USTheater is devoted to plays, operas, and performances, American and international, performed and published in the United States. We also are open to new plays by playwrights. All materials are copyrighted as noted. The blog is edited and much of it written by Douglas Messerli
Friday, October 25, 2019
Douglas Messerli | "Gems of Abstraction" (on George Balanchine's Jewels, performed by the Marrinsky Ballet)
Douglas Messerli | "A Confusion of Dichotomies" (on Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz's The Two-Headed Calf)
a confusion of dichotomies
The two-headed calf is always an
abomination, even if it might be seen as a kind of wonder, for yes cannot mean
yes, and no cannot mean no (for the opposite of which, at one point, a
character argues) if you’ve got two minds in one. You are always of two minds,
as anyone who carefully thinks will be for their entire lives. And that is the
true dilemma of our handsome and plainer looking Patricianello, trapped in the
confusion of dichotomies.
Tuesday, October 15, 2019
Douglas Messerli | "Losing Your Mind" (on Adam Guettel's and Craig Lucas' The Light in the Piazza)
Craig
Lucas (book), Adam Guettel (lyrics and music) 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 stunning if
quite simple set by Robert Jones along with glorious 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: beautifully charming. 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.
So why mightn’t I just say I loved this
work and cried and through it all; all of which I totally did?
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 adore 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 with her
fragile soprano voice in representing her own blossoming coming out—and in this
case that really is what it is. In his role as Fabrizio, Houchen literally came
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 he might have great in Sondheim’s Sweeny 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.
But where was the great Fleming, fussing
constantly over the possible failures of her stigmatized daughter? Well, of
course, she was stunningly beautiful in the first act song of sorrow about when
you first realize that love has broken down, “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
nonetheless beautifully conceived.
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 shine forth. Here, in expressing
all of her anger for her denial and later change of mind to allow 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. Yes, like Stephen
Sondheim has often argued, love is a “fable,” but there is no possibility to
love if you can’t ignore that reality, and perceive 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 to imagine what your children might find in
one another, as well 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. It was worth a
visit to this wonderful musical-opera just for that moment.
Friday, October 11, 2019
Douglas Messerli | "Dreaming Through Music" (on Brooklyn Rider and Magos Herrera)
out root, trunk, branches, birds, stars. Sing until the dream
engenders the spring at at which you may drink and recognize
yourself and recover.
Tuesday, October 8, 2019
Douglas Messerli | "A Sacred Domain" (on the death of Paul Badura-Skoda)
Saturday, October 5, 2019
Douglas Messerli | "One of Us" (on Shyam Bhatt's Treya's Last Dance)
Yet, for all the discussions of Treya’s family life, the play is also a long treatise—and I don’t mean this academically—on her own sexual activities and possibilities, and the difficulty of second-generation migrants. Concerning the latter she argues that while it is understandable that the original migrant family members might desire to be surrounded by their own kind, fearing the radical changes in culture they have just entered, their children, born in Britain in this case, need, sometimes painfully to pull away from their parents, friends, and familial values. How does one do that with love and grace? It’s a dance of a different kind, the metaphor that bookends the expanding vision of her world.