Philip Glass (with Shalom Goldman, Robert Israel, Richard Ridell, and Jerome Robbins) | Akhnaten: An Opera in Three Acts

send in the clowns

by Douglas Messerli

 

Philip Glass in association with Shalom Goldman, Robert Israel, Richard Ridell, and Jerome Robbins (libretto), Philip Glass (music) Akhnaten: An Opera in Three Acts / Los Angeles, LAOpera, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion / the performance Howard Fox and I saw was a matinee on Sunday, November 13, 2016

 

For me, it’s admittedly hard to know quite what I feel about Philip Glass’s operas, particularly the three signature works, Einstein on the Beach (1976), Satyagrapha (1980), and Akhnaten (1984), all three of which, since visiting the last opera yesterday at the LAOpera company’s production, I have now seen in excellent productions.

      Surely they are all beautiful pageants, with the chordal collection of the composer’s repeated and shifting motifs often creating sounds of shimmering perfection. In all three productions, the sets and costumes were innovative and, in Akhnaten, quite stupendous in their effects. In all the productions I’ve seen, the singers and other figures were superior. Particularly in Akhnaten, countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo and mezzo-soprano J’Nai Bridges sang quite brilliantly, with the LAOpera Chorus performing at the highest level (despite the unfortunate collapse, in an early scene of the opera, of a chorus member, which required several of her fellow singers to help her off; we can only pray that she was not seriously hurt.).

      Despite the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion’s continued acoustical problems, the LAOpera orchestra, this time under the baton of the young wunderkind conductor/composer Matthew Aucoin, came through well, except in a very few instances where, from my balcony position, we heard more tuba than other instrumentation. The audience, far more diverse than usual and, seemingly, quite sophisticated and eager to enjoy this production, clearly took immediate pleasure in it.

       And yet…in all three works, two of them sung in ancient languages, and the earlier work often singing the language of counting, my companion Howard and I both felt a kind of ennui as the singers moved through space in snail-pace deliberateness, shifting from opera’s more-standard narrative sweep to an opera made up of images closer to tableaux vivants than to normative theater.

      I feel strange to appear to be expressing dissatisfaction with that fact, since I have long expressed my love of just such a narrative technique in the works of Djuna Barnes and in the filmmaking of Sergei Paradjanov, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and others. Perhaps it’s just not as effective on stage, particularly when accounting a rather exciting tale such as the Egyptian pharaoh Akhnaten’s fascinatingly short life. In fiction you can combine, as does Barnes, the “stops” in the fiction with a strong narrative overlay, using the temporary tableaux as evidence for the effects of the story. In film, directors such as Paradjanov link their tableaux vivants into a series of narrative events. But in theater such as this, in which there is no true narrative structure, the time-stopped scenes become mere spectacle.

      While Einstein featured the abstract, the mathematical and scientific theories of the thinker, and Satyagrapha dealt with the sometimes equally abstract world of politics, Akhnaten’s is a world of religion, and a radical new religion to boot.*

     Perhaps it is appropriate, at least in the early and late scenes, to bathe the new pharaoh’s, and, later, dead pharaoh’s, experiences in the slow and measured pace of rituals, letting the driving music, most excitingly presented in tympani and brass (there are no violins in this darker-sounding work) create the inner narrative energy. This Egypt is still a dark place of priests who worship dozens of deities, all of whom must be given their due before the new King can be crowned. And it is not accidental that for the first 20 minutes of this opera, the work’s hero is entirely speechless, often while nude—in short, vulnerable and even unprepared for his soon-to-be glorious clothing. Indeed, this King remains partially naked, and therefore, an easy target throughout much of his life.

     It is also clear that the drop-dead love duet between Akhnaten and his wife Nefertiti might not allow for more action than the two walking slowly across stage, each swathed in an endless train of red robes that become intertwined. After all, Tristan and Isolde often stand—at least in most productions—in near motionless scenes to sing their great love duets.

      I can even understand why Akhnaten’s great hymn to the sun, a lovely, quiet piece which Costanzo sings in the very front of the stage—again, while appearing naked, with a gossamer robe to which are appliquéd breasts and, now, a vagina where his real penis once was located—does not require nor even want much movement.

    Yet even later events when Akhnaten sings, quite agitatedly about his vision of a new city to celebrate his sun god, or, when he and his family are coming under attack from the Egyptian citizenry for his insistence on a near-monotheistic worship (scholars now argue, that, at least in the early years, Akhanaten’s world was much more open for individuals to maintain some of their older beliefs), or when the Pharaoh actually comes under attack, being killed in front of his wife, mother, and six daughters do we really need the same slow pace?

