This is a promotional YouTube, but I thought I'd post it, as it gives you some insight into the concept of the production reviewed below, as well as a sense of the sheer beauty of the opera and the talent of the BEMF singers and musicians.
Tuesday, December 1, 2009
More on Acis and Galatea
Acis comes up aces
I knew last Saturday's Boston Early Music Festival production of Handel's Acis and Galatea was going to be wonderful; and indeed it was. (Alas, it was a one-night stand, or I'd be telling you how to order tickets.) By now BEMF's track record is so sterling it's almost monotonous, and what's more, the director of last summer's ravishing L'incoronazione di Poppea, Gilbert Blin, was back to do the honors for Acis. I worried a bit when it was announced that the luminous soprano Amanda Forsythe (who pretty much carried Opera Boston's Tancredi) had been sidelined by her sinuses, but even in the opening chorus it was clear that her replacement, Teresa Wakim (at left, with Aaron Sheehan) was going to be transporting in her own way.
The only surprise of the evening, it turned out, was the jump in theatrical sophistication that BEMF made with this production. The festival's operatic offerings are dedicated to replicating lost performance, as well as musical, styles - a worthy goal in a world led astray by the likes of Peter Sellars. Still, some BEMF offerings have come across as fancy-dress balls in wigs and heels - delightful in their detail, but artistically empty, as the historical frame which gave their tropes traction back in the day has long since vanished. For those of us who aren't actual monarchists, these productions sometimes looked like mere exercises in nostalgia for Versailles or Vienna.
But how to navigate a fresh course through historic material, while avoiding the shoals of vapid, "revolutionary" schtick à la Sellars, is a thornier question than many artistic conservatives might suppose. Director Blin found a way out of the conundrum, however, with his clever concept for Acis. Taking a hint from Stoppard's Arcadia and Byatt's Possession, Blin conjured a vision of the original premiere of the opera as a "frame" for the current performance. Of course this was of conceptual interest largely because Handel composed the opera during a famous episode of British artistic history - the short flowering of "Cannons" (below), a country house dedicated by its owner (the Duke of Chandos) to the flourishing of the arts, and famous for its décor, gardens, and art collection, as well as the literary and musical circle which orbited it (including Handel, Alexander Pope, and John Gay).
The façade of the lost, legendary Cannons.
Blin cleverly filled the small cast of Acis with many of these luminaries. The nymph Galatea and her swain were, I assumed, the Duke and Duchess of Chandos, while Pope seemed to take the part of the Cyclops, Polyphemus (appropriately enough, as the poet was eventually to throw metaphorical stones at the establishment), and Handel himself (you could tell from the wig) stood in for Acis's common-sensical sidekick, Damon. Blin's specific conceit - that we were watching a dress rehearsal, say - was left deliberately vague, so that he could move easily between "performance" and "reality" (or leave us guessing as to which was which), as well as pull into his scenario the visual art of the period.
His excuse was once again the Duke of Chandos - who did, indeed, amass a major collection (including a Poussin); thus the rehearsal/performance of Acis was sometimes interrupted by the pondering of a major canvas, apparently brought in by dealers. As it's no secret that seventeenth-century visual art, particularly Lorrain's evocations of the Roman campagna, inspired much of eighteenth-century operatic and theatrical convention (all those arcadian shepherds and nymphs from Ovid made their first appearances on canvas rather than onstage), these moments buzzed with a meta-theatrical resonance. From the twenty-first century we pondered the eighteenth, which was itself gazing back at the seventeenth, which in turn was transfixed by Ovid and the Romans. (An added shiver of resonance came from the knowledge that, like Arcadia, Cannons didn't last long; some thirty years after its completion, the collapse of the "South Sea Bubble" decimated the fortune of the Duke of Chandos, and the house was auctioned off, literally, brick by brick.)
It should be noted, however, that Blin fudged his postmodern framing a bit. The first painting displayed was not, surprisingly enough, Lorrain's well-known treatment of the myth in question, but rather his Landscape with Egeria Mourning for Numa (at left). The themes of the two myths are similar (Acis is transformed into a fountain, while Egeria turns into a well); more to the point, Egeria is undeniably the more beautiful panorama, which perhaps explains Blin's choice - he wasn't looking for the specifics of this particular myth, but rather the long view of Arcadia itself. 
Likewise the Poussin displayed was not the one owned by the Duke of Chandos (The Choice of Hercules), nor Poussin's own Acis and Galatea, but instead the famous Et in Arcadia Ego (right) - an appropriate riposte to Lorrain's dreamy idealism. The painting also matched neatly the somber turn the opera takes (needless to say, the love of Acis and Galatea can't last); indeed, for someone versed in art, the parallel was almost too obvious. Of course many classical musicians, outside their field of specialization, are as philistine as Patriots fans, and I have to report that the audience around me was audibly perplexed by both pictures. (And I wasn't in the mood to enlighten them.)
Which sums up, I think, a problem facing Blin, and the Early Music Festival in general - how to entice a subtly reactionary audience away from tableaux vivants and toward something theatrically rich and meaningful. I must admit, however, that even Acis was really a sketch of an idea rather than a fully developed one (all the more reason to return to the concept with more resources and perhaps another opera). Blin attempted to "consult the genius of the place" (as Pope once put it), by which I took him to mean the entire Baroque era; but he was only able to hint at questions of the age's idealized romantic atmosphere and hidden sexuality rather than fully develop them. (One touching gambit, in which a shepherd removed his wig and seemed to beg for sexual openness, gave some idea of how far the concept could go.) And alas, a few of the production's conceits felt slightly contrived, at least to anyone familiar with the period. Casting Alexander Pope as Polyphemus had its downside, for instance, as Pope is widely known to have been almost dwarfish, and hardly cut the figure of a towering rake (above right, Douglas Williams with Wakim), as here.
So Acis didn't so much serve as a destination as suggest a direction for BEMF. I must say though, that in musical terms, the Festival has certainly already arrived. The two instrumental "geniuses" of the place, Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs, led the onstage early music orchestra with their customary intelligence and grace, but were sometimes eclipsed by the virtuosic Kathryn Montoya's sparkling work on flageolet recorder.
Vocally the performance was if anything even more impressive. Wakim proved to have a gorgeously pure bloom to the top of her voice - it slimmed out somewhat further down, but was always beguiling. Meanwhile Aaron Sheehan brought both a handsome vocal profile and formidable force to Acis, while Douglas Williams impressed with an agile bass and a memorably brooding intensity. In the smaller roles, local hero Jason McStoots (whom I've been praising for years) stole several comic scenes as a fussy Handel who couldn't help correcting the musicians onstage, but then revealed in his arias a warmly nuanced tone even richer than what I remembered. And as that wig-less shepherd, tenor Zachary Wilder may have contributed the most subtly poignant and openly emotional performance of the night. That's the whole cast, actually: five parts and five great performances. The Boston calendar has gotten crowded of late with wonderful opera productions - but with Acis and Galatea, we must add one more to the year's bounty.
Monday, November 30, 2009
War and remembrance
Heroes, the poignant new comedy by Gérald Sibleyras at the Merrimack Rep, has been widely praised (including by me, see review below).
But there's an issue with the play that no one (at least so far) has discussed - and which I wish I'd mentioned in my earlier piece. Then again, perhaps it slipped my mind because I don't quite know what to make of this particular subtext, and how Merrimack might have integrated it into an American production.
The play, for those of you who haven't read my earlier review, concerns the last days of three French veterans of the Great War, on a sunny patio somewhere, we imagine, in Provence or Auvergne. It's a bittersweet comedy of bravado in the face of decay, and the Merrimack mines its comedy expertly.
But they don't quite know what to do with a series of references that, taken together, must have been meaningful to the play's original French audience, but sails right over the heads of most viewers in Lowell, MA. The heroes of Heroes all served together on the Western front, and so it's natural their various travails - and fantasies of triumph - should take shape in their minds through military metaphors. They babble about "defending their position," and yearn for sandbags, trenches and barbed wire. When they dream of escaping their nursing home for a distant stand of poplars, they even fantasize about roving onward, as far as . . . Indochina.
Ah, yes, Indochina. Which France abandoned, defeated, in 1954 (a French soldier, above left), in a set of accords which created North Vietnam - a nation that would, in turn, attack its southern neighbor in 1959 (roughly the period of Heroes), eventually leading to the notorious American involvement and escalation.
Rather an interesting subtext for a bittersweet comedy of age, no? And lest you think I'm reading too much into this, consider that the heroes of Heroes also ponder at length, and with a mix of denial and despair, the fall of France in 1940. So the playwright has clearly given as subtext to his veterans' delusions the major conflicts of twentieth-century French history - all of them, after the Great War, defeats.
This is, to put it mildly, rather loaded thematic material; it's a bit like threading through The Odd Couple a subplot about Vietnam. Not being that conversant with contemporary French attitudes about their military misadventures, I can't really judge how all this might have been construed by the playwright's compatriots. The comedy was a huge success upon its premiere - yet the French Indochina War is still known as "the dirty war" in France, and surely its mention must have brought a certain chill to The Wind in the Poplars (the play's original title).
At the Merrimack, however, this political subtext was simply ignored, and as I said, seemed not to even register with the audience. This may be indicative of one of our own cultural blindspots - how many Americans are even aware of the French "colonialist" prelude to the American "capitalist" war in Vietnam? But then again, how could this content be integrated into the comic mechanics of Heroes? I confess I'm not sure - the idea that Sibleyras may be insinuating a cooler critique of militarism beneath his affectionate gibes certainly suggests itself; but how the Merrimack might have translated that for an American audience is hardly clear. The references right now simply trail the action like indecipherable bits of semaphore. In a way, though, they remind us that something is always lost in translation when a play makes the leap from one culture to the next. Surely the first viewers of Heroes in Paris perceived in it a political ruefulness that is lost in its current incarnation. We are inevitably looking at a thinner copy of the original - and perhaps we always are, with every foreign original.
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the web . . .
Just so you don't think I spend all my time looking at ancient, outmoded art forms, I thought I would pass along two sites that have been amusing me greatly the past few days, even though I hate these guys because they're wittier than I could ever be: 27bslash6 (thank you, Jordan), and You Look Nice Today (thank you, Alton).
Friday, November 27, 2009
Lions in winter
The three befuddled Heroes at Merrimack Rep.
We never find out whether the fading veterans of Gérald Sibleyras's Heroes (now through Dec. 13 at the Merrimack Rep) were, indeed, actually heroes in the Great War, which threw them together some forty years before the action of the play. But the point is, obviously, that they are heroes now, facing as grim an enemy as any they faced in the trenches. Indeed it's the same enemy: death, put simply, which sits in wait for them just beyond the sunny, nursing-home patio on which they're playing out their last days. But Sibleyras - a successful French dramatist and screenwriter not much heard of in the States - doesn't dwell on the inevitable so much as suggest it, in a winsome meditation on the limits of life - and indeed all our lives - that succeeds (sometimes despite itself) in the Merrimack's sweet but superficial production.
Sibleyras imagines his three old soldiers in a new kind of trench - their patio is down in a hot little valley, from which they can just see a distant stand of poplars nodding in the breeze (the play's original title was Le vent des Peupliers, "The Wind in the Poplars"). The days pass, summer declines into fall, and our three heroes, Henri, Gustave, and Philippe, decline too; Phillipe's fainting attacks, the result of shrapnel lodged in his brain, grow more frequent, and he and Gustave (who's terrified of the outside world) begin to share a folie à deux about the stone dog guarding their terrace. Phillipe has other delusions as well: he's quite sure, for instance, that the little nun who runs the place is polishing off veterans in order to streamline her birthday party calendar.
As you might guess, of this trio Henri has the firmest grip on 'reality,' and whatever tension develops depends on his awareness that his friends are living in a kind of deepening dream; whether to fight it, or fly with it, is the slight script's only open question. Their recurrent fantasies are of battling for freedom - an escape to that stand of poplars, for instance (below) - and, unsurprisingly, sex. Those offended by Gallic romantic attitudes are here forewarned; these charming old duffs frankly rhapsodize about bringing women to climax, as well as making them laugh (one dreams of doing both at once, allowing this would be "rather difficult"). What poignantly undercuts the strut of these aging cockerels, of course, is the fact that, as one laments, none of them has had "an erection worthy of the name" for months.
Equipped to ford a nearby stream, the heroes of Heroes head for their beloved poplars.
One is reminded that the tramps in Waiting for Godot have much the same problem, and as translated (and trimmed) by Tom Stoppard, Heroes hints at something of Beckett's physical, if not spiritual, devastation. And it's that slight edge of decrepitude - which should, admittedly, be delicately rendered - that the Merrimack misses. The actors of this production (two of whom performed the piece earlier in New York) are all too vital to fully mine the pathos of the script. After all, unlike Beckett's tramps, these three are not so much concerned with the afterlife as with life itself, to which they are trying to hang onto any which way they can - and in an ideal production we should see them wither ever so slightly despite their best efforts.
Yet even with one character's lame leg, and another's frequent fainting spells, the general atmosphere at Merrimack was hale and hearty. This worked fine for the comedy, but left the poignance to be sketched in at particular moments by director Carl Forsman, when it should have suffused, and infused, everything. And speaking of infusion - I was rather surprised that the two actors from New York, Ron Holgate - who's won a Tony - and Jonathan Hogan, felt no further "inside" their characters than newcomer Kenneth Tigar. Holgate and Hogan were working more subtly than Tigar, it's true, but all were operating technically - and Hogan was unable to suggest the growing severity of Phillipe's attacks, or his deepening mania. Holgate offers probably the most satisfying performance - but even here, the edge of Gustave's inner terror was somehow missing.
Yet if this is not quite an ideal production of Heroes, it's nevertheless often an effective one - to which the Merrimack audience responded warmly. Sibleyras hasn't penned a masterpiece (for one thing it wraps far too abruptly), but he has a genuine voice - Stoppard hasn't rendered him as "Stoppard" - as well as the kind of light, yet serious touch that's becoming rare in the theatre these days. And if the Merrimack Heroes is a tad too broad, it's nevertheless affecting and sympathetic in a way it seems only the stage can be; I found its mood lingering in my mind for days after the performance. And a new play with that kind of effect is something to give thanks for.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Holiday wishes . . .
. . . from the Hub Review, as well as "Romeo" (above right) and friend. You can see more photos of Romeo, by "romeo's mom," here. And coming soon: the 2009 cultural events we should be most thankful for.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
The perfect Wagnerite
Wagner is a composer whose influence is everywhere, but whose actual works, at least in Boston, are - well, not so much in evidence. The BSO performs them fairly regularly in concert, of course, but I can't think of the last time anyone has attempted a fully-staged Wagner opera in the Hub. The reasons why are obvious. The later ones make demands that are just too daunting for local producers - the orchestra would stretch any pit in town to its limit, and of course the stagings are not only immensely long and complex (the Met's recently retired Das Rheingold, above) but often require huge choruses, live horses, or magical special effects. And to be blunt, sopranos and tenors with the power to cut through a late Wagner orchestration aren't exactly thick on the ground.
This, perhaps, explains the excitement stirred by the appearance of Linda Watson (left) with the Boston Philharmonic last weekend, in a program devoted entirely to Wagner. Watson sang Brünnhilde's Immolation Scene as well as Isolde's "Liebestod," ("Love-death"), and the Philharmonic essayed the popular preludes to both Tristan and Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg as well as what you might call Götterdämmerung's Greatest Hits - "Dawn" along with Siegfried's "Rhine Journey," "Death," and "Funeral March."
The evening was therefore a kind of Wagnerite wet dream - and a palpable thrill of electricity ran through the crowd upon the appearance of Watson. Imperious, draped in black, and sporting not just long Aryan locks but a stereotypical German profile, the soprano might have been sent by central casting - although actually, she's the genuine article, with a long list of Wagner credits that culminates in Brünnhildes at both Bayreuth and the Met. Once she began to sing, the reason for that résumé was immediately clear; even though she was working with Wagnerian forces cheek-by-jowl on stage (as opposed to down in the pit), Watson's voice more than held its own. The soprano has a clarion top, and there's a weight and burnished sheen to her voice that stretches unbroken almost to its bottom (only here did she have trouble being heard). For Wagner, it's all but perfect - although frankly, there's not much in the way of individual color to it, and Watson's performances were so dignified as to verge on the sedate. Admittedly, we don't expect a full dramatic performance in a concert setting - still, both Isolde and Brünnhilde are experiencing transfiguration amidst destruction, neither of which seemed to leave Watson particularly ruffled. (An amateur recording of Watson in a performance of Isolde is below; for a sense of how far the role can really go, at bottom is one of the great Isoldes of our day, Waltraud Meier, in an almost scarily intense performance.)
Linda Watson as Isolde at Deutsche Oper am Rhein in 2003.
While the diva did her thing, the Boston Philharmonic did its - intermittently. The opening prelude to Die Meistersinger was bright and energetically clipped, just as it should be, but after that, as conductor Benjamin Zander slowed his rhythms for the ensuing deaths and funerals, his interpretations still seemed somehow metronomic. A rising, but mysterious, suspension is central to Tristan - and a similar sense of decline infuses Götterdämmerung, but rather than summon gathering, inchoate moods, Zander seemed to be shifting, albeit at a funereal pace, from one spot to another in the score. As a result, the orchestra sounded far less focused than it did in their recent Dvořák Seventh, even though there were sudden bursts of brilliant playing in Siegfried's Funeral Music and in particular the overwhelming rise of the Rhine (and final coda) after the Immolation Scene. At these moments the terrible grandeur that is Wagner did, indeed, echo in Boston as it rarely does.
Now that's an Isolde: Waltraud Meier not so much sings as transcends the "Liebestod" in Munich in 1998.
Monday, November 23, 2009
Marianna Bassham hits the road in Reckless.
It's getting harder and harder to get your holiday sentiment straight up these days, because alternative Christmas shows always come with a twist, and there seem to be more and more of them every year. Over at the Huntington, the carolers are warbling about the Civil War, fer chrissakes, and the New Rep is once again turning the pages of The Santaland Diaries. So it's no surprise that SpeakEasy should re-purpose Craig Lucas's Reckless this season - hell, it's set at Christmastime, ain't it? And you know, it's vaguely gay and outrageous and all. Alas, it's also a little thin, and its wacky, surreal mood dates it as surely as the early personal computers dotting its plot. Unsurprisingly, SpeakEasy's selling point for this revival has been not the play itself but its cast, which is, indeed, a line-up of local theatre royalty. Still, director Scott Edmiston hasn't actually gotten their best out of any of them, and he doesn't quite seem to understand the actual arc of the script.
Still, he keeps things festive - that's his specialty, and Edmiston puts a nice shine on just about every joke Lucas leaves under the holiday-comedy tree. Trouble is, Lucas doesn't really lavish the one-liners on this "dark," frothy tale of the hapless Rachel (Marianna Bassham, above), a suburban Pollyanna whose husband announces he has taken out a contract on her life. On Christmas Eve, no less. Does it get any more outrageous than that? No, girlfriends, it doesn't.
Poor Rachel, of course, is soon dashing through the snow - until she's saved by the kindness of a stranger, the mysteriously glum Lloyd (Larry Coen), whose nom de guerre is "Bophetelophti" (har de har), and whose wife "Pooty" (yuk, yuk!) is a deaf paraplegic (Kerry Dowling, all above left).
I know, ka-razy!!! At this point it's probably good to remember that the script opens with Rachel shaking a snow globe in a "euphoria attack," and back in the mid-80's, Lucas no doubt thought he too had a right to turn the holiday over and shake it hard. After all, the threat of AIDS - omnipresent and terrifying in the 80's - is clearly what's being filtered into his wacky pseudo-hetero scenario, with its lovers who can kill you, or end up in wheelchairs. So far, so good. Trouble is, the script comes over as second-hand Christopher Durang, as more horrors and bizarre coincidences pile up around Rachel faster than reindeer poop at the Pole. And the script's two extended parodies of game shows have long since been surpassed in grotesquerie by the actual targets of their satire.
Still, this crack cast keeps us laughing - even if they can't quite chart the arc that Lucas has embedded beneath the surface of the material. Transference is this playwright's obsession (and great theme) - and via various transferences, life begins to slowly make sense - and even beneficent sense - around poor Rachel once again. Even here, however, you could argue that Reckless has been surpassed by the work of David Lindsay-Abaire, and at any rate, under Edmiston's direction, Bassham doesn't quite trace Rachel's descent into catatonia step by step, as she should (Coen does better by his similar collapse). Even once everything turns mysteriously, mystically around, I'm afraid Bassham is a little too subdued; surely more must be hanging, at least internally, on her series of discoveries in the final scene.
Paula Plum goes all therapeutic on Marianna Bassham.
All that said, Reckless does have a few holiday treats up its sleeve. For one thing, it's got Paula Plum, who tears through several hilarious caricatures of therapy (above) without batting an eye, or dropping an accent. There's also sharp work from Will McGarrahan, Karl Baker Olson, and especially Sandra Heffley, whom we just don't see enough of around here. Cristina Todesco's set, aglow with upside-down tannenbaums, is as witty as Charles Schoonmaker's kitschy costumes, and Dewey Dellay's weirdly whimsical soundscape is everything it should be. SpeakEasy has definitely wrapped this package right; if only it didn't feel like last year's present.
For your cool list
We are not surfers. But we wish we were. You will too, when you view the awesome "inside the tube" photography by Clark Little here. Hat tip to Art Hennessey.
Saturday, November 21, 2009
Dance's latest hot young thing, Trey McIntyre (below left, and indeed hot, no?) blew into the ICA last night (program continues through Sunday) with his new troupe, "The Trey McIntyre Project," and a set of dances that consistently charmed, even if they didn't always quite satisfy. Make no mistake - Mr. McIntyre is a born choreographer, with a graceful classic syntax that's so felicitous, it feels almost offhand. What's more, McIntyre seems to know instinctively how to set his movements in a consistently interesting space, and how to summon striking stage pictures at will. His "hook," however, is the application of this talent to a breezy, but earnest, pop sensibility. He photographs his dancers (above, and at left) in what look like expensive underwear ads, for example, to connect to a smart crowd that's more at home in a club than a concert hall. 
Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course (and honestly, it's far less trashy than some of the florid schtick you encounter all the time in ballet). But I have to say that McIntyre couldn't always manage his classic-pop synthesis in a way that would fully satisfy a classicist; the pop often won out in the end, leaving you feeling high, but also still hungry, as if you'd eaten only cookies for dinner.
This is partly because pop is usually so simple that you can't rely on its musical ideas to carry a full dance. Narrative is just about a necessity, and that's what saved "Like a Samba," the playful opening number set to the chic vocal stylings of Astrud Gilberto. McIntyre attired his boys in beach clothes, but his girls in toe shoes - which told us immediately that he intended to slip ballet into a sophisticated, adult-listening mix. And honestly, the opening silhouettes of the piece were wonderful: basically classical moves executed with a Latin shimmy in the hips and waist. The dance then devolved into charming, but lite, ballroom-dancing-style displays, however, sans any actual storylines of seduction or surrender. Until the trio set to "The Girl from Ipanema," that is, which featured two smitten boys (Brett Perry and John Michael Schert) trailing after their dream girl (Ilana Goldman) in a sunny sexual daze. Basically frozen whenever she was around, this goofy pair erupted into sweet little dances of infatuation whenever she was offstage, and suddenly we understood what Mr. McIntyre could really do when he had a scenario he could run with.
