanity which is at the heart of the opera—

 

          To this we’ve come: that men withhold the world from men.

          No ship nor shore for him who drowns at sea.

          No home nor grave for him who dies on land.

          To this we’ve come: that man be born a stranger upon God’s

              earth,

           that he be chosen with a chance for choice,

           that he be hunted without the hope of refuge.

           To this we’ve come, to this we’ve come

 

            …..

           …Oh! The day will come, I know

           when our hearts aflame will burn your paper chains.

           Warn the Consul, Secretary, warn him.

           That day neither ink or seal shall cage our souls.

           That day will come, that day will come!

 

—she is offered an opportunity to speak with the always missing Consul, she observes the terrifying Secret Police Agent leaving his office.

      Having already lost her child and her husband’s supporting Mother (the powerful singer, Victoria Livengood) to death, what does Magda possibly have left? Indeed, the opera might have ended here, at the close of the second act.

      Menotti, however, clearly wants us to suffer through the entire ordeal. Finally, to save her husband (Justin Ryan), Magda determines to enact the vengeance on society which she has long recognized is quite inevitable: her own death. Through that act she hopes to deter her husband from returning home; but, as fate has it, John has already returned and been arrested in the consulate, despite the fact that only there might he have been protected; on every front, however, it is too late.

       In the original production, Magda returned home to put her head into the oven. Here, once again, the artistic team have decided to present the act in much more theatrical terms—and again I cannot but admire them for their choice—to present her death in terms of the event that originally inspired the composer, a suicidal hanging, along with the hanging of nearly all those we’ve previously encountered, played out in the symbolic upending of chairs—the common symbol of home and family life.

      When we think back at how the US failed so many millions of European Jews during World War II—despite the presidency of one of the most liberal of all leaders, Franklin D. Roosevelt; and when we recognize that millions more will no longer now be permitted to enter our country, we can only turn our eyes away from one of our nation’s most potent symbols, The Stature of Liberty with its poetic promise by Emma Lazarus—“Give me your tired, your poor, / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, / The wretched refuse of your teeming shore”—and cry.

      If today Menotti is often thought of as a kind of retarder composer, in league with Puccini and other late Romanticists in a century already musically transformed by Ives, Stravinsky, Berg, Cage, and so many others, perhaps it is time to rethink this mid-century composer’s art, putting them into the context of his own long-time companion Samuel Barber and friends Aaron Copeland and Leonard Bernstein. Clearly, this Menotti opera is even more relevant today.

 

Los Angeles, October 23, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance