Stephen Sondheim (music and lyrics), George Furth (book) | Original Cast Album: Company / 1970 [documentary]

for the record

by Douglas Messerli

 

D. A. Pennebaker (director) Original Cast Album: Company / 1970 [documentary]

 

Yesterday, exhausted from several days of watching very intense LGBTQ feature films, I awarded myself the opportunity of viewing the noted documentarian filmmaker D. A. Pennebaker’s Original Cast Album: Company. The film was to have been the first in a series of such cast recordings, and received excellent reviews; the producers, however, in the meantime had been hired by MGM, and the series, most sadly, never occurred.

     We have only this “pilot” work, but what a memorable film it is! Criterion, which has re-released the film, most recently with commentary by critic Frank Rich, composer/lyricist Steven Sondheim, and Elaine Stritch, and others, listing it among their LGBTQ films; so it seemed to offer the perfect excuse for me to rush back into the arms of Broadway theater. Yet there is little outwardly “gay” in this production. Indeed, except for composer/lyricist Sondheim and the musical librettist George Furth, I don’t know of another artist in the work who is openly gay.

     The original cast album was recorded just a few weeks after the show’s opening as most such albums are, when Jones had not yet left company which he would shortly after due to the stress of his divorce proceedings with his then wife Mae Entwisle after nearly 17 years of marriage. Although Jones performs a remarkable couple of takes of the third act solo “Being Alive” and a quite touching version of “Barcelona” with Susan Browning—Sondheim even arguing that not only was that performance of “Being Alive” his best but that no one did it better*—that actor, who later became a born-again Christian, has never been one of my favorite performers.

      Now if the film had featured the terribly gifted but unfairly overlooked Larry Kert (the original Tony on Broadway’s West Side Story) who replaced Jones soon after, that would have truly made it a “gay film.”

      Kert was a particular target of the notoriously mean-spirited Jerome Robbins who kept calling him a “faggot” throughout rehearsals, despite the fact that Robbins and most of the male dancers were also gay; obviously Kert didn’t even attempt to hide his gay sexuality. He died, as so very many of the greatest talents of the time, of AIDS in 1991, leaving behind his lover, Bill Pullen.

    Only later, in England, did they dub in Kert’s performances for Jones’ on the recording. But the one we hear in this film is Jones as the central character, “Bobby, baby, bubbie,” beloved by all but in love with no one until he sings the two songs noted above. Although one of his male friends suggests a possible gay relationship with him in the musical, that conversation was, of course, not among this album of songs.

     Although the musical opened to some quite negative reviews, and, early on, was in danger of closing, it eventually ran for a long run of 690 performances, finally fully introducing Sondheim in Broadway as a significant composer, not just a lyricist, who would soon change the very nature of the medium through his introduction of darker, more complex themes, music, and lyrics that those than the musical theater productions that came before.

     One of the most difficult songs to perform is “You Could Drive a Person Crazy,” sung by Donna McKechnie, Susan Browning, and Pamela Myers, which, with its close harmonies and fast- talking lyrics, is easy to flub. We see this song, which surprised even a long-time pro like Thomas Z. Shepard, the record producer, in its complexities, performed several times before they get it right.

      Similarly, and even more difficult to perform is the brilliant patter song “Getting Married Today,” sung by Beth Howland. This tongue-twister is surely the tour-de-force regarding the combination of simply singing the lyrics and enunciating them fully enough to have them comprehended, at which amazingly Howland succeeds. She married Charles Kimbrough, who played Harry in this production.

       And Pamela Myers, in “Another Hundred People,” discovers for the first time that she has changed an F-sharp to an A of Sondheim’s original score, and now sings it correctly, Sondheim getting what he wrote down on the record, so to speak. This song I have always believed intimates some of the chordal developments and even lyrics of Sondheim’s later Sweeney Todd, particularly when early in the song she sings the elongated line “It’s a city of strangers,” with great similarities to Sweeney Todd’s “City on Fire.” Both serve as cries of the dangers of the urban space which many of Sondheim’s works celebrate, but with always the Bernstein-like lament for the need to escape to “a place for us,” free from those dangers. And Company, in particular is a nearly claustrophobic world in which Bobby cannot even escape his friends in his deepest most private desires and thoughts until he finally refuses to attend the celebration for his birthday, and leave the ever-present “company” behind.

       The major piece of this film, however, is its last. After everyone else has finally left the Columbia Records studio at East 30th Street and Third Avenue at around 3:00 in the morning, the orchestra, Sondheim, Furth, Shepard, Hastings and the orchestra remain behind with Elaine Stritch to perform the final number, “Ladies Who Lunch,” she having given over her earlier scheduled time to Jones.