Yet for some reason McIntyre didn't seem to know where to go with "Shape," which opened with a hilariously transgressive image - a female dancer equipped with Dolly-Parton-scale bazooms (actually balloons). The stage seemed set for something completely different, I must admit - I was hoping for something simultaneously jaundiced and sympathetic about our wacky standards of feminine beauty (and boobies). But suddenly other folks came on with other balloons attached to other parts of their bodies, and the piece collapsed into a sweet, but essentially platitudinous, take on diversity - although the finale, in which Dolly's balloons suddenly took off for the ceiling, gave the piece one last funny kick. The dancers once again charmed, although Annali Rose (right) was probably the stand-out (as she was in "Samba") of this green, but talented, group.
Not everything in the evening was breezy fun, however. "(serious)," which McIntyre has said was inspired by a dream about Charlie Kaufman (!) proved intriguing, if a little obscure in its essence (although given the obviousness of what had come before, having to think about what we were watching was a bit refreshing). Set to a suite of spiky, dense variations by Henry Cowell, the work follows three dancers - all dressed in office-casual - struggling with something, although we never find out what (indeed, perhaps all three are different facets of some nameless middle manager out there in cubeland). Whatever that "something" is, it eats at them, it bugs them, it sets them at each other - although they never seem to get emotional about it (perhaps because they're too "serious" for that). Dancers Chanel DaSilva, Brett Perry, and particularly the lightning-quick Jason Hartley, brought a coiled energy to the proceedings, which more than usual for McIntyre seemed to be following a loosely formal plan: at the finish, the three dancers coalesced into a kind of tautly balanced pyramid. Perhaps a solution - or at least an equilibrium - had been achieved.
The evening closed with an ambitious venture into more conceptual territory - "Sun Road," which was commissioned by the National Park Service (of all people) to "commemorate" the beauty of Glacier National Park. Part of the piece consists of film of McIntyre's dancers on location in the almost stupefyingly scenic Montana park (left), and the "dance," as it were, moved at will from screen to stage and back again (when the live dancers made their first appearance, they seemed to roll right out from the screen). This formal play was often fascinating, although the dance itself was at times a bit baldly symbolic. Chanel DaSilva was on hand, in a stunning scarlet gown, to seemingly impersonate nature herself, while several bad-boy dancers - clad in tuxedos with matching red cummerbunds - caroused, pillaged, and did pathetic battle across her great demesne. 
Soon ravaged earth was actually pouring from their sleeves, and DaSilva was "bleeding" long silk scarves; yet frankly, the dancers seemed puny before the scale of Glacier National Park, and the dance didn't quite convey that it was they, not it, who were probably most threatened by their antics. Still, the piece included yet again some marvelous stage images, of naked bodies (like our carbon footprints?) slowly melting the glacial snows. And McIntyre nailed his thesis in a disturbing coda, in which a lone man encountered another earth-mother (left), only this time clad in a burnt ball gown that suggested a dead, lifeless husk; as he clasped it erotically, even she withdrew, leaving him alone with the fruit of his labors. With more powerful imagery like that, McIntyre could soon boast a repertory as deep as it is sweet.
Friday, November 20, 2009
God bless us everyone, even the racists . . .
Just how far can the sentimental form of the Christmas pageant stretch? (At left, a Nazi officer decorates the tree at Auschwitz.)
That's the question raised - and, alas, probably answered - by A Civil War Christmas, now playing at the Huntington Theatre. The idea behind the show is undeniably intriguing; since with our new mixed-race President we are re-enacting many of the racist throes of the Civil War, playwright Paula Vogel has been inspired to create a holiday show set in those troubled times. And I admit, I admire her chutzpah; as to whether her idea counts as a flash of sheer genius or utter folly, however, I must admit I am filled with doubt.
For to be blunt, the Civil War conjures a level of tragedy that would challenge Shakespeare or Sophocles - and neither genius, I think, would opt to treat it in the form of a Christmas pageant. Yet Paula Vogel thinks she can pull that off; as Seth and Amy might say, "Really!?!" For let's again be honest: Ms. Vogel is a talented, but second-tier, playwright even among our living writers, and the Christmas pageant is - how to put this? - a highly restrictive form.
