A Little Night Music

The Opera Theatre of St. Louis production of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music is probably the strangest production of that show that I’ve ever seen. Isaac Mizrahi is the director and also designed the sets and costumes. In the trailer for the production, he says that the year he first saw A Little Night Music he was also working on a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and they got muddled in his mind. So when asked to do this production he went with the muddle. And it worked. Although it is really hard to explain.

Act I takes place in three locations: at the town home of a lawyer and his wife, at a theater and at the home of a dragoon and his wife. Act II takes place at a country home. But this production takes place in the woods. The floor is covered with grass, there are trees in which people sit, and furniture is moved in and out to suggest inside locations. The chorus (a quintet) who are usually dressed as servants or other household supernumeraries are, in this production, dressed in odd little costumes that look like, but aren’t quite, underwear. And they have little puck-like wings on their backs. Strange. But it worked! The set production was delightful. It might have been better on a stage that revolved because moving all the furniture in and out was cumbersome. But it never took too long, and we usually got to listen to the quintet sing (and flit around in the trees) while things were being moved.

The main characters are still the main characters and they do nothing strange with their performances. Fredrik Egerman is married to his very young, very beautiful second wife, Anne. Who is still a virgin after 11 months of marriage. Who is also the object of desire of Fredrik’s son Henrik. Fredrik and Anne attend a theatre performance starring Desiree Armfeld who, it turns out, is Fredrik’s old flame. There are still sparks between Desiree and Fredrik but she is involved with a married dragoon who has an abused wife, Charlotte, who loves and hates him. Desiree thinks maybe she’s at a point in her life where she should settle down. Maybe she shouldn’t have let Fredrik go all those years ago. So she engineers a weekend at her mother’s country estate to see what will happen. I won’t go into everything that happens.

There was nothing odd about the performance of any of these roles. What was odd, however, was the combination of actors and singers. I know, you’re thinking, there are always combinations of actors and singers in musicals. Yes. But not in operas. Not generally. In operas everyone is a singer and we live in hope that they can also act. And we don’t notice too much when they can’t. But here we had an opera production starring … Amy Irving – yes, the movie star and broadway actress Amy Irving who sings in the production but isn’t, herself, a singer. Surrounded by opera singers. So it was all just slightly … out of balance. But not enough to spoil my enjoyment of the evening.

Amy Irving was a low-key but completely believable Desiree Armfeld and Send in the Clowns doesn’t really depend on vocal abilities anyway, it depends on an actress who can carry off the pathos. Sian Phillips, another actress who is not an opera singer, played Mdm. Amfeld with just the right acerbic note. But since this was an opera production it was very noticeable that they each could do no more than carry a tune, whereas in a “normal” production of this show it might not have been so noticeable.

Christopher Herbert, an opera singer who can act, was however, a very believable Fredrik Egerman, with a delightful full voice. His duet with tenor Lee Gregory (another opera singer who can act), as the dragoon Carl-Magnus Malcom, was a highlight of Act II. Herbert and Amy Irving had enough chemistry to make their relationship work for the audience. Gregory was good enough with comedy to make Carl-Magnus a comic terror.

Amanda Squitieri (playing Anne Egerman) and Erin Holland (playing Charlotte Malcom) had beautiful voices and their duet in Act I was a highlight. Both were decent enough actresses that in an ordinary opera production I might be complimenting their acting performances. But here, in comparison with the acting of Irving and Phillips, they were merely adequate. Squitieri seemed a little too old to be a believable Anne (and seemed to be robbing the cradle with Henrik) and Holland wasn’t a good enough actress to blend the pathos and comedy of the role of Charlotte. She mostly just seemed cranky. But it didn’t really matter because there is so much going on in this show that their scenes would sweep into the next scene before their acting could slow down the performance.

From an opera perspective, the quintet of supernumeraries was the best part of the production. They are part of Opera Theatre’s young artist program and they were delightful.

The only thing I really didn’t like about the show was that it was miked.

