Georges Bizet | Carmen / 2019

three hateful figures

by Douglas Messerli

 

Georges Bizet (composer), Ludovic Halévy and Henri Meilhac (libretto, based on the novella by Prosper Mérimée), Richard Eyre (director), Gary Halvorson (film director) Carmen / 2019 [Metropolitan Opera live-HD film]

 

Over numerous years I have come to know almost every aria in and the plot of Carmen, but oddly enough I had never seen a performance of the popular opera. So, the announcement by the Metropolitan Opera that this year they were including their tragic tale of the gypsy Carmen and the soldier Don José in their live HD broadcast, led Howard and me to buy tickets. And this production was such an excellent one, that feel that perhaps I need not see another.

     I say that, knowing that I might truly enjoy hearing Georges Bizet’s most memorable score, and would truly enjoy singers performing it of the quality of this production, but must also proclaim that the central characters are all rather repulsive. 

      Yes, Carmen (Clémentine Margaine in this production) is a truly independent spirit, who will have love only on her terms, as she expresses it in her Act 1 "Habanera.” If in a society where men generally made the decision about whom they loved, the cigarette girl, given her beauty, is able to make her own choices of lovers and to declare that her shifting interests may result in heart-break or even death for her former lovers. In short, she recognizes herself as a dangerous siren who spends a great deal of energy in playing a kind of dominating whore, spinning webs around men only to leave them entrapped when she moves on to her next lover. And all those around her, apparently, know her pattern and steer clear of her sexual enticements. Only outsiders such as Don José (Roberto Alagna) and the toreador, Escamillo (Alexander Vinogradov) might allow themselves to fall for her charms.

      It is precisely her independence and willfulness that attracts men to her. In a society of feminine passivity, Carmen stands out in her alluring masculine-like stance. One might even observe that she symbolically stands for soldiers and toreadors alike—both groups of which, because of their historical association with their own sex and their colorful costumes, have long been the focus of gay intrigue—as a kind of acceptable drag incarnation of their male colleagues. *

     But Carmen also is a betrayer, a violent fighter, a smuggler, and thief, who entices the flustered Don José not only to leave the saintly—and again quite passive female, who visits her would-be lover only upon instructions and the pleas of Don José’s mother, Micaéla (Aleksandra Kurzak, in real life the wife of Alagna) free her from arrestment, for which he is imprisoned for months, to leave his employment as a soldier, and to join the gypsy smugglers. True, he is intoxicated by his love for Carmen, but we also see through these acts just how weak he is as a man. In a sense, Don José is as passive as Carmen is independent. And he too has now betrayed all those to whom he was formerly committed. Is it any wonder that Carmen can no longer admire or love him? By giving in to all of her demands he has simply shown himself as a male weakling (and we must remember that Mérimée’s tale is very much about gender stereotypes, even if they are often overturned).

      Carmen has now fallen in love with an equally odious being, the self-enchanted, braggadocios bull-fighter from Seville, Escamillo. The children (which are absolutely wonderful in this production, which provided them even with a backstage interview in the intermission) and the locals may all celebrate his achievements, but there is something amiss with this “hero.” Escamillo may appear brave to attempt to visit the smuggler’s mountain hangout to seek out Carmen, but he is quickly bested in a fight with Carmen’s cohorts and backs off. 

     Even if Carmen is currently smitten by him, we recognize that she will eventually perceive his true cowardice and will leave him as well. Fortunately, we never discover what might have occurred in their relationship, but it might be interesting as a separate work to imagine what their relationship would have been and how it might have ended—surely, once more, in violence.

    The true hero of this opera is Micaéla, who truly enters the lion’s den of the smuggler’s hideout, trembling with fear, not only for her encounter with the suspicious males, but for having to encounter her nemesis Carmen. Yet only she is able, temporarily at least, of weaning Don José away from this world so that he might attend to his mother’s impending death.

      Her victory, however, is a short one. He returns to Carmen, this time taking on the most horrific role he might ever embody of a murderer, waiting to be arrested and hung.

     No matter how you might view conventional behavior, you have to be shocked by the trio of horrific beings at the center of this story. Opera is filled with hateful figures, criminals, rapists, and many, many murderers. But these three rather shady figures starring in a single work may be a kind of record.

