Adam Guettel and Craig Lucas | The Light in the Piazza / 2019

dreaming through music

by Douglas Messerli

 

Adam Guettel (lyrics and music), Craig Lucas (book), The Light in the Piazza / the performance I saw with Howard N. Fox was at LAOpera’s production at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion on Sunday, October 13, 2019

 

I don’t like reviews that begin with the critic’s statements of his or her own ability to speak out about the work, but I have to admit that I begin this review with severe doubts my own powers to write intelligently about it.

      Adam Guettel’s 2005 Broadway (via Lincoln Center) musical is one of the most stunningly beautifully scored works of theater—or even of contemporary opera; and it won several Tony Awards for its magical invocation of a visit of an US mother and daughter’s to Italy, the mother in search of the love she has lost while the daughter discovers new love in Florence in the form of a beautiful young Italian boy, Fabrizio (Rob Houchen), when she temporarily loses her hat—a metaphor clearly for the mind that lies beneath it. 

     And it is no accident that she has lost her mind in the incident, since we gradually discover in the work that this young girl, Clara Johnson (Disney star Dove Cameron) is what her mother and father perceive is mentally-challenged having been kicked in the head by a small Shetland pony in her childhood.

      The girl, now 26 years of age, does seem far younger than her years and is given to occasional flights of excitement and over-exhilarated behavior that might lead a casual observer to wonder if she has a deep emotional instability.

      Yet, for all that—and this is a problem in all the versions of this work which I have experienced, the book by Elizabeth Spencer, the movie directed by Guy Green (and the weakest of these versions), and now the musical, all are rather vague about the actual mental problems of the lovely young Clara. If perhaps she seems overly naïve, falling immediately in love with Fabrizio, so does he seem equally naïve and just as innocent—with only the excuse that he is still almost a teenager, having just turned 20.

      Clara, however, quickly learns several words of Italian, and quickly is able to speak up against her over-protective mother, Margaret (the great singer Renée Fleming); and, ultimately, when she and Fabrizio are about to be married, quite quickly learns the Roman Catholic liturgy, including several Latin phrases. For me, this has always been a problem with this work. If she is truly medically impaired, so might we all be.

      What is important in this work—with its absolutely beautiful songs and musical arpeggios, and absolutely charming if quite simple set by Robert Jones along with almost magical lighting by Mark Henderson—is that the elders, who almost all have failed in their adventures with love are desperate to protect their youngest from the same pains they have suffered.

     At the heart of this musical are the failures of the adult relationships: Margaret’s long empty marriage to her business-hungry husband Roy (Malcolm Sinclair), the unfaithfulness of Fabrizio’s father Signor Naccarelli (Brian Stokes Mitchell)—which at one point is described as recognized by his more faithful and forgiving wife (Marie McLaughlin)—and Fabrizio’s far-more disillusioned sibling Giuseppe (Liam Tamme) and his wife Franca (Celinde Schoenmaker), who almost brings poor Clara to tears in her attempt to convince her, in the crucial “The Joy You Feel,” which suggests that any marriage to Fabrizio will lead her to sorrow.

     The love of the two innocents is just that: a pure expression of what they suddenly feel. One might suggest that they are both not in touch with the real world, but in another sense they are the only ones who do know what love might be, and the beauty in which they sing about their love represents some of the highest moments of this opera-musical.

     And yes, it is truly a kind of operatic piece, in which, often the lyrics move to complete abstraction, words like “piazza” having to be desperately elided in the work’s major song in Act Two, Scene 3, sung by a very excited (back in Florence after a desperate attempt to take her away from Fabrizio to Rome by her mother), “The Light in the Piazza” and the gushing expression of love by both Clara and Fabrizio at the end of Act One, “Say It Tomorrow.”

      It is not accidental that in my first round of my musical theater favorites in My Year 2018, I could not choose a song from this wonderful musical: none of them are songs you can take home to your favorite local stage. They need operatic productions, with a complete orchestra with harp, major percussion instruments, violins, violas, celli, bass, piano, oboe, etc., and great conductor to oversee this orchestral combination, in this case by the more than competent Kimberly Grigsby, who garnered major applause upon her entries into the pit.

     So why mightn’t I just say I loved this work and cried through it all?

    One of the greatest singers of the world was starring in this production, Renée Fleming, the central figure of this production, a woman whom I greatly admire from her various operatic performances. But here, I felt, she was toning down her grand voice for several reasons. She clearly did not want to out-perform the younger singers, particularly her stage daughter, Clara. But to give Cameron her due, she did quite remarkably well with her fragile soprano voice in representing her own blossoming “coming out”—and in this case that really is what it is, a sudden recognition that she too has rights, particularly when it comes to love.

      In his role as Fabrizio, Houchen literally comes alive as one of the most remarkable young singers of today; I would immediately advise him to get out of Les Misérables-like roles and move into better musicals or even operas wherever and whenever they might appear. He is so talented that he might do remarkable things in many a Broadway revival of the great musicals of Guettel’s predecessors, from his mother Mary Rodgers to his grandfather, Richard. I think Houchen might have been great in Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd as the young sailor in love with Johanna. In some senses he is the real charm of this Piazza production.

     Celinde Schoenmaker was wonderful as the unhappy wife of the also talented Giuseppe. Her evil statement of unhappiness was a true pleasure of this production, a young man so infatuated with the woman he has found that he overcomes nearly all of the obstacles placed before him.

     But where was the remarkable Fleming, fussing constantly over the possible failures of her stigmatized daughter? Well, of course, she was incredibly moving in her first act song of sorrow about when you first realize that love has broken away, “Dividing Day,” perhaps a song I might have included, when I think back, in the 2018 collection of favorites. And she was quite charming, surely, in her attempt to change the mind of Signor Naccarelli when he becomes outraged after perceiving the 6-year difference between his son and Clara’s birth, in the lovely seeking-out-solution song, “Let’s Walk,” a hard work to perform on a stage based around a circle, but which is perhaps symbolic of their attempt to circle their ideas to come to new perceptions.

     Yet we’d come to hear that glorious voice, this time even amplified by microphone. Only in her absolutely amazing last song, “Fable,” did the renowned singer finally truly shine. Here, in expressing all of her anger for her previous failure and joy for her the sudden permission for her young daughter’s marriage, she finally becomes a fierce force right out of Wagner, allowing that all of her and her husband’s, as well as the Naccarelli’s family’s, notions of marriage are nothing of importance.

    A bit like what Stephen Sondheim has often argued, love is a “fable,” but there is no possibility to love if you can’t ignore that reality perceiving it as a myth completely gone wrong. It is a brilliant “Try to Remember” moment when you have to give up your own notions of your youth and try to imagine what your children might find in their innocent loves, as well as a plea for forgiveness, a demand for the correction of time and previous failures, a hope for a future in which you yourself cannot be embraced. Finally the great diva was allowed to come alive. And the light in the piazza showed through so brightly that it nearly blinded us.

 

Los Angeles, October 15, 2019

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

William DuBois | Haiti / 2018

to the hills

by Douglas Messerli

 

William DuBois Haiti / directed by Ellen Geer at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum (Topanga Canyon, California) / I attended the performance on Sunday, September 2, 2018 with Pablo Capra and Christina Carlos

 

It’s difficult to believe that in the very same year, 1938, that saw the premiere of Thornton Wilder’s absolutely pared-down modernist, almost anti-theatrical play Our Town on Broadway, that William DuBois’—a Columbia University graduate who later became an editor The New York Times Book Review, not the famed Black author and founder of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1909—Haiti was produced, as part of the Hallie Flannigan’s Federal Theatre Project (under the auspices of the Negro Theatre Unit) at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, a work at almost the opposite spectrum of theatrical emotional intensity.