Really. That was the only thing I really didn’t like. At the end we all said to each other … I liked that!

Then we added … but I hope they got this out of their system and don’t do anything like it again.

It’s hard to explain why. I did like it. Really. I’m glad they tried it. I’m glad I saw it. It’s just that I’ve seen better productions of A Little Night Music. In fact, I saw a production of A Little Night Music on the exact same stage ten years ago done by The Repertory Theatre of St. Louis that was the best production I’ve ever seen. Maybe that affected my perspective.

But also, it just wasn’t a show that lent itself well to opera.

It isn’t that I don’t think opera companies can’t or shouldn’t do musical productions. I just think this particular show isn’t a good choice because the character who is the linchpin of the entire plot is required to be an actress first and foremost and doesn’t necessarily need to be able to sing well. As I said, it threw the production out of balance.

Maybe they could try Carousel. Or Phantom of the Opera. Or even Sweeney Todd. If they really want to do musical comedy.

But … and yes here is where I’m going to whine. Just a little bit. Opera season is very short. There are only four productions a year. Five miles away, across the city, in the middle of Forest Park, is an outdoor ampitheatre where The Municipal Opera Association (the MUNY) puts on an entire summer of musical comedies. And during the fall, winter and spring months, the FOX brings in touring companies doing … musical comedies. Wicked is playing right now. And the Rep always does at least one musical. As does The Black Rep.

I love musical comedy. It sends me out humming and singing. This production of A Little Night Music sent me out humming and singing. But it isn’t as if there is a dearth of musical comedy in St. Louis . There is no musical comedy void that needs to be filled.

So maybe OTSL should stick with what they do best – opera. Because there is not nearly enough opera in St. Louis.

Here is the trailer for a taste.

Back in my day …. Hey! Get off my lawn kid.

The other day I was reading (via Matt Yglesias) a piece by blogger Chris Bowers in which he posits that the progressive political blogosphere is now dominated by political and media professionals who get 95% of the audience share and that the old amateur progressive blogosphere is almost completely dead. I think he has a point. (And by the way, although I won’t blog about politics here I have no problem with blogging about blogging.)

Oh, sure, we could argue about what he means by “amateur blogosphere”. As he says, 99% of progressive political bloggers blog for no money as a labor of love. I’m pretty sure he doesn’t mean them when he says the progressive blogosphere is dead. Because they haven’t changed much and they aren’t going anywhere because they never had much audience share anyway. What they have is a deep interest in some particular area often arising out of their demographics or their life experience. So the feminist bloggers aren’t going away. The Latino bloggers aren’t going away. The LGBT bloggers aren’t going away. Law bloggers aren’t going away. The professorial foreign policy blogs aren’t going away. But the general national level progressive political blogger? Yeah, things have changed.

A couple of days later I came across (via Henry at Crooked Timber), a really interesting essay (PDF) by Laura McKenna also about the way blogs are changing. She notices the same professionalization of bloggers that Bowers notices. She also talks about some specific ways that bloggers have changed the way they blog. She points out that independent bloggers used to link to each other a lot but now that they are professionals they don’t link to the “amateurs”.

Perhaps because these newly professional bloggers felt pressured to distance themselves from their amateur roots, they stopped linking to independent bloggers. They were more likely to link to academic studies, foundation reports, newspaper articles, or live-blogged events.

I’ve been noticing the lack of links too.

Then, a couple of days after that I was reading this Felix Salmon blog post about a professionalized blogger named Kouwe (who I’ve never heard of) who was fired first from the New York Times and now from Dealbreaker. In this post Salmon says:

Kouwe himself, interestingly, never left a comment on the site. I said after he was fired from the NYT that he simply didn’t understand what blogs were all about, and this episode only reinforces that judgment. One of the biggest differences between journalists and bloggers is that journalists often have a bizarre phobia of making an appearance in their own comments sections, while bloggers feel that’s an important part of what they do daily. But if you’re a journalist who feels constrained from engaging with commenters directly, then maybe that helps push you towards less kosher means of engagement.

I’m not sure I agree with Salmon on that. There was a time that I would have agreed but I’m not sure I do now. I see fewer and fewer bloggers engaging in comments sections these days and I draw the conclusions that bloggers today don’t think it is an important part of what they do anymore. But, again, maybe we’re talking about two different types of blogs.

Then, tonight, via Boomantribune, I saw that professional blogger Keith Olbermann, who I think does TV when he isn’t blogging, has written a GBCW diary at DailyKos because the comment threads there have gotten so bad. (Actually it wasn’t a GBCW diary because they got tired of phony GBCW diaries over there and made a rule that if you wrote one you’d better really be gone so now people write them but make sure to say that it isn’t a GBCW because they might want to come back some day to which I say if you don’t want to be somewhere just stop being there and then if it turns out you’d like to go back, go back and don’t make a big production about it because, really, nobody cares.)

But. Anyway.

All of that made me start thinking about my blog-reading past and realize that I’ve come almost full circle in the way I read political blogs. If you have no interest in a personal memoir, stop reading now. Because, really, it isn’t very interesting to anyone except me.

Eugene Onegin

I saw my second Opera Theatre of St. Louis production this season last Thursday when I saw Eugene Onegin.   With music by Tchaikovsky, based on the Pushkin epic poem, Eugene Onegin is, of course, very Russian.  And, perfectly, OTSL found a Russian soprano, Dina Kuznetsova, to sing the lead role of Tatiana, a shy upper class Russian girl.  Kuznetsova’s voice was rich, pitch perfect, and flowed seemingly effortlessly through the Russian melodies.  More, she inhabited the role of Tatiana as if she were born to play her.  And the icing on the cake was that this non-native English speaker sang the role with perfect American diction while at the same time, especially during her final anguished scenes with Onegin, bringing a slight Russian inflexion to the words that was perfect.

Baritone Christopher Magiera did a fine job with Onegin, a difficult role to act since he is not a very likeable fellow.  In fact, the only other time I’ve seen this opera the baritone singing Onegin was so smarmy from the first moment he stepped on stage that it was beyond belief that Tatiana would fall for him.  But Magiera did well enough with his representation of Onegin in the first scene that it was believable that inexperienced Tatiana would fall for this man simply because he was pleasant to her.

Lindsay Amman sang the role of Tatiana’s sister Olga.  Her voice was a deep contralto that was beautiful but seemed completely wrong for the young, flirtatious blond character.  I wonder why Tchaikovsky decided Olga was a contralto.  Finally, Olga’s beau, Lensky, was sung by Sean Panikkar who sang Count Almaviva in last year’s Ghosts of Versailles.  I would like to see him come back in a lead role because he has a beautiful tenor voice that has only improved in the interval since last year.   His character this year dies in the first Act.  I think he has a voice that could carry a tenor-centric opera and I’d like to see him in one.

The production design was gorgeous.  The country scenes had rows of sunflowers and the interior party scenes were richly costumed.  The direction by Kevin Newberry made sure that the singers didn’t neglect the audience on the sides of OTSL’s thrust stage so we all felt included.  The chorus was a joy to hear.  All in all, it was an outstanding performance.

Now … the story.

As I said, I have seen Eugene Onegin once before and the only thing I can remember about it was that I wanted to shout at Tatiana that Onegin Just. Wasn’t. Worth. It.  But this was at least 20 years ago and I had forgotten all the details of the story so it was nice to come at it fresh.  I’ve never read the Pushkin poem but now that I’ve spent the last two years on my Tolstoy novels I looked at the story more closely as it unfolded. 

