Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte | Le nozze di Figaro / 2014

 

terrifying twists

by Douglas Messerli

 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (composer) Lorenzo da Ponte (libretto, after the comedy by Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais), Le nozze di Figaro / the performance I saw was the Metropolitan Opera live HD broadcast, October 18, 2014

 

Like many an opera buffa, Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro is filled with would-be lovers jumping in and out of beds; late night romantic assignations; flirtations and sexual encounters between maid(s) and master, mistress, and godson (or male servant(s), or any visiting admirer); intriguing switches of amative attentions; startling revelations of heritage and birthright; as well as, quite often, temporary alterations of sex—all undertaken beneath the nose of a highly suspicious husband or another such authoritative figure who is usually the greatest transgressor of the lot.

 

    As anyone who has seen this “follow up” to Rossini’s just as character-leaden and plot-stuffed precursor Il barbiere di Siviglia knows, Mozart’s work offers all of the above in great proliferation. Between Count Almaviva’s (Peter Mattei) attempts to bed nearly all of his housekeepers, and his maid Susanna’s (wonderfully elucidated by Marlis Petersen) and her soon-to-be husband Figaro’s (Ildar Abdrazakov) attempts to get even (or in Figaro’s case, to get revenge) for the master’s unwelcome attentions of the lively “flower of the household,” there is hardly a moment in this heady elixir of amour and feudal abuse that isn’t jam-packed with new plot twists.

     “Twist,” indeed, is the perfect word for the constant story fluctuations, which the Saturday HD broadcast host, Renée Fleming (who has performed in her share of Figaro productions) characterized as “a perpetual turning of the tables.” So many epistles have been written and posted through the pockets of Figaro that, at one point, when cornered by the Count, he admits that even he cannot keep track of the would-be comings and goings of figures, as three notes of assignation simultaneously fall from his pockets. Fortuitously, Rob Howell’s well-oiled swing of the settings and Sir Richard Eyre’s precisely-timed fluidity of direction keep the production moving, even if, at moments, the audience and characters lag behind in comprehension.

     But the “twists” of this busy-bee work lay not only in the turning down of bedsheets by the Count, but in the twisted relationships of various characters, most notably Marcellina (the housekeeper to the pompous Dr. Bartolo) who hankering after Figaro, has long-ago loaned him money attached to a contract stating that if he does not pay her back, he must marry her. Bartolo, who like the much younger Count, at one time has clearly employed house staff in roles beyond their job descriptions, is more than delighted to now have the opportunity to get rid of his “old cow,” while simultaneously revenging himself for Figaro’s involvement in preventing him (incidents represented in Rossini’s operatic version) from obtaining Rosina, now the Count’s lovely wife.

      Suddenly in act III we discover that the man Marcellina truly desires to marry is, without her knowledge, her long-lost son, Rafello, fathered by her employer, Bartolo. In short, she, who the Count was determined just minutes before to declare to be Figaro’s wife, would lure Rafello into a horrific coupling, like Oedipus and Jocasta, of mother and son. In the context of Mozart’s pre-Freudian world, such a marriage does not represent a psychological condition but rather serves as a hovering omen about the machinations of the Count, threatening to transform at any moment the comic “pranks” of Lorenzo da Ponte’s and Mozart’s work into a tragedy of epic proportions like Oedipus Rex. The potential parallel between the Count’s and Bartolo’s actions cannot be missed by the man who has just sung a song (Vedrò, mentr'io sospiro) expressing his jealousy of his own servant.

   Similarly, throughout their opera da Ponte and Mozart feature a newly created figure not in the original Beaumarchais play, Cherubino—who the great Kierkegaard described as a figure “drunk with love”—who twists and turns his way throughout this play in a sexual stupor that would dizzy even the most sure-footed angel. Yes, Cherubino, obviously, is a kind of angel, a man so beautiful that—as the writers insist in their script—he must be played always by a beautiful young woman (in this case, the lovely and musically gifted Isabel Leonard). But Cherubino is also a sort of shadow to the Count, a being who aspires to the same status as his master, which also explains why, discovering the young sex-fiend wherever he goes, the Count can only seek his destruction. For Cherubino also has significant qualities that the Count is missing: beauty and youth. Accordingly, like a twisted, fun-house looking glass, the stare of Cherubino, which the Count seems to encounter everywhere, can only remind him that he will soon be an old and ugly fornicator, like Bartolo, who also once challenged him for his wife! 

