Giacomo Puccini, Guelfo Civinni, and Carlo Zangarini | La funciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) / 2018

going west

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giacomo Puccini (composer), Guelfo Civinni and Carlo Zangarini (libretto, based on the play by David Belasco) La funciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) / New York, The Metropolitan Opera / the production I saw was the MET live-HD production of Saturday, October 27, 2018

 

Rather oddly, given Howard’s and my adoration of opera, I had never previously seen a production of Giacomo Puccini’s 1910 opera, commissioned by the New York Metropolitan Opera (a production conducted by Arturo Toscanini, with Emmy Destinn as Minnie and Enrico Caruso as Dick Johnson), La funciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West). I’d heard many of its pieces on disk and radio, but never actually experienced the production itself.

     Howard, who was to have accompanied me for this MET live-HD production at the theaters in Century City near Beverly Hills, discovered at the last moment that he had committed to a walk-through of the Merion Estes show he had curated at the Craft and Folk-Art Museum near us. So, Howard returned his ticket, which coincidentally was purchased by a local gallerist friend, Ruth Bochofner, who became, quite by accident and most pleasantly, a replacement friend.

     I’d always thought about this late-career Puccini opera as a kind of last gasp, followed only by his La rondine and his series of three short operas, also first performed at the Metropolitan in 1918; yet, I now realize this was a terrible misconception.

     Supposedly Puccini thought that this David Belasco-based opera was his very best, and almost all of the performers argued for its difficulties and complexities, with Eva-Maria Westbroek, arguing that it was one (if not the) very favorite of his works in which she had performed. The personable Italian conductor Marco Armiliato, who directed the score from memory, seemed impassioned about its intricacies and argued how more contemporary, given Puccini’s highly romantically-based operas before this, it was.

     I must agree that this work, given the remarkable vocalizations of Westbroek (as Minnie), Jonas Kaufmann (as Dick Johnson), and Željko Lučić (as the sheriff Jack Rance) is something I had never before imagined. And yes, this is definitely not the usual Puccini concoction of beautiful arias and character types as in La bohème, Tosca, or Madama Butterfly—even if, clearly, there is some of the last-named opera’s exoticism that creeps into his vision of Belasco’s wild west, with many quick references to his later Turnadot, wherein, like the proud queen of Peking, Minnie refuses her love to the minors from all over the world who have gathered in their mad desire for gold to offer her their treasures.

     On the surface, in fact, they seem mostly to be good friends, almost making up the foundation, sans wives, of a future civilized community. They gather in the local bar to drink, gamble, and to release some of their aggressions, but their trust in their mother/potential lover, owner of their bar, Minnie, is so very touching that we quickly comprehend why they use the lower shelves of her bar, overseen by the gentle bar-tender, in which to hide their life savings. The local Wells Fargo rider tries to get them to bank their wealth in his company (terribly ironic today given what we know of that institution’s 21st-century actions), but the stagecoach has often been robbed by a local bandit, Ramerrez, and they trust the virginal Minnie as the better banker.

     Together they vie for her attentions, Rance believing, just because of his position as a sort-of-law-and-order ex-gambler and heavy drinker, he has the best chance of wooing her. While Sonora (Michael Todd Simpson) believes he might be her favorite, given his status as a kind of group representative of the goldminers. If the various challengers for Minnie’s love sometimes break out in violent confrontations—this is after all the violent West of Hollywood myth which still suffers brawls and violent interchanges when a gambler is found to have been cheating—they seem to be a rather affable group, with even an ability to help out a fellow, very depressed miner, who is desperate to return home to England, by taking up a collection to send him home. We might almost imagine that this will soon be the “well-intentioned” Western town of Hadleyville if only some women were to arrive. What might be the desire for immediate violence could eventually turn into a refusal to get involved if you give these crude believers enough time.

     In the meantime, the gun-toting Annie Oakley-like figure of Minnie has to serve as both the vision of law-and-order and the mentor/educator of this rough community, calling them to order, serving up their liquor, and then reading to them from the Bible about King David and other major biblical figures. She’s a tough teacher, scolding them for their lack of memory, but also a loving and caring being who, we later discover, has served as nurse, confessor, and supporter of many of these toughs.

     If we sense this mix of a lesbian-like woman facing off with a gang of randy, isolated males might become a kind of tinder-box of pent-up emotional and sexual feelings we wouldn’t be far from wrong.

     But if Minnie, herself, as she later puts it, is a kind of gambler/capitalist, one of the boys so to speak, a woman who even sees herself as a kind of coarse, uneducated woman surviving through her instincts—without even realizing it, it is her true kindness and intellect that has allowed her continued existence. For she is, surprisingly, a reader, having stashed away a complete library in her mountain cabin, reading late into the night, mostly, she admits, love stories—while still rejecting the advances of many of her would-be suitors such as Rance (with the angry and moving “Laggiù nel Soledad,” her expression of an attempt to find “true” love.

     Minnie, accordingly, is a remarkable combination of a tough Western survivor and a naïve innocent, who goes through her life protected simply because of the armor of those contradictions.

     Given this rough-and-tumble world, and Minnie’s and her community’s own mixed emotions, Puccini must have realized that he had to create a different kind of opera. Here, for one of the first times in his music, beautiful wrought musical passages are again and again interrupted, as if almost suggesting a kind of modernist composition, as characters cut across each other’s would-be spiritual expressions. It’s a bit like an early intonation of jazz: the moment a phrase begins, another instrument (in this case an intrusive voice) interrupts to express his or her own viewpoint. People in this opera get in the way, constantly, of all the others, shouting down the arias they may have sung, refusing to hear any of the melodic sentiment of a standard Puccini opera.

     We are presented with wonderful flourishes of romanticism—the whooshing theme of the golden girl, the almost Rodgers and Hammerstein-like, somewhat clumsy American-intonations of the miner’s greetings of “hello,” the painful interludes between the past and present when the bandit Dick Johnson and Minnie recount their early accidental meeting as almost kids—constantly interrupted with musical expressions of the forceful, often physical and violent interactions between the miners and outsiders.

      Minnie becomes almost so girlish after inviting Dick to come to her isolated cabin in the sierras, that she truly does remind us of the corny Doris Day film when Annie Oakley tries to dress up for Wild Bill Hitchcock. It’s the trope: suddenly get out of your slickers, put away your gun, and put on a dress (in this case with a rose stuffed into your bosom) to attract the man of your dreams—even if, she quickly discovers, he’s worse that you might even imagined him to be, a simple bandit who has been consorting with a local Mexican whore.

     As one of the commentators noted between the acts of this marvelous production, this opera projects the sense of a kind of early movie, with the music and events tumbling over upon one another so quickly that sometimes you can hardly catch your breath. Musical phrases literally pile up only to collapse into more profane chords of everyday commentary. For what seems like hours, a tense three-hand poker game—during which Minnie cheats Rance to escape his intended rape of her and to assert her own attempt to claim her own man, somewhat like he was a gold mine she has suddenly discovered and determined to claim—tamps down any sustained lyrical musical refrain except for a sort of percussional tempo that is unlike anything one has encountered in Puccini’s previous scores.

      Minnie’s final song of love in Act II, after she illegally wins, might almost be perceived as a kind of mad scene out of Strauss’s Elektra or Salome.  Puccini has suddenly moved away from the late 19th century into new territory, made even more remarkable by the performance I witnessed. Even Westbroek had to admit, during an intermission chat, that she had completely “nailed” it.” It was a moment of opera to remember forever. And the audience went clearly appreciated it.

      Finally, unlike almost any Puccini opera before it, this is not a tragedy. Despite the attempt of the miners’ community to get their revenge, the impossible strong woman at the center of this work, returns, guns in hand, to righteously claim her man and help him escape the local noose, despite all the odds releasing her lover from their actual legalistically-justified arguments by reminding these locals bumpkins of all she has done for them.

     In the end, the freed couple walk off together into the rising sun to never return, perhaps moving on to a new southern paradise, I’d like to think, of Santa Barbara or the then-nascent Los Angeles. No snow there, which, after all, is what almost got Dick killed in the second act.

      I now agree, this may be, as Puccini himself believed, his very best opera, not a work that displays his immense melodic skills at music-making but expresses a kind of new Italian-Wagnerian notion of what opera can become. Had he only lived long enough to continue that transformation!

 

Los Angeles, October 28, 2018

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

Martin Sherman | Bent / 2015

talking sex

by Douglas Messerli

 

Martin Sherman Bent / Los Angeles, Mark Taper Forum / the performance I saw with Howard Fox was the August 23, 2015 matinee

 

Martin Sherman’s 1979 play, Bent, revived recently by Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum begins almost as any gay work of the late 1960s and 1970s, particularly Mort Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968), but also like Doric Wilson’s A Perfect Relationship (1978) and Robert Patrick’s T-Shirts (1979, works described aptly by Eric Marcus in his Out in All Directions as being about issues concerning “the loneliness that caused older men to turn to hustlers, the debauchery of innocents by urban gay life, the insularity of the gay ghetto, and the neurotic entanglements and complicated sexual victimizations that occurred among friends, partners, and frustrated would-be lovers.”