What is with the Russian obsession with ‘happy peasants’?  Both of the Tolstoy novels I read elevated rural Russia to an almost mythological level and this was no different.  The peasants came in from the fields like the happiest field hands in the world.  And it suddenly made me want to hear a comparison between Russian writers’ views of rural Russia and the American mythology that the ‘true’ Americans are from small towns in rural America. In fact, the beginning of this opera was staged almost exactly like the opening of Oklahoma except instead of a row of corn in the background there is a row of sunflowers and instead of Aunt Eller churning butter upstage there is a character shucking corn.  I assume this was intentional.   On the other hand there are shelves of American novels celebrating the big city (almost always New York) experience.  Are there similar classic Russian novels that celebrate life in urban Moscow?  Is there a Russian Edith Wharton or Theodore Dreiser?  Maybe Poemless will drop by and give us the scoop.

The other thing that struck me about the story this time was how the second half really makes a wonderful revenge fantasy.  For those that don’t know the story, here it is in a nutshell.   Tatiana and Olga live with their mother on a farm although (based on the end) they must be of a higher class of Russian life.  Olga, a joyous, flirtatious girl,  is in love with the neighbor Lensky and he is head over heels in love with her.  Tatiana, on the other hand, is quiet and shy and spends her time reading novels.  Lensky visits, bringing his friend Eugene Onegin,  Onegin and Tatiana converse (about nothing much) and (unaccountably) Tatiana falls head over heels in love with Onegin.  The second scene takes place in Tatiana’s bedroom where she has a long aria (almost the entire scene) in which she decides to write to Onegin to declare her love for him but worries that she is doing the wrong thing.  She does it anyway.   It is here that I wanted to shout out in the first production I saw and say “Are you kidding?  He’s such a jerk!”  But in this production it wasn’t yet clear that Onegin wasn’t worthy. So there is a little bit of anticipation as we wait to find out how Onegin will receive the letter.  He politely but somewhat condescendingly tells her that he isn’t interested in her, flirts with her sister Olga to make Lensky jealous and then denies that was his intent.  Lensky calls him out and challenges him to a duel.  Onegin kills Lensky and Act One is over.  

In the Second Act, Onegin is tired of his life.  He has been travelling abroad and has finally returned. At a party he meets Tatiana again.  She is now married to a Prince and is grown up and very poised and beautiful.  He falls head over heels in love with her.  She tells him it is too late.  He is devastated and says that all that is left for him is death.  The End.  

Kuznetsova’s acting of Tatiana was perfect.  In the first Act she was shy and tongue tied around company, mostly with her nose in a book.  Even at her own birthday party she is in the corner reading a book.  Her letter-writing aria, when she is alone, is feverished and is exactly what a young girl who lives through romantic tales might go through when she develops a crush.  The look on her face when he tells her he isn’t interested and she probably shouldn’t write letters like that to men was just heartbreaking.  The Tatiana who returns in Act 2 though is, in some ways, a fantasy Tatiana.  Seen from afar by Onegin, she is bejewelled and poised.  A beautiful, married woman with a husband who adores her.  If this were a 20th opera this Cinderella-like transformation would also have been revealed as a fantasy and Tatiana would be revealed as a lonely unmarried woman still living in a fantasy world.  But this isn’t a bleak but realistic 20th century opera, this is a romantic 19th century opera.  And isn’t it every woman’s fantasy that some day the man who has spurned her will be VERY SORRY?  So what a revenge fantasy to move on with your life, marry someone handsome and wealthy who worships the ground that you walk on and then have the man who rejected your youthful crush show up and see you and fall in love with you.  Of course there is that moment of remembering your own love and wondering if maybe … ah, but no .. you must tell him that you can’t leave your husband.  And you sweep out of the room leaving him devastated.  

It was hard to feel sorry for Onegin there at the end.   But I don’t think we were supposed to.

I’m thinking maybe I should read the original Pushkin.

Here is a link to the trailer if you want to see it.

A Gleeful End

The Glee season is over.  I have to say that I didn’t like Part 2 of Season 1 as much as I loved Part 1.  Too many overproduced songs, not enough character development.   But I still enjoyed it and will be watching next year.  I hope they have fewer musical numbers per episode so they have more time to get the lip synching right. 

I don’t blog about law here but I will give you a link to a good post about something that I’ve thought about a lot during this Glee season:  copyright issues.   Check it out. 