       To somewhat entertain us, director Phelim McDermott sends in the clowns—in this case a team of British jugglers who throw balls and other objects, mostly circular—paralleling, of course, the father and mother sun from which Akhnaten argues he has emanated. Yet even their actions are often slowed down as they are forced to slowly crawl across the stage floor and move gradually in and out of the singers. And when they do suddenly spring into action, quite adeptly tossing their balls and clubs through the air, they appear as more of a distraction than an integral element of Glass’s work.

       Strangely, while Glass’s score hardly even lets up in its driving momentum, the fact that he generally prefers to skip stage action or slow it down to such a gradual motion that it appears they are moving in a kind of dream space, he also enervates his characters to such a degree that they appear, themselves, to be unreadable hieroglyphs, and become difficult to comprehend in real life.

        Akhnaten and his world, indeed, are difficult for our time to comprehend, since most of his city, art, and communications were destroyed by his son Tutankhamun and the later pharaoh Horemhab. But it would have been nice, just once, to see these figures behave like real human beings instead of historical ghosts. And, despite the long length of this opera, I’d have given up the jugglers any day just to hear another, more revealing aria by Akhnaten and Nefertti.

        I can only commend LAOpera, however, for staging this stunningly scored work. Perhaps, in the future, we can get a less mannered presentation of it.

 

*I should add that, although the opera seems to give tribute to Akhnaten for his attempt to change his country from polytheism to monotheism, and Freud, in his important study From Moses to Monotheism attempts to connect those changes with Akhnaten’s rule with Moses’ demand that the Hebrews give up their other gods, I am, personally speaking, not so sure I mightn’t prefer the early Egyptian and later Greek and Roman polytheism, which I recount in several of the essays of My Year. These people, at least, lived with a far larger ability to assimilate different religious views. As we know, monotheism most always tended to want to destroy all other religious viewpoints, a history of religious monotheism which remains with us even today, and helped to give rise to groups such as ISIS and even the American Klu Klux Klan.

 

Los Angeles, November 14, 2016

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

Jacques Brel (concept and additional material by Eric Blau and Mort Shuman) | Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris / 2017

jacques brel is dead and worth resurrecting

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eric Blau and Mort Shuman (conception, lyrics, and additional material, based on the lyrics and commentary of Jacques Brel) Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris / 1968, revived in 2017 by the Odyssey Theatre Ensemble, Los Angeles / the production Howard Fox and I saw was on Sunday, July 9th, 2017

 

Yesterday afternoon, my companion Howard Fox and I attended an absolutely lovely reprise of the 1968 off-Broadway hit, Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Is Living in Paris, when it ran for four years, and eventually was reconstructed into a movie version in 1975.

     Howard and I missed out on those performances, and knew very little of Brel—although Howard vaguely recalls seeing the movie. I had not, and truly didn’t know Brel’s songs except to comprehend that this Belgian composer had been assimilated into the French chanson tradition, and had influenced several international figures (Edith Piaf herself has performed some of his songs, most notably, “Ne mais quitte pas,” a song not in this anthology) and even American singers (The Kingston Trio did a remarkable, and I would argue, completely atypical rendition of his “La Moribond” as “Seasons in the Sun.”). But, basically, I’d never really known his significant contributions. But given this production, that has all changed.

      Indeed, both Howard and I, after hearing this perfectly delightful rendition of some of his major hits, went happily home slightly scratching our heads. What was all the excitement about Brel about? Certainly the audience were of the age that they most certainly might have known of his 1950s and 1960s works, if not of his later cinematic career. Even though we can identify as elderly, we were most definitely on the younger end of the ages of these attendees. I believe we represent a kind intergenerational group, lost in the cusp between the 1950s nostalgic narratives and the transformation into the rock world of Elvis Presley, and, soon after The Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Many of those of of us born immediately after World War II feel slightly trapped between Rosemary Clooney and Janis Joplin, particularly those of us who sought intellectual alternatives to pop culture. I think both Howard and I feel we somehow lost out, because of our serious bent of minds, of the popular culture of our own times. And what I’ve seen in trailers of the Jacques Brel movie, filled with late 1960s, hippyish notions of clowns, balloons, and dancing, half-naked, revenants of the sun, I can’t imagine that I would have truly enjoyed the Brel musical as expressed by Eric Blau and Mort Shuman. My guess is that the 1968 play was also filled with just such topical tropes.

