William Finn and James Lapine | Falsetto's [TV broadcast of Lincoln Center Production] / 2017

love redefined

by Douglas Messerli

 

William Finn (music), James Lapine (libretto), James Lapine (stage director), Matthew Diamond (film director) Falsettos / 2017 [TV broadcast of Lincoln Center Production]

 

William Finn and James Lapine’s musical Falsettos, made up of Finn’s two earlier musicals, March of the Falsettos (1981) and Falsettoland (1990), was one of the earliest of Broadway works to speak up about two issues never before so openly discussed on the Broadway stage: the breakup of a conventional straight relationship when the male falls in love with another man and the earliest specters of AIDS. If, in fact, Finn had already perceived the issues in the first work that he brings up in the second installation, it might represent the very earliest of works, either on stage or cinema about AIDS. However, we have no evidence of that. And by 1990, the production in which the disease takes over Finn’s narrative, AIDS had been the focus of several brave and brilliant works of cinema, Nik Sheehan’s No Sad Songs (1985), Arthur J. Bressan’s Buddies (1985), John Erman’s TV film An Early Frost (1985), Bill Sherwood’s Parting Glances (1986), Jerry Tartaglia’s A.I.D.S.C.R.E.A.M (1988), David Weissman’s Song of an Angel (1988), and in the year before Falsettoland, Norman René’s Longtime Companion (1989).  

    The very year after Falsettoland, you might say everything broke loose with the production of Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.

    My now husband Howard and I were “saved” by the fortuitous fact that we had been in a primarily monogamous relationship since way back in 1970, although even that carefully placed word “primarily” always made me highly apprehensive. But since by the early 1980s we had already been established as a couple in the highly accepting academic, art, and literary worlds, and were not visiting the nightly gay bars as I had been just a year before we met, we were, basically “inoculated” from the AIDS horror, with only a few friends and acquaintances, Roger Horwitz (d. 1986) and his lover Paul Monette (d. 1995), my Sun & Moon shipper Michael (whose doctor called him at my office to cruelly report over the telephone that had AIDS) and his lover Piero, a small sampling of what other gay men and women experienced through the long suffering and deaths of several dozens of friends.

    But even in our igloo of straight-world acceptance we well knew what was going on, that as the character in this version Finn’s work Dr. Charlotte (Tracie Thoms) describes in her terrifying prescient song “Something Bad Is Happening.” We knew, were afraid, and wanted to somehow help to ease the pain without, given that time in our lives in our mid 30s and early 40s, we remained outsiders to our own community. Works like Finn’s Falsettoland brought the news to those few who cared, which perhaps at the time—although in hindsight I feel a great deal of guilt and anger for not doing more—was all we were able to offer.

     Recently, I grew terribly furious at a lovely dinner party with dear friends, all straight, one of whom in the days of COVID, proclaimed that he has always imagined that he would never have to suffer the horrible days as his parents had with World War II and the horrific right-wing aftermath of Hollywood blacklisting of the 1950s. But now with COVID, he realized he had not been spared the mass destruction of human lives. I almost shouted at him for his blindness, but realized it would mean little to him as a straight man to remind that, as a matter of fact, as high as 44.1 million people had died of AIDS, so many of them gay or in countries where even when there were medicines available to help curtail the disease such treatments were unavailable. To date there a little more than 7 million deaths by COVID. Such comparisons are meaningless, obviously, since both have been international scourges which have killed masses of loving, beautiful human beings who might have contributed further to our world culture. But the fact that my friend, also Jewish—and Finn’s play is also very much a work focused on the Jewish-American experience—seemed to utterly have forgotten that he had himself been part of that world that AIDS devastated made to want to scream!

     The power of Finn’s remarkable work is that it brings everything together: a happily married family suddenly broken apart by the father’s discovery of his gay attraction to a man; the desolation of a family, leaving a wife almost in a nervous breakdown and a young son so confused that he’s terrified even of his own identity; let alone the second act introduction of a happy lesbian couple and the discovery that the man’s lover has AIDS, the play ending with his death—all embedded within a specifically Jewish cultural and religious context. If we were to step back for a moment to observe what has just been presented we might be amazed that this production was even mounted in a Broadway theater, let alone was able to sustain audiences for 487 performances in 1992-1993. That it went on to have several productions in Australia, and was revived by in a Lincoln Center production again on Broadway in 2016 for a limited run of 114 performances starring now such legendary theater icons such as Christian Borle (as Marvin, the gay father) and Andrew Rannells (as his gay lover Whizzer) is even more astounding. And the fact that Lincoln Center was able to film its produce it on PBS is almost mid-boggling. Clearly audiences of the day were able to accept and assimilate a conglomerate of issues that might surely challenge today’s highly politized and far less tolerate audiences. The very idea of a Jewish musical about a married man who discovers he’s gay and still wants both lover and family, and who all come together finally when the lover is sick and dies of AIDS seems today like a fluke of reality; today we hardly have a PBS left to produce it and Lincoln Center audiences have arguably come to prefer revivals of Oscar and Hammerstein and maybe, once in a while, a Stephen Sondheim fable. Finn’s popular opera—all lines being sung or spoken in rhyme—was pulled out of the daily headlines, in this version, even more startingly, presented with no realist sets, but just with interconnecting cubes that get repurposed to represent rooms, furniture, and communal spaces.

    I am clearly a member of the audience this work was created for: I cried throughout, laughed on cue, and found the often simplistic rhymes and tunes somewhat clever and emotionally profound. This is clearly not a musical opera you go home humming, and I challenge any viewer to actually quote me more than a couple of lyrics, yet we follow along as it presents the plot in a manner than only opera goers can appreciate.

   Finn gets away with it, in part, through a series of strange displacements. The father, Marvin, is after all, still in love with his ex-wife Trina (Stephanie J. Block) and clearly still desperate to maintain the relationship he has established with his young son Jason (the absolutely charming, if confused and angry, Anthony Rosenthal) wants it all as he sings in “A Tight-Knit Family,” trying to integrate his lover Whizzer into the lives of his ex-wife and son. Jason, however, now feels closer to Whizzer than his own father. And Trina is encouraged by Marvin to see his very own psychiatrist Mendel (Brandon Uranowitz) who almost immediately, even while advising her that “Love Is Blind,” himself falls in love with his patient.

  Before he even can imagine seeing a shrink, the boy is also encouraged and finally convinced through a pressured Whizzer to also see Mendel, who suddenly becomes the link between the family that Marvin has been seeking to be.

    Mendel represents the family’s complete dissolution by proposing to Trina, and in so doing replacing Marvin as the linchpin for both his former wife and son.

    In 2011, years before the Lincoln Center revival, I saw this work in a homegrown local production at Third Street Theater in Los Angeles. And I’ll pick up my description of that viewing for the rest of the “plot:”

 

   “Meanwhile, tension is building between Marvin and Whizzer, as the former attempts to put Whizzer in the position of homemaker. At the same time, Trina is increasingly feeling alienated by the situation, growing fearful that she is becoming less and less prominent in her family’s life (“I’m Breaking Down"). A visit from the psychiatrist for dinner and therapy results in further involvement between Mendel and Trina, and before long he has made a marriage proposal to Trina.

    Trina has mixed feelings which she expresses in 'Trina’s Song,' but she realizes that Mendel’s love is sincere, and, in need of support, she realizes she could do worse. The men, all realizing their failures, together sing 'The March of the Falsettos,' admitting that their roles as 'masculine' examples represent a great deal of bluff.

     Trina and Mendel announce their marriage plans, and Marvin reacts with anger, violently slapping his ex-wife, both painfully singing 'I Never Wanted to Love You,' a sentiment Whizzer repeats to Marvin, and Marvin relays even to his innocent son.

     By the end of the first part, Marvin has broken with Whizzer and created a gap between him and Trina. Attempting to salvage his connections with his son, he sings 'Father to Son,' reassuring Jason that he will love always love him, however he turns out.

     If the first part has been almost brittle with the dilemmas Finn presents us with, the second part is even more distressing. It is now 1981, two years later. The cast has now grown by two others, lesbian neighbors of Marvin, Dr. Charlotte, an internist, and Cordelia, a kosher caterer. These two women offer support and love to the lonely Marvin, but create new problems of their own.

    Although Marvin has grown wiser ('About Time' being a song about growing up and getting over his selfish behavior), and has managed to retain a close relationship with Jason, the issue of his son’s Bar Mitzvah creates new tensions between Trina and him, she attempting to plan a large event, while Mendel (and Jason) encourage a simpler party. Caught in the middle, Jason is furious with both parents, which Mendel assures him is absolutely natural ('Everyone Hates His Parents').

    Both parents, Cordelia and Dr. Charlotte attend a baseball game in which Jason is playing, and in ‘The Ball Game,’ all make fun of themselves for watching Jewish boys 'who can’t play baseball,' and getting caught up in the event. To everyone’s surprise, Whizzer shows up—invited by Jason—which creates new tensions and reveals to Marvin just how much he has missed him.

     In the midst of these adult dilemmas, Jason somehow manages to hit the ball, but is so nonplussed that he forgets to run!

    Another ‘falsetto’ piece relates their new traumas. And soon after Marvin and Whizzer return to their relationship. The war between Trina and Marvin, however, continues, until suddenly, in a racquetball game, Whizzer collapses, and is taken to the hospital. Dr. Charlotte has already warned us through song that “Something Bad Is Happening,” young men increasingly becoming ill and dying. And we soon discover that Whizzer has AIDS.

    In the trauma of the new situation, both parents offer Jason the option of “Canceling the Bar Mitzvah,” while all four of the gay figures, Marvin, Whizzer, Charlotte and Cordelia musically muse on how their love can last, 'Unlikely Lovers.'

     As Whizzer’s condition worsens, Marvin turns to God, singing—a bit like Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof—'Miracle of Judaism.' Suddenly all break into Whizzer’s hospital room, Jason having decided that the Bar Mitzvah should be celebrated there, with Cordelia catering the event. For a few happy moments, ‘The Bar Mitzvah,’ lifts everyone’s spirits, but suddenly Whizzer can no longer continue in their company, and is wheeled from the celebrations.

    Left alone, Marvin sings his major love song of the work, ‘What Would I Do If You Had Not Been My Friend?’ a piece which might melt away all the icebergs in Greenland, as we hear the news that Whizzer has died.

    Marvin and his friends surround him to bid the audience farewell without another round of ‘Falsettoland.’”

 

    What is easily gleaned in this story is that despite the fact that Marvin sees himself as expressing ideals, he actually is a of smart bully who has attempted to place his personal values above all others, demanding that his ex-wife, son, and lover all place their roles orbiting around him. When he finally is sent in a shove out of his pre-ordained rotation, he spins off into space out of his control finally without either family and lover, demanding, finally, that he beg for re-entry to all of their lives.

     Through his marvelous comeuppance, his newfound relationships with his lesbian neighbors, and his gradual comprehension that love is something you cannot control but that controls you, we grow to sympathize with the nominative “father,” actually is simply a confused man who finally must admit that he cannot control anything. Eventually he is even further punished by realizing just when love returns in the form of Whizzer and his son’s growing maturity the man whom he finally realizes is the center of his life all can be just easily whisked away through death.

     At the end of the work, Marvin has friends, and some affection, but he no longer has anyone at the center of his love, not even Jason who seems to have preferred the company of Whizzer. One missing piece of the cube whose form is finally restored by work’s end might be seen to represent the now dead Whizzer, but I suggest it actually emblematizes Marvin’s position, a loner punished alas for having attempted to fly to the sun, in his insatiable desires wanting to all, but left with nothing to connect to and no place any longer in the make-up of the universe.

    It is this tragic comeuppance that saves this “pop op” from being nothing other than a sentimental melodrama. Even Finn’s lyrics, almost always ending in simple rhymes, takes us unawares with its several line enjambments, where the expected rhyme appears awkwardly in the next or even third line, or sometimes slant rhymes placed next to one another, with shifts of the rhythms and repetitions where you might not expect them. Take for example the group aria, each singing to the other about how their love as not truly intended and is now being withdrawn:

 

I never wanted to love you

I only wanted to love and not be blamed

Let me go, you should know

I'm not ashamed

To have loved you

I loved you more than I meant to

In my profession, one's love stays unexpressed

Here we stand, take my hand

God, I'm distressed

How I love you

 

I hate the world!

 

He hates everything!

 

I love my dad!

 

He loves his father

 

I love the things I've never had

 

Love our family

 

Lord, hear our call!

 

Help us all

 

Help us all

 

Help us all

 

Help us all

 

Help us all!

 

     Or consider the first two stanzas of one of the work’s best songs, “What Would I Do If You Had Not Been My Friend?”

What would I do

If I had not met you?

Who would I blame my life on?

Once I was told

That all men get what they deserve

Who the hell then threw this curve?

There are no answers, but

Who would I be

If you had not been my friend?

 

You're the only one

One out of a thousand others

Only one my child would allow

When I'm having fun

You're the one I wanna talk to

Where have you been?

Where are you now?

 

    Through the rhymes are simple: “blamed/ashamed.” “do/you,” “deserve/curve” their placement is not always what one might expect, end rhymes alternating in end line conjunctions and split infinitives that explode the regularity (the orbit) with a sort of transition of position, a break down of normality that saves Finn’s lyrics from being sticky and sentimental. Like the story, a tale of many loves, Finn and Lapine keep demonstrating the break-down of love, the individual, the family, and the society itself. In this version of the death of the American Dream, expectations are unfulfilled, familial narratives necessarily readjusted, love redefined. The voice pretending to be an expression of angelic innocence, cracks with the shifts and alterations of life into shouting matches, mean games, and questions without answers. But for all that, life demands you laugh and move on.

     It is odd that in a work that might easily have been as cynical as Sondheim’s looks at love in Merrily We Roll Along, Sweeney Todd, and Follies, this constantly reconfigured Jewish family somehow remains hopeful, marching along even if they have to stop momentarily simply to catch their breaths.

 

Los Angeles, March 2, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2, 2026).

 

 

 

John Adams and Alice Goodman | Nixon in China / 2011 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live production]

 six degrees of insanity

by Douglas Messerli

 

John Adams (composer), Alice Goodman (libretto), Peter Sellars (director), Nixon in China / 2011 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live production]

 

Although most of the critics who I read (Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times, Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times, and Anne Midgette of The Washington Post) agreed that the Met's new production of Nixon in China was excellent and long overdue, there was a sense between the three that the plot of the work was static and that one character, in particular, Henry Kissinger (sung by Richard Paul Fink) was a figure of parody whereas the others were treated more seriously. In a piece by Max Frankel, published in The New York Times a couple of days before the live HD airing, the former editor of the Times—who was with Nixon in China and won a Pulitzer Prize for covering the trip—squarely asked the question which the other reviewers only intimated:

 

                 ...Why bother, as in Nixon, to lure us to a fictional enterprise with

                 contemporary characters and scenes from an active memory bank?

                 Why use actualities, or the manufactured actualities of our television

                 screens and newspapers, to fuel the drama?

 

The answer, he feels, is "obvious but also treacherous," that the use of actual characters helps to "overcome the musty odor that inhabits many opera houses," drawing new audiences into the theater. But, Frankel continues, it brings other dangers with it:

 

                   The danger is that despite the verisimilitudes of text, setting and

                   costume, a viewer's grasp of events may not match the fabric

                   being woven onstage. What the creators intend to be profundity

                   may strike the knowing as parody.

 

      Most of the reviewers agreed that the composer, writer, and director did give their figures a range of emotions, both serious and comic, and between acts, Winston Lord (of National Security) assured us that much of the talk between Nixon and Chairman Mao in the First Act was close to what actually was said in their meeting; but all also felt that the opera did move to a kind of parody in the Second Art performance of The Red Detachment of Women, in which Fink, the singer-actor who played Kissinger, also plays a lecherous, Simon Legree-like landowner who has stolen away a young maiden. Fink sings:

 

                                             She was so hot

                                             I was hard-put

                                             To be polite.

                                             When the first cut

                                             —Come on you slut!—

                                             Scored her brown skin

                                             I started in,

                                             Man upon hen!

 

Some characterized this scene as surreal and the last act as psychological, as if they were somehow different in tone from the more historicized events in the First Act.

     If nothing else, there was a sense that Nixon in China, without a narrative arc, was a bit of a rocky ride. Certainly, at times, while always enjoying the shimmering glory of the music, I too felt that way while watching it. Yet now that I've pondered it for a while, I believe I was mistaken, that, in fact, the opera is highly structured and fairly coherent in its tone and presentation of characters.

     First of all, John Adams and Peter Sellars are never going to present something that works as a Verdi opera might. Although all may work with a complex weaving of historical events, Verdi's sense of drama is highly embedded in narrative, while Adams and team, postmodern in their approach, eschew what we might call "story."

    Nixon in China has "events," but there are presented in a series of tableaux, not unlike some medieval musical productions. Each character gets the chance to reveal his or her selves. But what Alice Goodman, Adams and Sellars are interested in is not so much the outer faces they present to the world, but what these figures are thinking and imagining within. And I think they would have to admit that every figure on their stage is, in one way or another, a bit unhinged; these are, after all—with the exception perhaps of Pat Nixon—people desperate for power. And all are on the edge of insanity.

     Even before we meet any of the major characters, the people of China speak in a strange manner that we comprehend is not quite rational thought, as they sing from the text of "The Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points of Attention":

 

                             Prompt delivery directly to authorities of all items

                                  confiscated from landlords.

                             Do not damage crops.

                             Do not take a single needle or piece of thread from the masses.

                             Pay for everything you damage.

                             etc.

 

As they chant, "The people are the heroes now," even if these "heroes" are highly manipulated and controlled.

     Out of the sky drops the Nixons' Spirit of 76, and no sooner does the President descend the airstair, shaking the hand of Premier Chou En-lai, than he begins inwardly calculating the great results of this journey as the filming catches him just in time for the evening news broadcasts in the USA, he hilariously singing out his fascination with his own acts: "News! News! News!

 

                                          News has a kind of mystery;

                                          When I shook hands with Chou En-lai

                                          On this bare field outside Peking

                                          Just now, the whole world was listening

                                       
James Maddalena, who has now sung this role in hundreds of performances, is an amazing actor, who brings off those jowl-shaking absurdities quite brilliantly.

     Nixon's and Kissinger's meeting with Premier Chou (Russell Braun) and Chairman Mao (Robert Brubaker) in the next scene is perhaps the most absurd of the entire opera, as the two powerful leaders speak in a series of alternating gnomic jokes, apothegms, and, in Nixon's case, simple American verbal blunders. As Mao becomes more and more incomprehensible ("Founders come first / Then profiteers") in sayings parroted by a wonderful trio of assistants, Nixon attempts his linguistic twists spun from what he believes the Chairman might be saying. It all reminds me, a bit, of the other Peter Seller's performance as the totally innocent and ignorant Chance in the film Being There, where he spouts meaningless sentences interpreted by others to be full of profound significance. Mao and Nixon, one a bit senile, the other humorless and often depressed, hit it off beautifully in their mindless chatter, while the more rational Kissinger proclaims to be unable to understand anything, and the Premier sits silently in sufferance.

      What that meeting accomplished, an issue clearly of importance in this opera, is questionable. But surely we can feel, and, in Adams' delicious scoring, we can hear the growing friendliness of all figures as they swill down Mai-tai after Mai-tai with toast upon toast. Again, non-drinker Kissinger misses out on all the glorious insanity of the evening.

      In Act II we get a chance to see Pat Nixon at the edge. She begins the morning, in fact, downing a couple of needed pills. Like Premier Chou she is in sufferance, and, although excited by the whole trip, she is also exhausted and, we feel, not at all comfortable. The most American of this opera's figures, she flaunts a bright red coat. Flawlessly played by Janis Kelly, Pat comes off as somewhat frail and slightly terrified being as she is rushed through a glass factory (where the workers award her a green elephant) and classrooms in which the students have clearly been told what to say and how to behave, before stopping by the Gate of Longevity and Goodwill, where she sings her touching and slightly pathetic paean to the world she loves:

 

                                         This is prophetic! I foresee

                                         A time will come when luxury

                                         Dissolves into the atmosphere

                                         Like a perfume, and everywhere

                                         The simple virtues root and branch

                                         And leaf and flower. And on that bench

                                         There we’ll relax and taste the fruit

                                         Of all our actions. Why regret

                                         Life which is so much like a dream?

 

Yet the homespun images she spins out of her sense of momentary joy—lit-up farm porches, families sitting around the dinner table, church steeples, etc.—are right out of Norman Rockwell paintings and is just as absurd of a vision as are her husband's darker mumblings.

      That evening's presentation of The Red Detachment of Women ballet, written by Chiang Ch'ing, Mao's wife—as she so shrilly reminds us later—is experienced by the now overwhelmed Nixons less as an objective performance—in reality the evening ended with enthusiastic praise by the President and First Lady—as from a psychological, inner viewpoint. It is clear that Nixon, as he suggests several times in the opera, admired Kissinger's mind, but he also mocked his ways and apparently disliked the man personally. Accordingly, the Nixons both conjure up the evil landowner in their tired travelers' minds, to be, or, least, to look like Kissinger.* Like many an innocent theater-goer, the Nixons become so involved in the story of a poor girl who is saved and then destroyed by refusing to obey Communist doctrine that they confuse drama with reality, breaking into the action of the ballet itself to save and protect the young dancer.

     Mark Morris, using some aspects of the original choreography, nicely stages his orderly squadrons of young military dancers against the chaos of events. This is perhaps the most difficult part of the opera, and I am still not sure whether or not it truly succeeds, but it is crucial to our witnessing the truly mad person behind Chiang Ch'ing (Kathleen Kim)—who in real life may have been responsible for hundreds of deaths and had, herself, erratic nerves and severe hypochondriasis—as she proclaims in the noted aria, "I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung," angrily declaring that all be determined by "the book." After Mao's death, we should recall, Chiang Ch'ing committed suicide.

     After witnessing these six individuals'—Richard Nixon, Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, Pat Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Chiang Ch'ing—mental dramas, we can only breathlessly watch as they slip into sleep. Kissinger shacks up with one of Mao's translators before disappearing into the bathroom. The Nixons share their disappointments, the President for being misinterpreted by the newspapers, Pat silently suffering, with tearful eyes, from her husband's inattention and having herself to attend yet again to what may be his ritual recounting of an attack he endured in World War II. Mao also finds relief in the hands of one of his translators before threatening his wife for having made political mistakes, until he falls with her into a lustful embrace upon their bed. Chou En-lai, clearly already in pain from the bladder cancer which would kill him 4 years later, awakens early to return to his never-ending work, drawing a close to all the madness with the most profound question of the opera: "Was there any point to any of it?" The "it" may refer, obviously, to the Nixons' visit, but it also suggests another possibility of meaning: "Was there any point to all their madness, to their desperate struggles to hold onto any power they might have over others?" All ended their lives in disgrace and shame, except for Pat; but even she almost disappeared from the public eye after the death of her husband, suffering a serious stroke the same year that Chou En-lai died.

     In some respects, I now wonder, despite its occasional comic elements and always lush sonority of sound, if this isn't one of the darkest of operas. But then, aren't the young and the old—represented by the US and China—usually at the heart of the tragic, Romeo and Lear?

 

Los Angeles, February 19, 2011

Reprinted from American Cultural Treasures (March 2011).  

 

*Coincidentally, in my 1990 "opera for spoken voices," The Walls Come True (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995), I included Dr. Kissinger in my "Twelve Tyrants Between Acts: Mundane Moments and Insane Histories," based on the paranoia and ridiculous accusations he expressed in his Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little Brown, 1982) when, in 1973, he was in Hanoi attempting to negotiate the Paris Accords.            