How do you use your surplus time?

My reading list for the summer includes Clay Shirky’s new book: Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age.  I probably won’t get to it until I head off to the lake on vacation later this summer but I already know where Shirky is starting from because he has been giving talks and writing about it for the last couple of years.  In a Wall Street Journal essay called Does the Internet Make you Smarter? he recently responded to the pessimists who claim we are getting dumber with this:

… the rosy past of the pessimists was not, on closer examination, so rosy. The decade the pessimists want to return us to is the 1980s, the last period before society had any significant digital freedoms. Despite frequent genuflection to European novels, we actually spent a lot more time watching "Diff'rent Strokes" than reading Proust, prior to the Internet's spread. The Net, in fact, restores reading and writing as central activities in our culture.

This idea that we spent the last fifty years watching television is something Shirky has been talking about a lot.  In one of his talks he tells the story of a television executive who said to him, about blogs and facebook and other internet activities, “I just don’t know how people find the time.”  And Shirky responded that NO ONE in the television industry is allowed to wonder that.

To be clear, I don’t think Shirky will necessarily bash television in his book.  I think he is simply pointing out that all of the time saving devices invented in the 20th century left us with a lot of extra time and we needed to figure out what to do with that time.  For a significant number of people, that time was filled by television.  I’m not sure that Shirky is saying there is something necessarily wrong with that per se, but there are now other options. One can now spend one’s time writing wikipedia entries if one wants. 

I’ll wait until I read his book before judging it.  But, like him, I do think the internet has restored reading and writing as central activities.  I certainly didn’t spend any time writing for pleasure in the 1970’s and 1980’s but the advent of easy blogging changed that.

I watch less television now than I did in the 1980’s but I also enjoy the television I do watch much more than I did in the 1980’s.   In general I’d rather read a good book than watch television but today some shows are as good as a book.  I recently (finally) finished watching the last season of David Simon’s The Wire.  I was watching it at the same time as some family members who live out of town and also the girlfriend of one of my cousins who lives here.  Talking about The Wire with them was like talking about a book.  The characters were as real to us as characters in a novel.  If anyone had told me that I’d be broken up by the death of a drug dealer, I would have laughed at them.  But I was. And I was heartbroken to see what became of three of the four middle schoolers we followed in Season 4. 

Why do we let ourselves spend our free time getting wound up in the lives of people who don’t exist? This isn’t a new phenomenon.  We’ve done it for a long time.  Before the advent of television people cried at the death of Little Nell.

Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at Yale, writes in the  Chronicle of Higher Education about why we like to spend time with fictional people.

First, fictional people tend to be wittier and more clever than friends and family, and their adventures are usually much more interesting. I have contact with the lives of people around me, but this is a small slice of humanity, and perhaps not the most interesting slice. My real world doesn't include an emotionally wounded cop tracking down a serial killer, a hooker with a heart of gold, or a wisecracking vampire. As best I know, none of my friends has killed his father and married his mother. But I can meet all of those people in imaginary worlds.

Second, life just creeps along, with long spans where nothing much happens. The O.J. Simpson trial lasted months, and much of it was deadly dull. Stories solve this problem—as the critic Clive James once put it, "Fiction is life with the dull bits left out." This is one reason why Friends is more interesting than your friends.

Finally, the technologies of the imagination provide stimulation of a sort that is impossible to get in the real world. A novel can span birth to death and can show you how the person behaves in situations that you could never otherwise observe. In reality you can never truly know what a person is thinking; in a story, the writer can tell you.

So spending our free time in the worlds of fictional characters isn’t necessarily a waste of time.  Of course, Diff’rent Strokes is not The Wire.  Episodic television tends to be pure entertainment and spending half of my waking hours on pure entertainment that I forget the minute it is over isn’t something I want to do.  Sure, I like The Big Bang Theory, but it’s one half hour of television a week and it occurs on Mondays when I need to spend time NOT thinking too hard.  It has its place in my life. 