      A slightly “monogamish” couple, Max (Patrick Heusinger) and Rudy (Will Taylor in the production I saw) awaken past noon after a long wild night, Rudy somewhat peeved by his partner’s behavior of the night before while pretending nonchalance. Max can remember nothing, until a well-endowed, naked male (Tom Berklund) appears from a back bedroom (how Max has missed his obvious bedmate is unexplained), as Rudy gradually explains how Max, completely drunk, first invited all the waiters of the gay club run by the drag-queen, Greta to come home with him, before falling to the floor upon a black leathered young man, Wolf, whom we soon discover is one of Ernst Rohm’s Sturmabeilung troop members. But it is only gradually that we discover this fact, and, at first, we might well as be in a Manhattan apartment, with the two occupants arguing about their messy lives. If Max is a wild drunken cocaine uses, Rudy is a naïve dancer at the local cabaret, no more responsible, and even less able to find money to pay the rent, than his would-be lover.

      Wolf, for his part, is eager to join the two young men at the home in the country which the drunken and drugged Max (describing himself as the Baron) has promised him a drive in his shiny new car. Max, in short, is clever con-man, capable, as he admits, of convincing people of things that lie outside reality.

 

     In short, the whole first scene plays like a light-hearted, slightly camp presentation of just what Marcus describes, and Sherman’s drama, accordingly, reads as a light-hearted comedy. And surely, when the play first premiered, when few (according to the program notes of this play*) seemed to know about the Nazi incarceration of homosexuals, the play must have read even more normative.

     Today, at least, when most of know more about that era—the moment we recognize that this scene is played out in Berlin in 1934—we perceive that the play is soon to shift in a very different direction—although the folks sitting behind Howard and I seemed to have no idea as they guffawed straight through the next few moments, when Nazi soldiers break down the door and slit the throat of Wolf in continuation of the Night of the Long Knives (which I describe in the essay above), part of Hitler’s purge of Rohm and his Brownshirts, a political act which his government obscured as a crackdown of gay perversion. In terror Max (dressed only in his bathrobe) and Rudy skitter off to the club.

       Suddenly the play shifts again, presenting us with a scene that might have been in the musical Cabaret, John Kander and Fred Ebb’s successful musical of 1966; the song the club’s performers, led by Greta (Jake Shears), sing, “Goodbye to Berlin,” is also the title of one of Christopher Isherwood’s Weimar-based novels, upon which Cabaret was based. All right, we get it, this is the razzle-dazzle sex-crazed Berlin. Although Sherman’s cabaret number is not nearly so tawdry and convincing as the songs sung originally by Joel Gray.

      As if realizing the play has again come again to a standstill, Sherman offers up his clueless heroes who have gone into hiding as they attempt to find shelter from the mean-spirited Greta, who has actually sent the Nazi’s searching out Wolf to their apartment. Although he (as Greta makes clear, he is safe, since offstage he is a married man) gives them a bit a cash, he is not convinced that they will be able to escape the new Nazi purge.

     Finally, Sherman’s play begins to settle into its real subject matter; but it’s already a bit too late. Although the couple have forced into the forest, camped out in tents, they continue their gay-life patter, arguing over their limited choices of food, the condition of living quarters, and complaining about their inability to even touch one another—appearing as if somehow they still have not completely assimilated the complete horror of their situation. Rudy is particularly dense, it appears to me, although I couldn’t be sure that his absurd innocence was due, in part, to with understudy Taylor’s almost amateurish performance (playing Rudy as a kind Midwestern American) or whether Sherman simply couldn’t quite create figures that were convincingly of European birth.

      Max, apparently, is the son of a wealthy Amsterdam button manufacturing family, who is upbraided by his gay uncle for embarrassing his family by his extravagant behavior. And Max, skewered throughout most of the play as a spoiled, selfish being, is even willing to marry the window of another button manufacturer if Uncle Freddie (Ray Baker) will only get him two sets and new papers and tickets to Amsterdam instead of the one he offers. Yet it is hard to believe that Max in either of Dutch birth or might possibly be so unselfish as to put himself in such endangerment for Rudy’s sake. If he is willing to “ditch” Rudy once they reach Amsterdam, why, we have to ask, is he so protective of him now?

     This soon becomes an even more profound question which the author is never able to answer, as both Max and Rudy are captured, and, in transport to Dachau, Rudy is tortured before the Nazi commando demands that Max, to prove he is not Rudy’s friend, beat him. In order to save his life, Max not only complies but almost seems to get a strange sadistic pleasure in the act; and, soon after, when asked to prove that he is not gay (worthy only of the lowest of the emblems sown upon the prisoners’ uniforms, the pink triangle) demands he have sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl, recently murdered, as the other Nazi’s voyeuristically stand in watch. In reward of his sexual virility, Max is awarded, ironically, the Jewish yellow star, which, oddly enough puts him at the top of the Dachau totem post, garnering him a better chance of surviving the ordeal.