       Having heard this song sung by Stritch now so many times, I can recognize almost immediately how tired and stressed the singer is. Sondheim, in retrospect, suggests in was one of those times where she kept drinking a few sips of alcohol just give her the courage to continue going on, and by the time of her song, was drunk enough that she couldn’t live up to the demands of the song.

      The composer insists she first bring down the song into a lower key in order to not hurt her voice. She sings it lovingly and knowingly, but it’s “flaccid,” as Shepard puts it, slower than its usual pace, perhaps even a little better narratively expressed, but without the zest of protestations of those shallow ladies who try to do everything imaginable to fill in their empty lives. By the end of the song, even Stritch can hardly “rise, rise, rise” to full occasion of her narrative dismissal of the lot.

     She sings it again, making it even worse. And again, back in the original key, attempts to belt it out. We are witnessing the difference between a great performance and several mediocre ones. If there was ever an example of that important difference in defining the greatest of both a performer and this series of performances is revelatory.

       At nearly 4:00 a.m. on a Monday morning, they finally tell Stritch to go home, almost against her protests. They have the orchestra play the piece without her. And the film ends the next day, as a rested Stritch, made up for her evening performance, stops by the studio to sing it the way it should be sung, layering her version over the previous recorded orchestral one. Stritch seems also a little fearful, even after her performance, that they still may cut it. But they assure her that everything is now as perfect as any such a recording can ever be.

      As cameraman Jimmy Desmond states, no one could have imagined that such an event would be quite so dramatic; and indeed, as Pennebaker agrees, it’s the perfect film taking only one day and night.

 

*After writing this essay, I did a comparison listening to four of the major singers of this song, Dean Jones, Larry Kert, Raúl Esparza, and Neil Patrick Harris. The results were surprising. Far and away, the best dramatic version was sung by Dean Jones. Sondheim and others had been on target in their evaluations. Esparaza was the most dramatic and often terribly effective, but there was just too much self-consciousness involved with his performance, and his voice as not as lyrical as was Jones’. Larry Kert had the very best voice with remarkable clarity, but there was no depth to his “Being Alive,” which he sung almost as a ballad instead of a discovery of the true contradictions he was suddenly to terms with. Surprisingly, Neil Patrick Harris did a commendable version of it, although it was definitely the weakest of the four. The prettiest version was by yet a fifth singer, John Barrowman, who sang the role of Bobby at the Kennedy Center. But this was from a song album and truly is not comparable with a theater production performance; it was lovely to hear, easy on the ears, and beautiful to listen to, but had next to nothing to do with theater. There are two illegally photographed versions of the Kennedy Center performance on YouTube, unbearable to watch and impossible to listen to. When will people comprehend that such “snapped” performances are not only a crime but truly are a disservice to the artist.

 

Los Angeles, September 6, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2023).

John Jarboe and Stephanie Blythe (screenwriters), John Jarboe (director) Blythely Oratonio in Blythely Ever After / 2020 [TV video]

 the night she sang opera in drag at a karaoke bar

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Jarboe and Stephanie Blythe (screenwriters), John Jarboe (director) Blythely Oratonio in Blythely Ever After / 2020 [TV video]

 

As part of Lincoln Center’s American Songbook series at The Appel Room, popular Metropolitan Opera mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe takes on a drag role, one of the many “beards” she’s played throughout her long career, Blythely Oratonio, a somewhat intemperate tenor who she first met while selecting mustaches for one her roles and later encountered again for a full evening at a karaoke bar, in what Blythely describes as one of the best nights of his life. Backed by up his band, The Fluffers, his non-gender performing “Birdies” (Messapotamia Lefae and Sav Souza), and his “Flowers” (Hailey McAvoy and Margaret Tigue), Blythely plays a gay man who not only knows his Grindr inside out, but throws out various gay slang terms, some of them so crude that most opera singers might not even whisper them in the dark.

     As critic Brady Schwind observes in BroadwayWorld:

 

“Bearded, bejeweled, and ready for battle in a Trojan headdress, it's patently clear from his first entrance that Oratonio, in his first American Songbook appearance, like the best of all opera heroes (and antiheroes) will take no prisoners. But lest we forget, tenors are also sensitive, fragile creatures; the inflated symbol of importance in an art form steeped in such an antiquity of tradition, it's continually pegged as a likely candidate for extinction.