I like to think that serials are less of a waste of time, especially when I can talk about them with other people and analyze them.  I’ve found it frustrating to read books that no one else has read and have no one to talk to about.  I’m more likely to find someone else who is watching Caprica than I am to find someone who read The Children’s Book.   Part of me looks wistfully at tales of how people used to wait for the next episode of a Dickens story to come out.  Now people talk about Lost – which I wasn’t watching.

Richard Beck, at N+1 Magazine, recently wrote about the connection between the serial novels of the 19th century and serial television. 

In the nineteenth century, serial novels worked hard to accommodate themselves to industrial daily life. As the bourgeois workday rigidified into something like a nine-to-five, leisure time became repetitive as well. Serialization allowed people to set aside time for reading at evenly spaced intervals, and thus helped to keep the alternating sequence of work and leisure running smoothly along. Interruptions in the publication of a serial work could be very upsetting. When Dickens failed to produce an installment of Pickwick in June 1837, his publishers sent out notices all over, and the July number included an explanation refuting rumors that he had gone insane and died. Apparently, readers could not have imagined a less catastrophic explanation for the interruption of their favorite novel.

Beck points out that we have now legitimized all of the Dickens serialized stories by thinking of them only as novels; perhaps we are starting to do that with serialized television too.  Beck doesn’t say this but I think that the evolution of the television series DVD, where a person can watch the series in its entirety, helped  this along.  But also, the serialized form in television has evolved.

…  it’s only in the last decade that critics and viewers have begun to think of artistically ambitious dramas as natural to the medium. We no longer treat them as miraculous aberrations. A change began to occur at the end of the 90s, as producers and writers went consciously looking for the internal limits of the serial form. They began to investigate the extent to which certain traditional elements of realistic fictional narrative—plot, the representation of individual characters and social worlds, etc.—could be developed in a multi-season work, and they won acclaim and got their shows renewed by advertising their ambition to anyone who would listen. Those series that actually did find what they were looking for, that managed to articulate one or another facet of televisual narrative to the fullest extent, brought the contours of the form itself into view for the first time. Three of those series are The Sopranos, The Wire, and Lost.

In our discussions about The Wire, my co-watchers and I agree that it was possibly the best thing that was ever on television.  But there is no doubt that it took up a lot of time to watch.  Far more time than reading a book. As Beck says:.

Even slower readers are unlikely to need eighty-six hours to get through Anna Karenina or Ulysses, but that is how much time Tony Soprano spent explaining himself to millions of people.

If this is how we want to spend part of our cognitive surplus, the time we have when we aren’t consumed with doing the things necessary to survive in life with an adequate standard of living, what’s the harm?  For those of us stuck in offices all day, going home to our upper middle class lives, spending time in the fictional world of The Wire is fulfilling for all three reasons that Professor Bloom gave us above.

… [David] Simon got a whole city into sixty episodes. Each season focused on a new professional group—first cops and drug dealers, then longshoremen, city politicians, teachers, and finally journalists—and then used dialogue to arrange them into coherent structures. The Wire has more than 200 named characters, and by the series’ end all of them seem to have talked to one another.

And if you get too wrapped up in the world of serialized drama, according to Beck, you can be brought down to earth by the modern comedies on television:

To the dramas that said you could find satisfaction and dignity in your underpaid government job, The Office said No: You actually work at a paper company in the internet age, and your coworkers are mostly irredeemable psychos. (30 Rock has similar thoughts on coworkers.) To the dramas that went further, that claimed your coworkers were now your family, Arrested Development had an even better answer: Fine. But your family? These people are psychos too—in jail, in debt, in league with Saddam Hussein, even—and now you must also live with them, all the time.

Of course if you get tired of the world of fiction, you can turn off the tube and use your surplus time for something  else that you find entertaining.  Like surfing the web, sharing on Facebook or blogging.