    

Georges Bizet, Eugène Cormon, and Michael Carré | Les Pêcheurs de Perles (The Pearl Fishers) / 2016 [The Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

love vs. faith

by Douglas Messerli

 

Eugène Cormon and Michael Carré (libretto), Georges Bizet (composer), Penny Woolcock (stage director), Matthew Diamond (director) Les Pêcheurs de Perles (The Pearl Fishers) / 2016 [The Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

Changing the location from the more specific island of Sri Lanka (Ceylon), the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Georges Bizet’s Les Pêcheurs de Perles (The Pearl Fishers)—the first time on their stage for over 100 years—is set in a vague “Far East,” its ramshackle sea-side village filled with figures dressed in a wide-range of outfits that cover everything from the mid-19th century to the contemporary, and who inhabit rooms fit out with run-down refrigerators and television sets. These brawny pearl fishers reach for out a “brewski” while still worshipping the ancient brahma, and still glorifying their religion with the nightly songs of a vestal virgin, Leïla (Diana Damrau) who might have been at home in ancient times. By permitting these obvious anachronisms, director Penny Woolcock allows for the exoticism of Bizet’s world while bringing that fairytale landscape into the real world.

    That tactic pays off by transferring our attention from the obvious flaws of Eugène Cormon’s and Michael Carré’s original libretto and later disastrous musical revisions by the opera’s publisher Choudens, back to Bizet’s sparklingly limpid score. Under the careful and yet exploratory hand of conductor Gianandrea Noseda, we can now again hear the constant references to the surrounding ocean (made even more theatrically central by beginning the opera with plunge of two pearl fishers into the deep sea—using skilled company dancers with newfound aerial skills to pretend the undulations of swimming) and discover that there are more than two great arias to this almost forgotten opera.

     Yes, the well-known tenor-baritone duet, “Amitié sainte,” a swearing of the two male lead’s eternal friendship that reads to anyone with an ounce of imagination as a male-male matrimony, is the most unforgettable aria of this opera and many another; but almost as memorable is Nadir’s (Matthew Polenzani) solo recounting of the beauty of Leïla, “Je crois entendre encore.” And the choral pieces of both acts I and II beautifully bind the personal emotions of the village leader Zurga (Mariusz Kwiecien), Nadir and Leïla, with the fears, strengths, and desires of the community as a whole.

       In part, this tale, like so many operas, represents a struggle to express the self within the confines of communal rules and decorum. Nadir’s and Leïla’s love not only betrays the love of Nadir and Zurga, but the pledge Leïla has made to the community and their god. 

       The fact that both men are also in love with this woman merely complicates the various positions, public and private, which have been imposed upon them in this slightly desperate world, threatened by the possibility of daily death by drowning, being crushed by the waters’ tsunamis, and, at opera’s end, being destroyed by fire. In short, the central question of the opera becomes how can these individuals sublimate their private passions to their public declarations and their faith?

     The character of Zurga, in particular, is torn between these issues. It is he, despite the outcry of the community, who must decide whether the discovered sinners must live or die, and he openly wavers again and again, twice by the end of Act I. 

        Even after he has sentenced them to death, Act II finds him suffering for his decision; and, upon meeting with Leïla, who argues for him to spare Nadir, even if he kills her, he once again temporarily rescinds his decision, desperately wanting to believe that the whole affair was a thing of accident instead of a preconceived betrayal of Nadir’s and his love.

        But as Leïla goes on to restate their love, Zurga’s feelings of reconciliation quickly turn to jealousy and vengeance again in the magnificently tumultuous ending of “Je frémis, je chancelle, de son âme cruelle,” in response to which the previously submissive Leïla curses Zurga and proudly embraces her death beside her lover

        Once again, it appears, community values will outweigh personal passions; but having now realized that he has, symbolically speaking, had his own night with Leïla when, as a child, she offered him haven in her family home, Zurga shifts position one more time, in this case ardently turning against his community and religion by setting the fragile wooden homes afire, and sending the city’s inhabitants back to their burning homes in order to save their endangered children. While the lovers escape, his fate seems sealed, as he, himself, in this production, appears to be surrounded by flames. And no matter what outcome we might imagine for events, his passion for both Nadir and Leïla has set his own life afire at the expense of communal obligations and faith.

        So excellent is this new production of the early Bizet opera, we can be assured that at least for several years, The Pearl Fishers will again be available, at least in New York.

 

Los Angeles, January 17, 2016

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