…. Such a presentation, at first blush, might be the kind of grand and over the top drag exploitation, you'd expect from (at best) The Box or (at worst) America's Got Talent. Oratonio, with his band The Fluffers, merges expected mind-bending classical vocals with (what's become rather boilerplate) anachronous cross over pop anthems likely on heavy rotation at your local karaoke bar. Imagine Pavarotti doing Rick Springfield's ‘Jessie's Girl’ as a Mozartian baroque and you get the idea of the musical vocabulary and running gag of the evening.”

 

      As one might expect from such a figure, Blythely goes back in time to tell of his childhood attractions, which elicits “Jessie’s Girl,” to far more broad-minded pursuits, discovering his true self. Early in the hour-long concert and chatfest, Blythely sings passages from Sondheim’s “Send in the Clowns” that are so perfect, I wanted to hear him sing the entire piece, but as he prone to do throughout, he quickly intertwines that work flawlessly with the call of another clown, singing from “Vesti la giubba” by Leoncavallo.

     Barry Manilow’s “Could Be Magic” alternates with Puccini’s “Recondita armonia,” and Delibes’ beautiful flower duet, sung by his “Flowers,” becomes an occasion for several testimonies from celebrities, including Stephanie Blythe herself, as well as the tenor taking a few deserved bows.

     Surprises in Blythely’s choices of music abound, as when he sings, quite stunningly, Toni Tennille’s and Daryl Dragon’s “Gentle Stranger,” and the next moment drifts off into Offenbach’s “Barcarolle.”

     But despite the musical wonders Blythely calls up, it is often his personal revelations that tug deepest on the heart, particularly when he describes in graphic terms the moment he realized, on the toilet no less, that he could he can no longer “carry an expiring maid while singing a high D.” Elsewhere, Blythe, as herself, has admitted that after menopause, “my voice started moving lower and lower, and I’ve worked to develop this lower range. It’s a natural progression because of hormonal changes, and I’ve chosen not to fight it.”

      And there is throughout Blythe’s Blythely’s choice to explore the sometimes fluid shifts of sex and gender of operatic characters, as Schwind points out, such as the macho Valkyries and the loving male duo of “Nessun Dorma." Blythely’s operatic songbook, indeed, has no reason to exclude a glam rock musician such as David Bowie, whose “Changes” she sings quite admirably, or the opera-loving Freddie Mercury,* who himself pushed his music toward the oratorio. She closes her show, in fact, with his “We Are the Champions,” with the audience’s full knowledge that the “we” of which Blythely sings are far more diverse than the more conservative opera-goers might ever imagine that pronoun to be.

     What I would now truly like to hear is a full night of Blythely singing Broadway tenor solos.

 

*Mercury first met Spanish opera singer Monserrat Caballé in 1987, and in 1988 released an album with her, Barcelona.

 

Los Angeles, May 11, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).

 

The Smiths: Morrrissey, Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke, and Mike Joyce| The Queen Is Dead / 1986 [music video]

take me out

by Douglas Messerli

 

The Smiths: Morrissey, Johnny Marr, Andy Rourke, and Mike Joyce (composers and performers), Derek Jarman (director) The Queen Is Dead / 1986 [music video]

 

For decades Morrissey had been enticing young British and US followers with his and The Smiths performances of songs that blurred gender boundaries and toyed with vaguely homoerotic narratives. Finally in his 2013 Autobiography he admitted to having had a long term relationship with a man. Yet even then the formerly declared “celibate” hedged his sexual bets by describing himself as “humasexual,” presumably suggesting that he was bisexual or possibly tri-sexual if he dared explore relationships within the Q factors of the LGBTQ sexual community. As one entertainment outlet put it, “everyone rolled their eyes” as if to ask, “so what’s new?”

     In a sense, it doesn’t matter, for The Smiths’ work had always toyed with cross dressing and adolescent sexual angst, particularly in their 1986 album The Queen Is Dead for which the out and proud gay filmmaker Derek Jarman filmed a fascinating music video which included three songs from the recording, the title song “The Queen Is Dead,” “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” and “Panic.”

     While Jarman’s work sometimes references images suggested in the songs themselves, one might also argue that his film was basically created with a narrative logic that is not beholden to the lyrics. In general, Jarman is far less sexually explicit in this music video than he is in his own films, particularly given his images in Sebastiane of a decade earlier and Carvaggio of the same year. In the music video there is little nudity, and the intensity of the male on male gaze is kept to a minimum. Indeed in the first song, the director almost reaches back to the 60s and 70s hippie world to encapsulate the new world of freedom experienced upon the occasion of the Queen’s metaphorical death. Young children transmogrify into childish-like adults, one dressed in a striped shirt and short black pants who trips around a vacant industrial lot spray-painting the song’s title upon concrete walls. Young girls in dresses are a moment later transformed in what appears to be a young man in a long gown, suggesting the song’s lyrics about Prince Charles’ secret desires:

 

                           I said Charles, don't you ever crave

                           To appear on the front of the Daily Mail

                           Dressed in your Mother's bridal veil?