     In other words, Sherman has chosen a nearly impossible monster as his hero, whose redemption—in this case by a scrawny pink-triangulated Horst (Charlie Hofheimer), whose major sin is that he signed a petition in support of the sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld—appears nearly impossible for the play’s start.

     Mysteriously—and this is a continual problem with Sherman’s seemingly naturalistic tropes—Max gets Horst transferred to from the brutal tasks of breaking down rocks with a pick-axe, to the nearly existential task of moving a pile of stones from one place to another before returning them back to the other, again and again, ad infinitum—a job which, Max.suggests, is intended to make him mad. Although, I would like to know whether or not Sherman had any evidence that such a task was really given to prisoners at Dachau, it seems a kind of perfect metaphor for the madness of the camps themselves.

     Yet Sherman is not a writer of someone like Beckett’s stature, and in the first of what are far too many scenes in which the actors are forced to heft stones back and forth across the stage, returns us to the kind of catty gay couple arguments of the “comedy” that Bent begin as. And later, as his character’s conversations increasingly become infused with talk of sex, the author does not share Beckett’s abilities to transform the inane into a poetically rich language.

 

    There is something almost thrilling, particularly the first time through, when this odd couple attempts to make love while standing next to but apart from one another through the art of speech. It reminded me, a little, of those early network chatrooms wherein participants talk about sex in order to actually experience it. But in front of a primarily heterosexual audience, which I assure you the elderly Taper patrons mostly consist of, the scene seemed at once more prurient and tamed-down than any actual sexual act performed on stage might have been perceived. Later, when the freezing and sickly Horst lamely refuses to go through the same verbally sexual encounter, Sherman reaches to the bottom of his often jokey quips—“I have a headache”—in response, turning what might have been a someone creative dramatic trope—particularly for a basically voyeuristic audience—into a sit-com situation.

     Again, some of the audience members, chirruping at this and other cheap quips, laughed half-way into the final scene where the Nazi guard commanded Horst (whose cough proves that the medicine Max had obtained from him through the present of a blow-job to the Nazi guard was actually intended for his co-worker) to throw his hat at the nearby high-voltage electric fence. We have already been told that such a command doomed whomever it was directed, for if the individual chose not to retrieve the hat, which would surely cause his death by electrocution, he would be shot. We are not surprised when the events are inevitably played out.

       What we are surprised about is that Max—whom we have finally come believe has truly begun to understand love as something different from mere sex—once more stands by without being compelled to aid his friend. That he is forced to bury him and, at the very moment of the pieta like enactment wherein he begins to carry his dead lover to his grave, he is forced to stand still while looking forward (a ritual described as “rest time” dictated by the timed screeches of a whistle) while holding Horst’s body before him, gives evidence to the fact that this is the first time in this play (except perhaps for the cabaret dance—but even if you look at the photo above, it does appear the directly Moisés Kaufman forced his figures keep to keep their hands off one another) where anyone has actually touched anyone else. When the whistle signals a resumption of action, he seemingly puts Horst into the ditch with the voiceless howl of Brecht’s Mother Courage. Just as with Rudy, Max has in large part, once again, in this man’s death.

      We must conjecture that he will no longer to be able to live with himself, so that, accordingly when after moving a few rocks, he returns to the ditch to remove Horst’s shirt with the pink triangle, and, removing his own yellow starred garment, puts it on—although it is a truly moving moment, an acceptance not only of his sexuality but of his recognition of love—there is something empty in the act. A small group of the audience members could not resist this symbolic transformation of character and applauded the event.

      But for the others of us in the audience, I believe, that symbolic expression comes simply too late. No matter how Max has been transformed, his recognition—in part because of the author’s literary devices—has simply come too late. And even his rush into the wall of electrified death at play’s end, seems to be a melodramatic aftermath. Perhaps if he had really dared death earlier on, had actually reached out to touch the other instead of simply imagining him, we might have truly been able to celebrate what Sherman’s play certainly intended to convey: W. H. Auden’s contention that “We must love one another or die.”

           

*Although I may be mistaken, I am almost certain that I had long before 1979 known that homosexuals were imprisoned and killed in the Nazi camps. Surely, I and others, might have known the details, but I can’t believe that Sherman’s play was the first to actually brooch this subject. Perhaps in the popular theater, yes, but not if one read one’s history.

 

Los Angeles, August 25, 2015

Reprinted from American Theater, Opera, and Performance (August 2015).