      Unlike the often clumsy and blundering Almaviva (a long-living soul who actually learns through the long-time experiences of life), who serves always behind his nemesis, the cherub can literally “fly,” as he proves through his escape from the balcony window of his godmother’s bedroom. In short, he can move about in near absolute freedom, not only in space but within his own body, as he constantly shifts gender. Using the former castrati role as a tranvesti character to perfect effect, Mozart and his librettist require that not only every woman in the play be sexually charmed by the young man but must attempt to make every man equally so enchanted.  

    Except for perhaps Rossini’s Le Comte Ory, opera has never before used transvestitism to such wonderful effects. Not only do the Countess and Susanna spend long moments in joyfully dressing up their youthful lothario as a lovely woman whom they hope will satisfy the sexual longings of the Count, but another of the Count’s conquests, Barbarina hides him, when Cherubino has deserted from his military service, by dressing him up as a provincial beauty. Time and again, the woman turn-the-tables, so to speak, on this would-be molester by rendering him neuter, by turning him into one of their own kind.

     Still, the rapscallion Cherubino nearly destroys the day for the penultimate “twist” of the story, wherein the Countess, having transformed herself into Susanna through her costume—while at the same time Susanna hides her eager desire to be embraced by Figaro by wearing the Countesses’ gown—prepares to receive her unrepentant husband. Cherubino’s unwanted attentions reiterate not only the pains the Countess has had to suffer for his husband’s philandering, but those that Barbarina may have to suffer through her Cherubino.

     For the moment, however, the day is saved, and, the final “twist” is played out in all its grand ironic display, the Count unconsciously playing lover to his own wife.

 

    Suddenly realizing that he has become the fool in front of everyone, the Count, at least momentarily, is forced to realize the errors of his way, asking for forgiveness not just from his wife (“Contessa perdono!), but from everyone in hearing range, including the audience whom he has so entertained. The Countess’ proclamation that she is kinder than her husband in forgiving him, results in a beautiful choral work that expresses joy while reminding everyone of the “terrible twists” of reality that they all have almost accidentally escaped. As I whispered to Howard a few moments later: “That is the saddest aria to a happily-ending opera that I have ever witnessed.”

 

Los Angeles, October 19, 2014

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (October 2014).

 

 

 

Peter Quilter | End of the Rainbow / 2013

an incautious overdose of life

by Douglas Messerli

Peter Quilter (author, with music once performed by Judy Garland) End of the Rainbow / Los Angeles, Ahmanson Theatre / I performance I attended was a matinee on March 30, 2013

 

Peter Quilter’s play about the last months of Judy Garland’s life—as the beloved and decaying performer made a final singing engagement at London’s Talk of Town, accompanied by her fifth husband, former band leader and club manager, Mickey Deans (Erik Heger)—is little more than a series of documented and rumored events strung together with witty bon mots, mostly centered on Garland’s alcoholic and drug addicted condition: “It’s all about gravity. My chin and tits are in a race to my knees.” Other than Garland, perhaps the central figure might be said to be her piano player, the Scottish born Anthony (an excellent Michael Cumpsty), who as a gay man begins the play with an self-conscious contempt for the aging star (although she was only 47 at the time of her death), with whom he had previously shared a disastrous performance in Australia (“It was a blood bath”), but whom increasingly comes to feel for the terrified woman, who in Mickey Deans has again chosen the wrong man to love. Anthony ends his time with her by proposing an asexual marriage in an attempt to take her away from the circus of her life, although he seems shocked by her question of whether or not they might share a bed. Garland, this play asserts, was distinctly a sexual being.