                           Oh...

                           And so, I checked all the registered historical facts

                           And I was shocked into shame to discover

                           How I'm the eighteenth pale descendant

                           Of some old queen or other

    The dancing boy in dress at one point drops the top of his bodice to reveal a woman’s breasts, suggesting that perhaps what has appeared to be a boy is actually a woman with hair closely cropped. But later, the image again appears to be a boy with a fairy flitting about it.

     Throughout this section—and indeed throughout the entire video—the royal crown spins about the young apparently cross dressing figure who embraces roses, a sunflower, and what appears to be a nettle, perhaps hinting at Johnny Marr’s song “The Boy with the Thorn in His Side,” not represented in the video.

      To the strains of music that suggests “We can go for a walk where it's quiet and dry /  And talk about precious things / But when you're tied to your Mother's apron / No-one talks about castration” the boy-girl begins to spin and by song’s end the young transsexual figure is rotated almost into a wild Turkish dervish, a flame lit where once was his/her face.

      My favorite song of the video (and one of my two favorites of the record as a whole) is the true centerpiece of Jarman’s tribute “There Is a Light...” To me this narrative song, about a young man in the car who is clearly enjoying the trip to someplace “Where there's music and there's people / And they're young and alive,” with another, perhaps slightly older boy at the wheel, represents all the wonderment and confusion of a first date. The song reminds me a bit of Luther Vandross song sung by Teddy Pendergrass two years earlier in Alan Randolph’s film Choose Me, “You’re My Choice Tonight,” the five syllabic phrases, “Take me out tonight,” and “You’re my choice tonight,” that ends in a molossus (three equally stressed metrical syllables) in each case assertively pleading the other provide him with pleasure. 

      But in this case the narrative goes far deeper. The boy at the center of the song is also seeking an escape from home:

 

                     Driving in your car, oh, please don't drop me home

                     Because it's not my home, it's their home

                     And I'm welcome no more [.]

 

This young man clearly has been kicked out of his own home, which suggests to me that it has something to do with his sexuality as expressed in the rest of the work. The young man with who whom he’s riding is obviously someone with whom he’s in love but is too shy to express that fact:

 

                      And in the darkened underpass

                      I thought "Oh God, my chance has come at last"

                      But then a strange fear gripped me and I just couldn't ask [.]

 

So delighted is the presumably younger man that he ridiculously imagines that even if a double-decker bus of “a ten-tonne truck” [sic] crashed into them, he’d be happy to die: “To die by your side, well, the pleasure, the privilege is mine.”

       I read this work, in short, as a coming out story, about a young man forced out of his own home by his parents because of his sexuality being taken out on a wild night by the boy he clearly adores.

       Apparently, Jarman reads it similarly since he represents a handsome young man who eventually appears shirtless before finally being kissed by another boy hovering over him. The short sequences of this portion of the work are presented almost as in the thousands of young gay coming of age films that by the next couple of decades had become so popular that currently they dominate LGBTQ filmmaking.

      Here too, as in the previous work we see flames, but in this case instead of representing the end of the old regime they signify the possibility of being killed by the crash. And in a sense the young man, demanding to move forward without a return, can only imagine that he might be consumed in his young love for the driver, the male in charge. Jarman reveals the truth of this song: that it speaks not only of love but of a desperate search for a replacement of the familial love he has lost. Death would be better than going back as long as he was in the arms of the driver of the vehicle taking him to a new destination.

      As the two again kiss, the surface becomes scratched over by what eventually appears to be gains of wheat—for an instant Jarman almost seems willing to romanticize their love into a Hallmark card image—the golden stalks appearing to embody the hair of the blonde boy being kissed, and finally blotting out the faces of the two lovers as Jarman’s frame resolves into an abstraction that if one focuses long and deeply enough ephemerally reveals a series of lithe nude dancers.

      The third song, “Panic” begins, in Jarman’s vision, with an image of a cool handsome young man in a leather jacket who slightly resembles a British version of James Dean who seems to stand against and apart from everything that the lyrics are announcing:

 

Panic on the streets of London

Panic on the streets of Birmingham

I wonder to myself...

Could life ever be sane again?