    They all may be proclaiming love, but the results of that love make you shudder. Even Don Giovanni, the lecherous count also roaming the Seville streets, seems almost saintly in comparison.

As the gentle and mostly unjudgmental Howard said, upon leaving the theater, “these are not such nice people.”

     I was enchanted by the performances and music, even if it didn’t make me want to abandon my life and run into the mountains.

 

*It’s fascinating, simply as a coincidental piece of gay gossip, that Marcel Proust, after Bizet’s death, befriended the composer’s wife and son, upon whom he based two of the central figures in his masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past. The author of the original Carmen, Prosper Mérimée, although having occasional affairs and long correspondence with women, never married and lived most of his life with his mother. He did have a one-night stand, apparently, with George Sand (not impressed with his sexual prowess), who might almost be portrayed as a kind of Carmen, a strong-willed, talented seductress of many powerful men.

 

Los Angeles, February 6, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (February 2019).

 

John Beasley | MONK’estra / 2018

 the sweet sound of dissonance

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Beasley MONK’estra / Santa Monica, California, The Broad Stage, the performance I attended with Pablo Capra on October 12, 2018

 

Beginning as a jazz pianist, composer, and arranger, John Beasley for the last few years has reimagined the great songs of pianist Thelonius Monk with, at first, a small combo, finally expanding that into a larger jazz orchestra, MONK’estra, which successfully demonstrates just how great of composer Monk truly was. Indeed, the two albums the group has recorded garnered several Grammy nominations.         

      For lovers of Monk’s often eccentric piano poundings and endless chordal embellishments, it may be hard to even imagine a big band sound—with a row of saxophonists (who double as clarinetists and flautists: Bob Sheppard, Tom Luer, Tommy Peterson, Adam Schroeder, and Danny Janklow), trombonists (Wendell Kelly, Ryan Dragon, Lemar Guillary), and trumpeters (Bijon Watson, Rashawn Ross, James Ford, Brian Swartz), along with percussionist Peter Erskine, bass and acoustic player Ben Shepherd, and Beasley, himself, sporting a Monk-like tam, at the piano and occasionally stalking the stage as the director—yet Beasley’s arrangements incorporate much of the punch and yet complex texture of Monk’s works.

      The night’s list of songs at the The Broad Stage in Santa Monica, a performance which I attended with Pablo Capra, was announced from the stage, and since I standardly do not take notes at events and I don’t know Monk’s entire oeuvre, it’s difficult to recount all the titles. Yet I do recall Monk’s notable Round Midnight, Little Rootie Tootie, Going on the Hudson (one of my favorites), and possibly Dear Ruby. There were many others; in all, Monk wrote about 70 songs.

     What is totally unforgettable is the sound of this group, as if the Duke Ellington orchestra had suddenly shifted into Monk’s extreme dissonance, which, as one group member argues, “he [Monk] makes sound normal.”    

     The utter talent of this group allows for a showcasing of the individuals, with a couple of baritone sax solos (particularly of interest to me, since I played that instrument in high school), a couple of trumpets and a trombone features, alto and tenor sex solos, and special focuses on the drummer and bassist, along with, of course, Beasley’s own very Monk-like piano renditions.

      If at times there may seem to be a bit of sweetening-up of Monk’s more improvisatory approach, MONK’estra does capture the spirit of the jazz legend and reveals, moreover, as Beasley notes, how much of his work included elements of the history of 21^st-century sound, including “hip-hop, bossa nova, Afro-Cuban jazz, funk, fusion and free jazz.”

   The near sold-out performance was filled with people who couldn’t get enough of the highly energized sounds, awarding the performers two well-deserved standing ovations, and demanding an encore.

    What I think we all recognized, despite the negative press Monk received throughout his life (jazz critic Philip Larkin once describing his as “the elephant on the keyboard”), as the arranger / pianist argues:

 

                 I discovered how pliable his music is, like any great composer—

                 for example Bach, who sounds great in any tempo. Monk’s music

                 is so open to interpretation because his compositions have such a

                 solid story. I figured out how to elongate his sophisticated melo-

                 dies and voice things in a non-traditional way. And through it

                 all, those unforgettable melodies just stick with you.

 

     Even if the titles Beasley announced didn’t all stick with me, yet those melodies are still replaying in my head this morning, and the next time MONK’estra performs in town—they now travel the globe in their performances—I hope to be there.