  

      If Wilder’s play is almost abstract in its barebones attitude, DuBois’ play hearkens back to the theater traditions of high melodrama and historical documentation that clearly lays out the moral ground of its figures. How can an audience not root for the Haitians, whose Creole citizens fought against British rule, and were the first country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery and the first free Black nation, not side with this country’s anti-colonialist heroes, Touissant L’Ouverture (Rodrick Jean-Charles) and his General Christophe (the dashing Max Lawrence) in their strategic retreat and later battles with Napoleon’s army, who has arrived via a frigate, complete with Napoleon’s sister, to “sway” the Haitians to return to the fold of obeisance to their rule.

      The Haitian leaders of 1804, who now occupy the last of the large colonial estates, argue between themselves on how to protect their territory and government. The sly Touissant wants his soldiers to take to the hills—such an appropriate desire, given this production in the Geer family Theatricum Botanicum lies literally in the middle of the Topanga Canyon hills—to gradually wear-down their opponents, as opposed the more radical Christophe’s insistence that they begin the fight at the port where the French are about to arrive.

     Yet Touissant knows better; the French will not be able to survive their mountain fights with the Haitians nor the climate, with its malarial mosquitoes, and the lack of protection from the island’s storms (all of which, of course, now reminds us of just how resourceful the Haitians, given the storms and earthquakes, despite the lack of organized US help, during they have managed, at very many times throughout history, their almost impossible survival). Indeed, the actors themselves literally do take “to the hills” before our very eyes, as the company uses, as in so many other Theatricum productions, the craggy landscape in which the theater sits. In this case, the hills are quite actually alive with Haitian revolutionaries.

      When the French peevishly arrive at the former mansion, once owned by the family of the now royal consort, Odette (Tiffany Coty), along with unhappy Colonel Roche (Tavis I. Baker) and his nearly always complaining wife, Pauline (Lea Madda), they discover no one around except for one seemingly obeisant servant, Jacqueline (the powerful Earnestine Phillips) who hides throughout most of this work behind a kind of stereotype of the Aunt Jemima-like maid, a woman who bows to her conquerors as if she were still the slave which she once was.

        

     In fact, Jacqueline had an affair with the owner of the estate, birthing Odette, and has determined to stay on in this ridiculous position simply to care after her daughter, or, as she puts it, “rehear her lover’s voice.” 

     Although it might have been to the eyes of the 1930s US viewers terribly controversial to have an “octoroon” heroine (DuBois evidently kept his cast of blacks and whites from touching one another), in French culture such issues of miscegenation were often easily assimilated for French colonialists in Martinique, Haiti, and even New Orleans. For the French is was not so much a matter of skin-color, but a matter of class, of the proper education, and pedigree. Dozens of famed French writers, including Balzac, recount just such women and males, easily and sometimes not so easily, enfolded into high French society.

     Odette, who if nothing else, knew that this was once her father’s estate, does not know the identity of her mother, and that becomes the central theme of this complex oedipally-centered work.

      Moreover, despite her marriage to the nasty Colonel Boucher (Jeff Wiesen), she is in love with the young, newly named Captain Duval (Dane Oliver) (a title awarded because Boucher has sent him into the wilds to destroy the Haitians, a journey he has incredibly survived).

      Gradually, the French forces lose too many soldiers to the native resistance, while the Colonel is slowly consumed by malaria. Christophe jumps in and out of the scene, at one point revealing Odette’s true paternity to the girl, the fact of which pulls her away from her beloved young hero, Duval. Discovered to be a spy, Jacqueline insists that her daughter escape with the others, that she return to the world that she, herself, has made possible for Odette to enter.

      Yet perhaps it is too late, and as she is discovered as a spy and kills herself with a deadly potion, Odette is trapped in the world into which she was born, her lover murdered by the Haitian insurgents.

       But not before a series of marvelous swordfights and battles that might have made Earl Flynn jealous. Never, on stage, have I seen a more convincing sword fight, with remarkable acrobatics, grand theatrical gestures, and heart-throbbing events. The mostly West Side Los Angeles audience, but this time, fortunately, joined by a large contingent of LA’s black community, reacted with boos, pleas of salvation, and, at times, open laughter, that I might never have imagined in contemporary theater. Suddenly I realized just how much had been lost in the rise of modernism over this kind of old-fashioned melodramatic writing, a theater that didn’t mind mixing up politics, love, fate, and just plain high-jinx.

     In the end you could only laugh and cry and root for your favorite heroes. If a bit like Hamlet, a lot of those figures lay dead on the stage by play’s end, their resurrection for curtain-call was as uplifting as theater gets. And at the wonderful Theatricum (despite their need to get ready for the late-night performance of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, a play with also has deep political roots, but with a kind of cold modernist objectivity that has always annoyed me), the actors all stand in front of the stage to greet and shake hands with the audience as it disperses. This is theater at its very best.

     The director Ellen Geer has done something quite marvelous with her very large ensemble cast, children included, particularly given the fact that she determined to revive a play that should have never been lost.

 

Los Angeles, September 3, 2018

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

Giacomo Puccini, Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa | La Bohème / 2008 [Filmed opera]

facing the cold

by Douglas Messerli

Giacomo Puccini (composer), Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa (libretto,based on Scénes de la vie de bohème by Henri Murger) , Robert Dornhelm (director), La Bohème / 2008 [Filmed opera]

On Sunday, September 27, 2009, Howard and I attended a movie presentation of the opera La Bohème at the Music Hall theater in Beverly Hills.

 

      Although my intention in this short piece is not particularly to evaluate the film or opera itself, I should mention that I found a great many of the filmic details to be quite annoying. Dornhelm's aerial flights between scenes gave the "realist" drama a kind fairy-tale like quality, as if God-in-all-his-wisdom were looking down on these poor folk, which was further enhanced by a presentation of the Latin Quarter—which in this version looked more like some Alpine village—in black and white before fading into color.

      Continuity throughout the film was poor, with obviously false snowflakes alternating between blizzard and gentle snowfall in a matter of seconds. Mimi's eyes in some scenes looked less like a victim of consumption than that a prize-fight boxer who'd been terribly roughed up; yet a few seconds later her makeup lightened and she was relatively pale.

      Dornhelm also presented some of the operatic duets as internal dialogues rather than sung recitatives, giving the characters a strangely mute appearance, often at the most lyrical moments of the music.

     For the most part, the singing was admirable, with beautiful performances by Rolando Villazón as Rodolfo, Anna Nerebko as Mimi, and Nicole Cabell as Musetta. But why Dornhelm could not find two Baritones, Marcello and Schaunard, who could both act and sing (George von Bergen's and Adrian Eröd's performances were sung by Boaz Daniel and Stephane Degout) is beyond me. I thought every young Baritone cut his teeth on these roles? I found the lip-synching distracting.

      For all that the opera was as joyful and emotionally wrenching as any La Bohème, and most of the rather geriatric audience could be observed weeping at opera's end.

      Normally, I might not have even written on such a well-known chestnut, presuming there is little more to be said. But a few observations might be useful, nonetheless. Throughout the opera the characters seek, other than food and the money to purchase and sustain them, primarily only three things: heat, light, and love. Of course, love can also provide some spiritual heat and light, and light, in turn, often results in heat and, particularly in the Spring, emanations of love.

     The problem for these bohemians however, one they daily face, is that they have little of the first two. Luigi Illica's and Giuseppe Giacosa's Paris has always seemed to me to be more like a Siberian settlement than the City of Light. Yes, we know it snows in Paris, and the temperature can be frigid; in January of this year, thousands of travelers were stranded at Charles DeGaulle International Airport, the Eiffel Tower was closed, and temperatures for several weeks plunged to 10 Celsius. But most would tell you that while it snows in Paris, it is not a common event. Yet the world of La Bohème is a particularly dark one, in which, so it seems, every day is a frigid challenge.

      Roldolfo and his friends begin the opera singing of their cold bodies, determining to burn either the room's only chair or Marcello's new painting; Rodolfo offers up the pages of new play, which "perform" very badly. The "play," so they jest, is not one that will last. Schaunard arrives just in time, food and wood for the fireplace in hand; he has been paid for playing the piano for a parrot.

