Your Humble Blogger just watched the first act of The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, a Great Performances video of a production at the Los Angeles Opera. The LA Opera hired John Doyle to direct, and Audra McDonald and Patti LuPone to be in the cast, so it’s clear that they were looking for Broadway cred. Mr. Doyle didn’t have the cast playing instruments, by the way. None of that.
Anyway, I don’t think I will bother with the last two acts. The lack of subtitles in English is a problem for me, combined with the standard operatic voice that combines incredibly clear enunciation with a total inability to make out what anybody is saying. Oh, and Ms. LuPone’s notoriously idiosyncratic enunciation is a problem too, and is very noticeable when put alongside, for instance, Anthony Dean Griffey. And Bertolt Brecht is easier to admire than like, and Kurt Weill is, well, Kurt Weill.
Mostly, though, I’m not enjoying the staging at all. There seems to be (from the limited amount I’ve seen on video) a modern opera idiom which is unduly influenced by Robert Wilson. I love Robert Wilson’s stuff, or a lot of it at any rate, and think he’s a fascinating and profound artist. But he may be the sort of great artist that people should try to escape the influence of, rather than the sort of great artist that people should try to internalize. At any rate, there’s a sort of slow surrealism, a disjuncture between words and action, and an alienating stillness that I’ve noticed in a fair number of videos of opera stagings. Although, to be fair, I don’t seek out such videos often, and when I do, it’s usually because of some striking visual, which will taint the sample toward those directors who are most influenced by Mr. Wilson’s work.
Still, when the play has Jimmy pull a knife, and then suddenly everyone has lined up across the stage for a somber kickline, my reaction is that it’s Robert Wilson gone terribly, terribly wrong.
I do have a general question, though, for Gentle Readers, although I don’t know that any of you are Opera Buffs. My impression is that the staging of Opera is done with the idea that the audience is very familiar with the libretto of the work before they come in to the theater. That is, an audience member knows that he is supposed to get hold of the script and read it, or at least read a detailed synopsis, and also listen to the music before going, and possibly study the music with specific attention to what differences the production may bring to the color, pacing, and tone. I could be wrong, of course, but I don’t get the sense that most people walk into an opera intending to rely on a short essay in the playbill to prepare them for the show.
Musical Theater, on the other hand, does assume that the audience will walk in without any preparation. Oh, when a particularly popular show is revived, they may keep in mind, when they stage it, that people know this or that number from the cast album or the pop hit version, but mostly, they figure that people buying tickets to Gypsy just know it’s a show about a stripper’s stage mother. Right? And certainly, people who buy tickets to musicals expect to be able to follow it all without studying up beforehand, right?
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
I think there are two kinds of people who tend to enjoy opera. There are those who approach it as theater, and there are those who approach it as a formal musical style. Although I enjoy theater well enough, I fall into the latter camp, and the staging is almost entirely irrelevant to me. That’s to the extent that I indulge in opera, which is not very deeply, because who’s got the time, really?
Anyway, my preference is not to prep for a show in any way, and that goes for theater, opera, movies, a local mime, going to see a band in a bar. I might read the handbill at an opera if I’m early and bored in my seat, but I don’t like spoilers. Drives my wife nuts, as she prefers to know what she’s getting into before-hand, and she also likes to discuss what she’s read. She squirmed for literally days before we went to see Memento and Sixth Sense.
As to the staging of this particular show, I would think it appropriate to Brecht to create a disjuncture (as you say) between words and action. He would probably approve, which is fine by me. On the other hand, we aren’t really meant to enjoy Brecht, anyway.
I do like Kurt Weill, though.
peace
Matt
I think staging is crucial in Opera. The bigger the themes, the grander the set ought to be. The direction also needs to be up to snuff. If Brunhilde enters the scene wearing a baseball cap and a sportsbra, it doesn’t bode well for “Siegfried” (unless you like your Wagnerian Opera in bib overalls, but that sounds like parody to me). I’m willing to grant Brecht & Weill’s work a certain amount of deliberate, Germanic irony, though.