 

Los Angeles, October 13, 2018

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

 

 

Meredith Monk | Atlas / 2019

a great opera brought into the repertoire

by Douglas Messerli

 

Meredith Monk Atlas / at the Disney Concert Hall, June 11, 2019, directed by Yuval Sharon

 

One might imagine that an opera with a plot that is more like a travelogue than a coherent narrative or story, whose set consists of a giant space-like orb, and songs without words primarily made up of what critic Bonnie Marranca has describe as encompassing “glottal effects, ululation, yodeling, speech song, and animal sounds” would be something one would not desire to sit through for several hours. Moreover, even the Joseph Campbell-like mythological adventure at the heart of Meredith Monk’s Atlas is not only vague (based somewhat on the life of adventurer Alexandra David-Néel) but, at moments, is downright hokey, with the small band of travelers and their spirit-guides encountering troupes of agrarian, artic, and desert dwellers before finally spiraling off into space that often combines a kind of silly symbolism with outright fantasy. Unlike Marranca, I am not a great admirer of the Modernist Symbolism.

     Yet, sitting at Disney Concert Hall last night, both my theater-going companion, Deborah Meadows, and I agreed that we might have wished it would go on for even a bit longer, perhaps like one of John Cage’s Europeras.

     The first major production of Monk’s Atlas since its 1991 premiere at the Houston Grand Opera, this Yuval Sharon-directed work might not even have been imagined as possible given Monk’s reluctance in this and in other works to produce performance scores, her own deep involvement in the work (in the original she played the central heroine), and her reliance on a group of performers with whom she had worked for years sharing her special brand of vocalization, choreography, and theatricality.

      Indeed, as critics have long wondered, could a work by Meredith Monk continue to exist without her? Monk may well have wondered that herself, and fortunately when Sharon, working for the past 3-years as a special conductor for the LA Philharmonic, approached her with the idea of reviving it, she agreed—with only one important stipulation: that she be in no way involved in it. From the smile on her face during a well-deserved standing ovation Tuesday evening, it was apparent that she was pleased by the results. As Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed observed, Atlas had now been transformed from a Monk performance piece to an opera by Meredith Monk. And surely, given the success of this performance it will now be revived internationally. In this sense Sharon has given the world a new work to join the opera canon.

       Nearly everything about this work succeeded. First there was the set design by Es Devlin, which stunned everyone in its imposing and eerie presence even upon entering the hall. His huge, 36-foot spacecraft orb not only served as a canvas to Luke Halls’ projections of earth, moon, and extraterrestrial space, but through moving panels and retractable steps, served as a living quarters at times for the group of travelers on their way to and from their several journeys.

        Beautiful choreography by Danielle Agami articulated Monk’s own vision of the relationship between music and body as did the sound by Mark Grey.

        The space itself had been utterly transformed, as four front rows of seats of the theater had been removed in order to create a small pit wherein the LA Phil New Music Group, conducted by Paolo Bortolameolli, sat.

 

     And then, most obviously, there was the glorious music both from orchestra and on-stage. Consisting of 25 short vignettes, the singers trace the early years of Alexandra (Milena Manocchia) living at home in Illinois with her parents (Kathryn Shuman and Jimmy Traum) to her (now sung by Joanna Lynn-Jacobs) numerous travels with fellow companions Cheng (Yi Li), Erik (John Brancy), and eventually the more self-centered Franco (Dylan Gentile) along with two spirit guides (Miguel Zazueta and Kelci Hahn).

      In their voyages they encounter not only the different communities I describe above, but fascinating and horrifying figures that challenge each of them: a Hungry Ghost (Sharon Kim), an Ice Demon (Jessica Beebe), and a Lonely Spirit (Juecheng Chen). 

      By voyage’s end—after an absolutely glorious Out of Body Chorus, sung near the orchestra pit, an older but surely wiser Alexandra (Ann Carlson) returns home to quietly unpack her accumulated possessions.

 

     What is truly amazing is not only the truly unbelievable (and I do mean hard to be believed) singing by all cast members, but the fact that even without words we can truly comprehend their mix of vowels, rhythmic glossolalia, and complex vocalizations. Even the early opera mutterings of her mother and father are clear expressions of their fears and sadness for their daughter’s desire to leave them. And for all the yodels, screeches, shouts, and bangs, Monk’s music remains, almost like some Broadway ditties, in the ear. All night—a night in which our building lost all its electrical power—I kept hearing the opera’s musical refrains.