      Soon after, with Rodolfo alone in the room, Mimi knocks, claiming her candle has gone out, and much of the rest of the scene is spent with the two of them crawling about in the dark as they look for her lost key and fall madly in love. Rodolfo's first touch of her shivering hand reveals what will remain the theme throughout the opera, how to keep Mimi warm. As their candles both dwindle, they sing of their dreams, love of the Spring and light, Mimi explaining her pleasure in roses.

      One of the first of Rodolfo's acts after meeting Mimi is to buy her a bonnet, his attempt, symbolically, to warm her. The Second Act continues the warming theme with food, drink, and the emotionally-wrought and comic song of Musetta, aimed primarily at her former lover, Marcello. Sparks fly. All in all, this is the most well-lit and warmest scene in the entire production.

     For Act Three, performed entirely in the cold winter air and, symbolically, at the very gate of the City, is the coldest of the opera. The characters remain not only outside of society and at the very edge of the City, but literally outside on the street. It is here, after suffering her lover's symbolic heat of his jealousy and fury that Mimi tells Marcello of Rodolfo's behavior and determines to leave him. But, as we know, she does not return home, staying to overhear Rodolfo's woeful tale of her tuberculosis and her certain death, all made worse by the fact that he has no way of altering their fate. His own poverty provides no warmth for the frozen woman, no light, and, in this context, no proper expression of his love. In this regard Puccini and his librettists literally create a "frieze," placing their characters costumed, in this movie version, in dark coats and dresses set against the white frozen world in which they are attempting to survive. As if Rodolfo's sorrow and Mimi's shocking discovery of her own condition were not enough, Marcello and Musetta also begin to fight, the terrified foursome revealing even further that love is nearly impossible in the world they inhabit.

      Rodolfo and Mimi are too deeply in love, however, to separate in this frozen landscape; they can only wait until April, when, at least, light returns and the flowers, and with them come the warmth of Spring and Summer.

     The end of this constant struggle, the necessity of having to continually face the cold, is played out in the last act, inevitably with Mimi's death. Yet even here, as they try to symbolically warm her, Musetta and Marcello running out to buy Mimi a muff, there is little warmth and even less light. Even trying to warm Mimi's medicine is an effort, as the flame threatens to go out. Singing to his coat—the only thing he has to keep the cold away from his flesh—Colline prepares to pawn it, sharing the money with his fellow sufferers. Love, it is clear, has survived in all of these good people, but without heat or light their love cannot heal or salve the living.

Los Angeles, September 28, 2009

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (September 2009).

   

Margaret Leng Tan | Curios and Metamorphoses (Book I) / 2018

a queen of the piano

by Douglas Messerli

 

Margaret Leng Tan Curios (by Phyllis Chen) and  (by George Crumb) / the concert I attend at REDCAT was on November 1, 2018

 

At the wonderful REDCAT performance space in the heart of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, I saw a performance by Margaret Leng Tan, often described as “the queen on the toy pianos.” Well, if there is a queen of such small instruments, it must surely be Tan, yet I cannot help but feel that in describing her as such, it somehow diminishes her immense talents.

      There is no doubt that Tan is often playful—in all senses—particularly in the first work of the evening while performing Phyllis Chen’s Curios, what the program describes as a “cabinet of curiosities,” which, in this case, connects with the German circus and carnival traditions (although it also appears in several French works, such as Jean Renoir’s famed film Rules of the Game, in one of the central figure’s collection of mechanical musical instruments, perhaps a nod to the war that Germany was soon to engage with France). Here Tan, playing the comic-musician, dons various costumes, winds us various toys which briefly march across the performance space, blows on a mini-pipe organ, chirps out a bird whistle, and plays her famed toy pianos, all with such a whimsical joy that you can only be convinced that this “cabinet,” at least, is filled with a clownish spirit that is highly worth listening to.