      Fortunately, the current Los Angeles Odyssey Theater production dispels such attic ideas, and the four strong singers, Marc Francoeur, Susan Kohler, Miyuki Miyagi, and Michael Yapujian, work hard to just simply interpret the English lyrics as created by the Blau/Shuman team. But here, it appears, they are also are faced with a problem: the American translators’ shift from the French “chanson” tradition into a kind of American narrative form that is far heavier and denser than the originals. Dan Fisbach’s rather stodgy direction only encourages a kind of plodding story-like presentation of Brel’s far more memorably very personally impassioned songs.

      I say all of this after having left the theater, despite memories of such lovely performances as Susan Kohler’s “My Death” and, even better, her “Marieke” (sung in three languages) and the wonderful last chorus of the 1956 work, “If We Only Have Love,” still with a sense of disappointment. Frankly, many of the songs selected to be included in the Blau/Shuman production are, admittedly, just a bit corny— particularly the opening number “Marathon,” the war-inspired “Statue” (in which a bronzed war-time sculpture comes alive to admit to his sexist behavior to women), “The Bulls” (although admirably performed by the engaging Michael Yapujian), “Funeral Tango” (sung by Marc Francoeur), and, above all, the late musical number “Carousel” (in which the whole cast lamentably engages in a calliope rendition of the popular attraction).

      These songs all appear to be from a generation that has little significance even to the 70-year-olds Howard and I now represent. God knows how younger people (a few of whom had snuck out for a peek) might feel about these musical elephants? I forgave them because of their datedness and loved the cast for their obvious singing talents. We all applauded enthusiastically, and, not to forget, the four musicians—keyboard artist Anthony Lucca, bass player Cyrus Elia, percussionists Conor Molloy and Ryan McDiamid, and guitar player Max Waner—who would have made any production proud of their existence. Some of their jazz intonations while they played, apparently improvised as we all waited for some of the performers caught in heavy Sunday afternoon traffic. We enjoyed it, in short, even if, as we moved home down Olympic Boulevard, I wondered why I still felt so empty, as if I’d swallowed a marshmallow concoction that left me with an unresolved hunger.

      The next morning (today), as I listened to many of the original songs sung by Brel and others on You Tube and other sources I began to see what my problem was. Even the least interesting songs suddenly seemed to reveal to me that what didn’t appeal in the musical, were truly memorable, such as “Amsterdam” (performed at the Odyssey by Marc Francoeur) while Brel which gave it, in his concert-sweaty performance, a sort of red-light urgency; David Bowie’s English version was equally shocking, making you wish to help pull up the sailors’ zippers and send them, after they were safely sated on fish dinners (fish representing women in the French), on their way. “Amsterdam” or, better translated, “In the Port of Amsterdam,” is a red-light number about all the boys (of whatever sexual persuasion) who have sought out sex before drunkenly being shipped back to their endlessly lonely internments upon the sea.    

      The slight love song, “Fanette” of Jacques Brel’s Act II becomes, in Brel’s singing, a truly painful adolescent memory that can never leave the singer whole again. What Susan Kohler competently sang as “My Death” in Brel’s La Mort becomes almost a death march into non-existence, and, sung by Bowie, becomes a terrorizing march into the self-destruction which, alas, he finally faced. Even the eerie “Old Folks,” sung at the Odyssey to an audience basically represented in the mocking English lyrics of folks who seldom wandered out and listened to the tick-tock of the silver clock, seemed, given Brel’s interpretation, a passionate expression of Thomas’ “I Will Not Go Gentle into that Good Night.” 

     It’s now clear, given the passage of time, that Blau and Shuman’s Englishized narrative statements have truly little to do with the originals, and that Brel’s work might have been far better served in the US by an anthology of the hundreds of wonderful adaptations by wonderful American interpreters from Ray Charles, July Collins, John Denver, Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra, Scott Walter, and Andy Williams than in a discrete review of four talented but basically amateur singers.

     I think everyone who loves great music should run to the Odyssey Theatre and hear the versions of the great singer-performer Brel which these well-intentioned performers interpret. It’s a great introduction to the Belgium genius. But then, go home, search out You Tube and other such services and listen, again and again—all day if you have the time. And learn what Brel’s incredible music is truly about. I should add, I immediately posted some of these works to my USTheater, Opera, and Performance site. Go and listen and listen again.

 

Los Angeles, July 10, 2017

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera and Performance (July 2017).