       And as for its lack of a coherent “story,” well we all know the story though the experiences of our lives, the necessities of packing and leaving home. Even at my rather advanced age, I still have numerous dreams of planes, trains, and other forms of transportation which I’m using to take me away from and back home.

      And most of us who have read the Odyssey will already know this story. Indeed, the mother in this opera, a bit like Penelope, is constantly knitting throughout the first scene. And the female hero must undergo some of the very same challenges that the Greek hero encounters. Only, as this version makes clear, it is only as an entire world community working together that we all are to survive our wanderings through life.

       A lesson, apparently, that this new version of Monk’s great opera reveals to us through Sharon’s reinvention of her work. I hope that, before I die, I can see it again many a time.

 

Los Angeles, June 12, 2019

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2019).

Tennessee Williams | The Glass Menagerie / 2010

rise and shine

by Douglas Messserli

 

Tennessee Williams The Glass Menagerie / this production premiered March 24, 2010 at the Laura Pels Theatre, New York / the performance I saw of this production was on October 17, 2010 at the Mark Taper Forum, Los Angeles

 

Although Williams' wondrous The Glass Menagerie is a seemingly simple play, it is one of the most difficult to perform because it depends almost entirely upon the actors' interpretations and, most particularly, on tone. If the characters, particularly the dominant mother, Amanda, are too harsh we lose much of the author's comedy; I agree with Frank Dwyer's statement in the theater program, that Williams is a comic writer. Yet Amanda cannot be simply a comic figure or the audience will not be able to comprehend her son Tom's desperation and his final act of leaving his mother and sister to fend for themselves.

    Laura must be shy, almost invisible, yet be able to stir up one's sympathy and even love. Finally, the right balance between these three figures is extraordinarily difficult to attain, a problem I perceived as early as 1966 when I saw a production—also proclaimed as a comic portrayal—at the Milwaukee Repertory Theatre.

     After a successful run in New Haven at the Long Wharf Theater and rave reviews from New York critics for its performances at Roundabout's Laura Pels Theatre, I looked forward to its reincarnation in Los Angeles. Judith Ivey's Amanda Wingfield had been described as a performance of a lifetime, and few, if any, critics found fault with the whole.

     Ivey is quite remarkable in her role as the imperious, scheming, prompting, praising, condemning and, at times, simply silly mother who keeps her children close, out of both worry over her daughter's fate and her own neediness. She is a monster, but, as Ivey makes clear, for the most part she is a hilarious one. Her incessant greeting to each morning, "Rise and Shine," may cause Tom to crawl deeper into the covers, but it is also a desperate command for him to match her pact to make the best of life, despite the fact that she has had little with which to work. It is almost a prayer for her children to live up to their potentialities—for Tom's sexual and creative awakening and for Laura's ability to charm and, hopefully, socially engage, even if it is only in the reflection of her glass figurines.

     Tom is at best a dreamer, at worst a slacker, a man, who like his father, is soon to desert her. Laura is nearly agoraphobic, so shy that she can hardly communicate; accordingly, there no hope that she can ever land a husband or a job. As Tom repeats throughout the play, she does nothing but play old records and care for her little glass treasures, made up mostly of small animals which her mother describes as her "glass menagerie."

     It is a miracle, accordingly, that despite the fact that things—including her children—have a "way of turning out so badly," that Amanda meets each day with the humor she does. Ivey captures both her determination and her almost girlish delight in living with a great gusto. If you cannot exactly call her performance naturalistic or even natural—the continual dropping of words at the end of sentences and long pauses in those same sentences often make her art feel affected—we nonetheless believe her acting, and we come to comprehend the woman behind.

     Yet this play is far from a perfect rendition of Williams' great art. In my estimation several aspects of director Gordon Edelstein's production take the work in a wrong direction from the very first instant of the play. Whereas most of the action of Williams' reading version of his work occurs in the Wingfield house, Edelstein begins it in a hotel room where Tom, now a budding young writer, attempts to type out the play's first passages. We recognize the autobiographical details in Williams' published version of the play, but by exaggerating these, by insisting that what we are witnessing what was written by Tom, he moves the play away from its dream-like quality and puts it into the mundane world of script writing. In the published version of the play, Tom is dressed in this first scene as a Merchant Seaman, not as an aspiring author. The fusing of the hotel room and a livable house, moreover, distracts from what I see as the focal point of the play, family life.