 

     The real gems of the evening, however, are to come in George Crumb’s evocative  Metamorphoses-evoked work which, a bit like Mussorgsky’s too oft-performed Pictures at an Exhibition, steals images from modernist painting, but takes them in entirely new directions—with images from Paul Klee, Vincent van Gough, Marc Chagall, James McNeill Whistler, Jasper Johns, Salvador Dalí, and Vasily Kandinsky performed mostly on amplified toy pianos and, after an intermission, on a grand Steinway, with prepared piano and grand swirls of musical composition on keyboard, along with accompanying moans, grunts and squeals by this remarkable artist, with its highly memorable Perilous Night, a response to Jasper Johns’ 1990 composition itself a response to John Cage’s 1944 composition.                   Despite her wonderful toy-piano playing, I can only say that the second half of Tan’s concert on this particular evening, mostly with her playing, in very John Cagean, but with highly original Crumb techniques, the embedded strings of the instrument (in one instance, apparently, forcing her for a short period off the stage for a temporary finger or finger-nail injury).

 

    I’ve never been a true admirer of Chagall’s painting The Fiddler, but in Crumb’s experimental rendition, the fiddle strummed upon the piano’s innards created an entirely new vision, reinforced, moments later, with the very slightly Jewish-inspired chords Tan played out on the keyboard.

     If Dalí’s The Persistence of Memory, with its melting clock faces, is not your favorite vision of contemporary art, Crumb, with Tan’s great artistry, plucks up an evocative sense of finitude and loss of something slightly now slightly out of reach, reiterating that memory is simply something that needs to be recaptured and reiterated.

     The Tahitian death chant of Gaugin’s rather terrifying Contes barbares, sung by Tan as she performs, is a slightly sinister and horrifying movement into the grave.

     The little Blue Rider of Kandinsky’s work, in Crumb’s insistence and in Tan’s performance, rides into the landscape so forcefully that you simply have to applaud his presence upon the much larger space unto which he has launched himself. He is a hero, in this musical version, in the making, a figure on the verge of reality which in his relentless rhythmic forward drive forces himself upon the scene.

      The span of the toy to the grand, prepared, piano, in short, represents a world in Tan’s significant shifts throughout her theatrically-gifted performance, that spans the comic to the tragic, moving from a world of childish wonderment to a deep immersion into the human psychology.

      If Tan is a queen, it is of total piano performance. The “toy” is only the half of it.

 

Los Angeles, November 2, 2018

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

Jules Massenet and Henri Cain | Cendrillon / 2018

dream and language

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jules Massenet (composer), Henri Cain (libretto, based on the story by Charles Perreault) Cendrillon / 1899; the production I saw was the Metropolitan Opera’s live HD production on April 29, 2018

 

Jules Massenet’s 1899 Cinderalla-based opera, Cendrillon, was a bit hit upon its premiere at Paris’ Opéra-Comique; but only this year received a production for the first time at New York’s Metropolitan Opera. Tastes changed early in the 20th century, and Massenet’s beautiful scores, with their tributes to everyone from Mendelsohn to Wagner, with a few stops for Mozart and Strauss along the way. But the fact that Cendrillon had never previously made it to Broadway seems to be a particularly sad event.

      Fortunately, the great American mezzo-soprano, Joyce DiDonato rediscovered the work (after it had performed by Frederica von Stade) more than a decade ago and warmed up to it playing in a Laurent Pelly production (he also designed the remarkable costumes) in Santa Fe, London, Brussels, and elsewhere. As a regular in MET productions, it was perhaps inevitable that eventually DiDonato would be featured in a production in New York, and we can now hope that, given its great success, it may join the MET repertoire. Certainly, it was visionary of the MET to include it their famed live HD series, which my husband Howard and I saw yesterday in a Los Angeles movie theater, and which may help make it a production which audiences will embrace. Clearly, the elderly audience with whom we saw it loved the production, and I think their grandchildren might equally enjoy it.