Then there's that troubling (but clearly intended) parallel with the present day. The show is set in Christmas 1864, just after Lincoln's re-election, when his popularity was buoyed by victories in the South; of course no one knew then that within months he would be dead, assassinated by John Wilkes Booth. Needless to say, the threat of assassination is part of the current zeitgeist, too. Indeed, many Republican Christians are praying for the death of the President, and even selling T-shirts about their hopes for his demise. So the very concept of A Civil War Christmas - its reason for being - requires that the moral conundrums of the past be grappled with, and somehow made to resonate with those of the present day. How do we accept John Wilkes Booth, or his descendants, at the Christmas table? And how do we deck the halls when our cheer depends on Sherman's March - or a rout in Afghanistan?
Yet in the end it must be said, I'm afraid, that whenever Paula Vogel ventures near any of these cultural third rails, A Civil War Christmas becomes irritating, and sometimes infuriating; indeed, it often plays as a kind of parody of the patronizing evasions of political correctness. Vogel caricatures both Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln (surely among the most complex figures in American history), and paints John Wilkes Booth as villainous but clueless (and his cohorts as stooges). Her staging ideas are embarrasingly bald - a ghost of the Lincolns' dead son drums from a balcony, and there always seems to be a coffin nearby whenever honest Abe makes an exit. Even worse, she mostly dodges dramatizing the problem of racism, even though that's central to her project; instead (as usual) this playwright consistently returns to issues of sexism and feminine empowerment - which is a bit like pulling Susan B. Anthony into a play about the Holocaust. And then there's all the simple, blunt evidence of her bizarrely confident moral and political stupidity - I won't even discuss Vogel's jokes about the Emancipation Proclamation, or her sudden bursts of blank "irony" about the bloody progress of Sherman through Georgia; these gaffes only make you almost defensive about the South and its "beautiful cause."
The author is on firmer ground when she sticks to lesser-known historical figures (or blends of historical figures), and plays at being a New Age Dickens, tugging at our heartstrings with little girls lost on the streets of D.C. (on Christmas Eve!!) or innocent Confederate prisoners of war facing Certain Death. It's possible, in fact, that if Vogel had simply avoided the major players, and actually grappled with the issue of racism, she might have been able to make her rich (actually, overstuffed) pageant of war victims work. Still, even in her scenes of the common folk, Vogel's aim sometimes goes wild - when her wounded Union boys began singing in Hebrew over a fallen Jewish comrade, I almost laughed; when the victim rose from his death bed and dashed toward a blast of Heavenly Light, I almost threw up.
Caught in all this cultural and conceptual crossfire is a cast that deserves better. Poor Ken Cheeseman is required to earn cheap laughs as a horse (above left, with Molly Schreiber), and then - even worse - as Abe Lincoln! That he manages this at all is worth some kind of award. Karen MacDonald, likewise, does what she can with Vogel's sitcom-level portrayal of Mary Todd Lincoln. Jacqui Parker gets better material, and exudes a palpable sense of stricken strength throughout (at right, with Delance Minefee). She also sings affectingly, although the versatile Gilbert Glenn Brown must take the musical honors of the night with his haunting version of "The Yellow Rose of Texas." I wish we'd heard more from the wonderful actress/vocalist Uzo Aduba, whom we haven't seen since the New Rep's Dessa Rose a few years back, but I was glad to see several local up-and-comers, such as Jason Bowen, Stephen Russell and Ed Hoopman, acquit themselves well in a variety of parts.
Indeed, with the well-sung carols and the better sketches - as well as the charming turns by local choruses before the show - you might be able to patch together a bittersweet Christmas memory from this strange, eventful history. Or, you might consider it an oddity that tops even David Bowie and Bing Crosby's notorious duet to "The Little Drummer Boy." As for me, I think I need to see the original "Grinch" again, and pronto. Now there's a Christmas show.
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