THE ROUGH TENDERNESS OF VOICE
Dorian
Wood XAVELA LUX AETERNA / Alberto Montero, conductor / the performance I
saw with Pablo Capra and Paul Sand was at Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts
Theater) on November 22, 2019.
In
a period of just 2 months I have now attended 3 solo concerts in 3 different
theaters of major singers performing in languages other than English: in
October I attended, at the Wallis Theatre in Beverly Hills, a production of
Brooklyn Rider and Megos Herrera singing in Spanish and Portuguese; in November
I saw the glorious Julia Migenes singing French chansons at the Odyssey
Theatre; and last night I attended Dorian Wood performing XAVELA LUX AETERNA
at Redcat,
On
stage was a rather large barrel-chested man (Wood, who clearly prefers, as
evidenced in the program, the pronoun “they”) dressed in a long white dress and
earrings singing, along with a string quartet (made up of Madeline Falcone,
Emily Cell, Cassia Streb, Isaac Takeuchi, with percussion by Marcos Junquera,
and synthesizer backup Xavi Muñoz) songs sung by the great Mexican-Costa Rican
singer Chavela Vargas, "la voz áspera de la ternura" (“the rough
voice of tenderness”).
As Dorian Wood’s baritone voice, moving
sometimes to a strong tenor, reveals with lovingly rough tenderness,
passionate, often almost ululating plaints, “they” are absolutely stunning,
while at the same time incorporating Vargas’ famed songs along with other Costa
Rican compositions, dug up, apparently by Wood’s musical director, the
Spanish-born Alberto Montero, who at one point joins Woods on stage with guitar
in a truly lovely, quiet love song.
At other points, Wood is joined on stage
with vocalists SAN CHA and Carmina Escobar, allowing the water-slurping Wood to
momentarily rest “their” vocal chords, necessary since “they” explode into such
intense musical passages that even the hands of the singer tremble with delight
and desire.
After listening to just a couple of
Wood’s powerful songs, you quickly forget that “they” are not of the feminine
sex, and begin to feel that “they” may have actually channeled the great
Mexican-Costa Rican singer Vargas, an utterly amazing transformation since Wood
doesn’t look anything like the singer herself.
In a sense, what Wood has been able to do
is to turn Vargas’ singing and masculine identity upside down, to retrieve the
deep femininity within her then-radical lesbian demeanor. It is almost as if,
dressed in a white quinceañera-like dress “they” reprieve the deep sexuality of
the original singer.
What was just as fascinating to me, as an
outsider, not fluent in Spanish, was how the audience—a nearly full-house made
up, obviously, of a large group of folks of Central American and Mexican
heritage—clearly knew the songs was performing. Only in major US metropolitan
communities and border towns might you find an audience who could easily join “them”
in singing one of the last songs “they” performed. My friends, Tony winner Paul
Sand and publisher/editor Pablo Capra were equally delighted by the entire
ambience of the evening.
At a time when immigration has increasing
been vilified, it was truly wonderful, as I again realized, to live in such a
remarkably diverse city. Wood, born to Costa Rica parents in Los Angeles, had
his mother in the front row, and, after a much-deserved demand for an encore,
brought up “their” mother to the stage to break open the large piñata that had
been hanging over the entire proceedings.
The small, handsome woman, took several
powerful swings and opened it, pouring what appeared to be small papers instead
of any candy treats; the audience, fortunately, had already had almost all the
sweet treats we could endure for one night. This time the standing ovations
(and there were several) were truly deserved.
Los
Angeles, November 23, 2019
Reprinted
from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (November 2019).the rough voice of tenderness
by
Douglas Messerli