     Unlike Rossini’s better known La Cenerentola (in which DiDonato has also performed the Cinderalla role), the Massenet version does not focus as much on the young stepdaughter’s ill treatment as it does on the fairy-tale elements of the work, going back to the original Perreault story for its source. The mean stepmother is this version, although with her two fawning and fairly ignorant daughters, is much closer to the mother and daughters of Beauty and the Beast than the wicked figures of Rossini’s world.

     Like Cocteau’s Belle, Massenet’s Lucette (Cinderalla’s real name in this version) basically accepts her life as a cleaning woman to the vain stepmother, Madame de la Haltière (the always wonderful Stephanie Blythe) and her almost-idiot like stepsisters, dressed in comical-like balloon-like dresses that evidently stand for the haute-couture of the day. In comparison, at least in the early scenes, Lucette looks like a peasant woman from a Verdi opera. And despite her hard life, she is deeply loved still by her weak-willed father, Pandolfe (Laurent Naouri) who, after his wife’s death, inexplicably chose this monstrous woman of what she claims is a royal background. It may be that his little farm in the forest was simply not successful enough to pay the rent. Now the man simply suffers for his horrible mistake, his daughter paying the punishment for the crime.

     Most of Lucette’s life, when she isn’t busy cleaning up the story-book-like house—set designer Barbara de Limburg has covered the walls of the constantly shifting rooms with phrases from the Perreault tale—is spent sleeping and dreaming; and, in fact, she has a hard time, as we may as well, in knowing whether her experiences are real or simply dreams.

      It is certainly a dream of an opera, with the soaring phrases of beauty, suddenly transforming into more comic passages, and moving back again into glorious romanticism, which conductor Bertrand de Billy described as “particularly French in style.

 

    One, moreover, cannot imagine a more remarkable cast: besides DiDonato, Blythe, and the long-performing Naouri, the remarkable soprano Kathleen Kim (playing The Fairy Godmother) and another regular MET performer Alice Coote (who performs the “soprano de sentiment” role of Prince Charming). It may be true, as The New York Times reviewer Zachary Wolfe argues, that Coote’s “voice is too blunt to expand over the score’s long lines,” but in the production I saw, she came off amazingly real in her trouser role as the unhappy prince who cannot find anyone in his kingdom to love. And when he does meet his love in the form of a surprise guest at the ball, Lucette in a stunningly beautiful sequined white gown which gradually cascades into darker colors at the bottom (all others are dressed in comically outrageous versions of red) she/he sings in quite beautiful awe about the event.

      If this Massenet work is about the confusion of dream and reality—there are long periods when Lucette simply believes she has dream her entire visit to the ball and her later encounter with the Prince in the forest—this version, at least, is also all about hearing and language, the joy of being told the tale through words. Not only the walls, but chairs, tables, and the wonderful carriage on which Lucette rides to the ball are identified with their linguistic equivalents, the carriage itself made up of the letters spelling “carosse,” the old French word meaning “coach.”

       Quite vindictively, it at first appears, The Fairy God Mother refuses to let the loving couple see one another in the forest, only allowing them to hear each other’s sad pleas. Yet that’s precisely the point. Hearing and reading reality is what truly matters here, not action and adventures. The only incredible actions in this work are Lucette’s flight from the ball at midnight, whereupon she loses her shoe, and the impossible attempts to find the foot that fits her glass slipper.

     Otherwise, Cendrillon is a work of poetical and musical wonderment. Eventually, The Fairy Godmother comes to the rescue on a pile of large books. And Pelly’s and De Limburg’s direction and sets put their faith on spectral elements, allowing the Perreault tale to come alive in a way that Verdi or even the later Puccini, in their commitment to realism, might never have been able to imagine.

      The opera closes suddenly, since we already know the end, with the chorus announcing that their tale has come to an end, the loveliest close to an opera that one might ever imagine, the char-woman in the Prince’s arms and even the terrible stepmother admitting—now that Lucette has found her own royalty—that she truly loves her. If we don’t believe her one little bit, it doesn’t matter. Cendrillon is a fairy-tale, a thing of language, as the host, Ailyn Pérez announced early on before the opera began, a much-needed tonic these days.

 

Los Angeles, April 29, 2018

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