     At the same time, Edelstein and set designer Michael Yeargan have abandoned Williams' suggestion for a screen or scrim on which words and images appear, announcing each scene, which parallels Tom's nightly activity of attending the movies, and further takes us into the delusional world of the Wingfields. The screen also adds another dimension of humor to the play.

     Having determined that Tom is a young Tennessee, actor Patch Darragh, as if channeling Williams, twangs away in high southern, slightly effeminate voice that I found rather irritating. In my reading, Tom, in some respects, is as dreamy as his sister, despite the fact that he is the narrator. It is, after all, described by the author as a "dream play," in the manner of Strindberg.

     But in this version Tom doggedly dukes it out with his mother, stretching his gentler memories, at times, into one-liners as if he were playing vaudeville. While there is no doubt that in his dreadful imprisonment in the Wingfield home he has learned how to turn his spleen into verbal wit, Tom must remain likeable if we are to endure his ultimate act of abandonment. Along with his whining invective, at times I longed for Tom, like his father, to fall in love with "long distance" quick. As unendurable as life with Amanda Wingfield might be, I'd give anything for her to call me with a sympathetic plea that I resubscribe to a magazine.

     While in the earlier scenes, Keira Keeley found a good balance between Laura's severe shyness and the gradual revelation of an inner life, in the important scene of "The Gentleman Caller," Keeley seemed to transform her character into a borderline histrionic, which turned that important breakthrough encounter into an even more painful experience.

     The hyped-up energy of Ben McKenzie's Gentleman caller did not help. Yes, in Williams' original, he does stretch his body out in shadow upon the wall, but need he turn the act into a series of jumping jacks to make his point? Not only did we fear that he might break Laura's glass collection but, in his vigorous antics, that he might crush her as well. That scene is all about two young people discovering and sharing a certain affectionate gentleness that family life has never before offered—at least to Laura. He may indeed have another woman to whom he is engaged, but for the moment all his intentions are focused on the young woman in front of him, who comes momentarily alive; it is perhaps the only moment of potential sexuality that she will have in her life. If she is to psychically survive she must carry this moment in her imagination. But in his energetic portrayal of the young man with a future she can never have, McKenzie drew our attention away from Laura at the very moment when Keeley nearly buried her character in her portrayal of clinical "avoidant personality disorder."

     It is utterly amazing that the play did still survive somewhat intact, and strongly moved its audience. Ivey clearly kept the play alive simply by her captivating acting, embodying the comical survivor—equal almost to Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon—Williams created.

 

Los Angeles, Halloween 2010

Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2010).

 

Murray Mednick | Mayakovsky and Stalin / 2018

white lace and red poetry

by Douglas Messerli

 

Murray Mednick (author and director) Mayakovsky and Stalin / Los Angeles, Lounge Theatre / I saw the production with Pablo Capra on July 22, 2018

 

The legendary Murray Mednick’s most recent play, Mayakovsky and Stalin, which I attended yesterday with my editor Pablo Capra, might be described as less a traditional drama than as a kind of “parade” of figures in the early decades of Stalin’s long and brutish rule of Russia. Indeed, except for brief interchanges between the dictator (Maury Sterling) and his wife, Nadya (Casey McKinnon) and between the poet Mayakovsky (Daniel Dorr) and his married lover, Lilya (Laura Liguori), the characters—aligned in chairs with red-colored seats along the back of the small theater stage—come forward one by one to speak out about their values and ideas. Rhetoric rather than dialogue dominates this work, as each attempts to explain in a series of short speeches who they are and why they are driven to act the way they do.

 

    That is not to say there is no heart or emotional energy to the work. The great Soviet poet is impassioned with his homeland in Georgia, with language, with—to a certain extent—with the Communist Party, and his love of Lilya, as well as his friendship with her complaisant husband, Osip (Andy Hirsch). And Mayakovsky, despite his belief in the party, is also doubtful of the ability of his fellow countrymen to make the necessary changes and, like everyone else, is quite terrified by Stalin and his henchman. After all, even though Mednick’s play does not represent this, Stalin would eventually kill and destroy almost all of the early believers in Communism who worked as writers, artists, dancers, and in theater (as Mayakovsky himself did). 