The Leeds side-streets that you slip down

I wonder to myself...

 

Hopes may rise on the Grasmere

But, Honey Pie, you're not safe here

So you run down to the safety of the town

But there's panic on the streets of Carlisle

Dublin, Dundee, Humberside [.]

      While the figure smokes and stares off into the bay, we also get glimpses of derelict streets, graffiti-laden walls, alleys filled with garbage, and buildings that appear to have been shot-up by bullets. Is the young man a product of these war-torn streets?

      Yet, despite his seeming bemused attitude, a war even against the music itself is brewing as the lyrics invoke that the discos be burned down since the music that they play has nothing to do with the narrator’s life, ending, of course, with the now famed final invocation that they should

 

                                 Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ

                                 Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ

                                 Hang the DJ, hang the DJ, hang the DJ

                                 Hang the DJ, hang the DJ

                                 Hang the DJ, hang the DJ.........

     By video’s end the young man seems to almost be kissing a smoking skull, an expression of the necrophiliac relationship the man has had, apparently, to that DJ or the music itself.

     In 2019, writing on the internet site Far Out Kelly Rankin nicely summarized Jarman’s contributions to the art of musical videos and to the work, in particular, of Morrissey, Marr, Andy Rourke, and Mike Joyce.

 

“Jarman’s fragmented style perfectly suits the cult-classic band The Smiths. All of the footage was shot on film; the Super 8 was notoriously Jarman’s favourite companion. There are multiple accounts talking about his early days and how he would never leave the house without it. You can tell from the first second; there’s an abundance of hand-held camera action of urban scenery. Followed by shots of punk behaviour, alarming figures and costumes, highly contrasted shots of Buckingham Palace, other places around London, the crown—and of course the Queen herself—all giving a nice salute to Morrissey’s anarchistic lyrics. Layers of film overlap, these shots cross over each other… you might not always be sure of what you’re looking at exactly, but you are definitely intrigued. You want to know why he chose each detail and what everything represents.

     All of this has happened in just the first five minutes. It’s a piece of visual art, not just a music video. Although each song and section of imagery is completely different, there are still clear themes that run throughout the thirteen-minute film. Shots of flowers, fire and angels; an eighties take on romanticism. It’s thirteen minutes of a decaying Britain, with flashes of beauty and queerness. If you love The Smiths, Derek Jarman, eighties Britain...you should give it a watch.”

      

     It would have been interesting to see how Jarman might have approached another song on the 1986 album, “The Vicar in a Tutu”:

 

I was minding my business

Lifting some lead off

The roof of the Holy Name church

It was worthwhile living a laughable life

To set my eyes on the blistering sight

 

Of a Vicar in a tutu

He's not strange

He just wants to live his life this way

 

A scanty bit of a thing

With a decorative ring

That wouldn't cover the head of a goose

As Rose collects the money in a canister

Who comes sliding down the bannister?

 

A vicar in a tutu

He's not strange

He just wants to live his life this way [.]

 

    But perhaps that would simply be too literal for Jarman’s more subtle talents. Yet I’d love to have seen the vicar slide down that bannister.

 

Los Angeles, February 26, 2021

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog and World Cinema Review (February 2021).

Gary Halvorson (film director), Phelim McDermott (stage director) | Akhnaten: An Opera in Three Acts / 2023 [the Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

send in the clowns

by Douglas Messerli

 Shalom Goldman, Robert Israel, Richard Ridell, and Jerome Robbins (libretto), Philip Glass (music), Phelim McDermott (stage director), Gary Halvorson (film director) Akhnaten: An Opera in Three Acts / 2023 [the Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

 

I reviewed the original production of the 2016 opera when it was performed by LAOpera, but saw it again in the 2023 HD-Live MET production with most of the same cast members and the same stage director. Accordingly, I chose not to create a new review, since I feel that what I expressed 7 years previously was still appropriate, although I must admit that seeing it live on the screen does wonderfully overwhelm one with its images, and actually does permit and even justify some of the more spectacle-oriented scenes. Screen and the very large MET stage, quite obviously, admits to stop-motion tableaux vivant artistry much better than does the smaller dimensions of a theater production.

     Yet, 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, after re-visiting the MET production company’s production of the last of Glass' epic works.

      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 Metropolitan 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.).

     Conductor Karen Kamensek and the supreme MET orchestra came through excellently.

    And yet…in all three works, two of them sung in ancient languages, and the earlier work often singing the language of counting, 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.

     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. Here, perhaps for the first time in opera we encounter the first truly transgender figure. 

     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 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 23, 2023

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2023).