     To give him credit, Deans begins the play with a strong attempt to make over her life, managing it the best he can (the couple have hardly any money left) while forbidding her drugs (checking in every possible cranny in which might have hidden them) and denying her alcohol. But gradually it is apparent that in order to literally get her on stage, he must return to the regimen of the studio heads of her early youth: “amphetamines to pep her up and barbiturates to make her sleep.” Behind her fiancée’s back, Garland acquires retinol and escapes, after once performance, into a drunken night on the town. There is obviously no controlling—as Garland herself makes clear—someone sick of being put on display and determined to end her life. A few months after the end of her 1968 engagement, on June 22, 1969, she was found dead in a rented London home, the victim of, as the British doctor understatedly described it, “an incautious self-overdose.”

 

    Except for a scene in a BBC studio where Garland answers questions in an outrageous manner and cannot even remember some of the questions she’s asked, most of this sometimes fascinating, but at heart rather repetitive drama takes place in a palatial room (which Garland represents it as being small as a tomb) of the Ritz Hotel.

      But then this small documentary-like retelling has something else going for it: Tracie Bennett. As an uncanny like Garland stand-in, Bennett is quite literally an engine of motion, twisting her lithe, small-body into so many positions that, at times, one might almost think that instead of being flesh-and-bones Bennett, like Gumby, is all rubber. Whether jumping upon the room’s grand piano, suffering in pain on its couch, or crawling upon the floor in supplicant pleading for everything that has been kept from her, the actor is in near constant motion. In one scene, after grabbing a bottle pills—and quickly swallowing a couple—intended for Anthony’s pet dog to cure its mange, Bennett performs as a dog, on all fours, comically barking and lifting her leg high in the air in mock-peeing upon her “captors.” With all this almost frenetic action, it is amazing that the actor can stay in character, let alone continually convince us, as she does, that she is Judy Garland. Unlike many drag queens, however, Bennett does not so much try to sound like Garland—although I’d swear at times she’s channeling the diva’s voice—but convincingly moves the way Garland might. Even at the most neurotically pitched number of the evening (“I’m Gonna Love You, Come Rain or Come Shine”) the actor seems less intent upon capturing Garland’s exaggerations, than she is in expressing the tensions of the singer’s inner demons and outer attempts to please her audience. It is, as she puts it, all in the acting rather than in the imitation. I have read that Garland, like Bennett, a small person, would stand behind the curtain before going on looking like a timid rabbit terrified at what she was about to attempt. Then suddenly she would take deep breaths, puffing herself up so that she suddenly looked taller and absolutely powerful as she entered the stage. So too does Bennett accomplish something similar, belting out a chorus just when you would have thought she had, in the previous moment, emotionally spent herself.

  

     As the play, often quite cleverly, transitions from the hotel room to her performances at the Talk of the Town nightclub, where Bennett belts out Garland favorites in a strong voice that is so dead-close to Garland—or at least similar to Garland’s own best imitator, her daughter Liza Minnelli—the audience was absolutely stunned. Through the clever machinations of these scenes, the audience’s spontaneous and often rapturous applause simulated the audience applause of the original performances. Bennett’s Garland, like the singer herself, may not quite be up to Judy Garland’s Carnegie Hall achievement, but they come damned close. While we obviously know Tracie Bennett is not Judy Garland, the actor, as if by magic, truly convinces us that she is a simulacrum—in that word’s primary meaning, “an image”—of the real thing. There is perhaps no better example of what literary critics have long described as readers and audiences “willing suspension of disbelief.”

       Yet even if Bennett’s rendition of Garland weren’t so “dead on,” her performance would still be a kind of miracle. If you think of her hotel room movements as a sort of kinetic dance, put alongside her great vocal outcries (Bennett declares that she cannot really sing), one might say that this actor is one of the best musical performers alive. After the show, my companion Howard and I tried to remember all the numerous live-theatre moments in which we had witnessed what he might describe as true greatness: I won’t list all of those, but they included the couple of times we’d seen Barbara Cook live, Faith Prince in the revival of Guys and Dolls, Elaine Stritch in her one-woman show At Liberty, Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly!, Angela Lansbury in Sweeney Todd, John Hurt in Krapp’s Last Tape…several others, all performances you knew you’d never forget until stricken with dementia or Alzheimers. We agreed that we would have to add Tracie Bennett in End of the Rainbow to our somewhat meaningless compilation.

 

Los Angeles, Easter 2013

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (April 2013).