       The poet’s cynicism, voiced several times in this work, is perhaps best expressed in a comic poem which I, myself, translated several years ago:

 

                      the tale of the little red hat

 

                      Once upon a time there was a Cadet*

                      a little Cadet who had a red hat.

 

                      But apart from that hat that capped

                      his head there was in him no shred of red.

 

                      But quick as revolution began

                      the Cadet ran home to get his red

 

                      tam. They all lived happily—

                      brother, father and Cadet granddad—

 

                      as they had until one day a wind blew

                      right through his hair to tear the red

 

                      hat from his head and reveal his black

                      roots. The revolting red wolf got his licks

 

                      of the boots and ate his way up to that Cadet’s

                      knees but was still so starved he carved

 

                      up to the heart. So please when you’re about to start

                      politics don’t forget how that Cadet got et.

 

*Cadet was the nickname for the Constitutional Democrats, the part of the political center.

 

As Maykovsky notes in Mednick’s play, he likes to rhyme.

 

    Stalin’s shuttered wife, Nadya, is represented by the playwright as a parallel version of Mayakovsky. An intelligent and sophisticated woman raised herself in a Communist family, Nadya might like better to live the sexual openly and more feminist-oriented Lilya Brik. But, of course, as the wife of the supreme leader, she is now allowed such choices; either she joins him in his social forays or lives only as a dedicated mother to his children, Vasiliy and Svetlana (the latter of whom later emigrated to the West). Closeted in a world of lace collected by Stalin’s first wife, who died under mysterious circumstances, Nadya increasing displays her dissatisfaction, not only with her personal life but with the various purges of individuals (doctors, artists, etc.) by her husband. She is aided by her trusted servant, Masha (Ann Colby Stocking), who is a true-believer in religion of the Orthodox school. But like Mayakovsky, she increasingly is given over to bouts of despair and disbelief.

 

    And then, of course, there is Stalin, a crude and rude dictator who sees himself as the representative of history itself. Like all such leaders his entire life is given over the great “cause” he believes he represents. There must be someone at the top, he declares, to make sure the Party progresses and moves forward in its intended path—even though Mednick makes clear that that “path” is something that is constantly shifting under the feet of the would-be believers. Sound familiar? (At least our current leader has only a made a “killing,” to our knowledge, in the marketplace; although his has bragged that nobody would take him to account if he might gun someone down in the street). Fortunately, Mednick does not milk the slight similarities, and centers his work on the subject at hand.

      Serving as a kind of chorus and, one might argue, as a cabaret host to these harangues and interchanges is Max Faugno, a Russian Jew who was born years later in the US of figures who left the Soviet Union to escape Stalin’s endless wrath. Mednick, however, gives him wide range to speak in the present and the future, commenting on and connecting the “parade” of figures he puts before us.

      Obviously in such a culture, the center cannot hold. Mayakovsky takes a gun to his heart in an apparent suicide in 1930—although some claimed that they heard two gunshots, and many suspected that it was Stalin’s thugs who oversaw his “suicide.”

      In the 1932, Nadya took the same kind of gun and shot herself in the heart as well, a self-admitted victim to her husband’s reign.

      In short, these two very different figures suffered similarly through that period as brave and talented individuals whose very names were, at least temporarily wiped from history’s slate. After his wife’s death, Stalin never spoke her name; and only in 1988 did Mikhail Shatrov write in the Soviet press about what had happened, even though in the US several had commented on the truth long before.

    Mayakovsky’s great poems and plays were banned until Lilya wrote Stalin (also, incidentally a Georgian by birth) asking him to redeem the poet’s career. Amazingly, he did, declaring him the only great poet of the revolution.

     If Mednick’s work, accordingly, is somewhat static in the telling of this complex series of tales, it is centered upon matters of the heart, a work about people who had given their hearts to Communism, Stalinism, and their comrades, all of whom, in turn, broke their hearts before they were driven to explicitly demonstrate that in their desperate actions.

   With projected photographs (some of them, such as Mayakovsky’s body after his death, quite amazing) and a wonderful cast, Mednick has taken history and brought it to life through the telling rather than the showing. How can you “show,” after all, such broken hearts?

 

Los Angeles, July 23, 2018

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