It’s a Mystery

It’s summer and I feel like binging on mystery novels. I’d like to pick an author and read all of his/her books straight through, like I did with Laura Lippman’s books. I guess I need to check The List. But ideas are welcome from commenters or emailers.

While I’m thinking mysteries, Simon Hoggart, in The Guardian is collecting television detective show cliches. I love television detective shows and partly because they are so full of cliches:

Your detective show cliches continue to pour in. A couple of my own: when a detective is watching the TV report of his case, he invariably snaps the set off midway through, even though you'd think it would be vital to know what the public was being told. If someone has just been interviewed, and the camera lingers on the back of his head as he watches the detective walk back to his car, he or she did it.

Terry O'Hara asks why, when a suspect is being interviewed at the station, there is always a uniformed officer waiting at the door. "This has never happened during my 28 years in the police."

WM Stack of Norwich points out that anyone who walks alone at night with blue floodlights behind the trees is a goner, just like anyone filmed through their kitchen window making a bedtime cup of cocoa. It's nearly always fatal to have a housekeeper, whose job it is to stumble on their employer's stiff, cold body, and scream.

Frank Desmond points out that anyone who coughs, however gently, is for it later on. Likewise anybody foolish enough to show people pictures of his loved ones.

Bruce Antell points out that if someone says something like, "Hello, what are on earth you doing here?" without using the name, he or she is about to be murdered by the unnamed visitor.

Eamonn Burgess says that whenever an underling is spooling through hours of CCTV footage, the boss always walks by at exactly the right moment: "Hey, wait a minute, go back – yes, him! That's our man!"

I think my subconscious is keeping me from having a housekeeper. Well, that and my budget.

The Marriage of Figaro

Figaro. …Figaro. ….Figaro, Figaro, Figaro …

oops. Same Figaro, wrong opera.

Last year Opera Theatre of St. Louis performed The Ghosts of Versailles which utilized a play-within-a play concept. The opera that was performed within the opera was a production of an operatic version of the Beaumarchais play The Guilty Mother, which itself is the third play in Beaumarchais’ Figaro trilogy. The first two plays in the trilogy were made into operas that almost all opera-goers are intimately familiar with – Rossini’s The Barber of Seville (in which the famous Figaro, Figaro, Figaro aria is heard) and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro.

Last night I saw this year’s Opera Theatre of St. Louis production of The Marriage of Figaro. It has always been one of my favorite operas. It is an almost perfect opera – a score filled with hit after hit after hit, multiple roles for women, much comedy, a lesson to be learned. It’s hard to mess up The Marriage of Figaro too – although I thought Opera Theatre missed the mark with their last production in 1999 when they had a truly murderous count. But this time they decided that the Count was just having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. It worked much better.

Here’s the plot. Figaro works for the Count and is in love with Susanna who works for the countess. The Count is tired of the Countess for no good reason (after all he spent all of The Barber of Seville wooing her) and has his eye on Susanna and wants to throw a monkey-wrench into the marriage plans. But the Count doesn’t want the Countess to have her eye on anyone. She is carrying on a flirtation with a boy called Cherubino who is enamored of her. Much comedy ensues, the women plot together to teach the men a lesson, there are mistaken identities and long lost mothers, and Cherubino (who is always played by a woman dressed like a man) disguised as a girl. It is a comedy. It has a happy ending. It has glorious music by Mozart. If you’ve never seen an opera you wouldn’t go wrong choosing The Marriage of Figaro as your first opera. If only the garden scene at the end didn’t drag on a bit it would be the perfect opera.

Figaro was sung by Christopher Feigum who also sang the Figaro role in last years Ghosts of Versailles. I enjoyed his performance, he was an appropriately jovial and yet sly Figaro. He sang well although I would have sometimes wished for his lower range to have been stronger. Truthfully, all the principal male singers seemed to be having trouble with their lower ranges so maybe it was just the St.Louis “crud” affecting them. It has been a horrible allergy season this year.

One really pleasant surprise was Amanda Majeska as the Countess. From the moment she opened her mouth I loved her. And she brought to the Countess a real feel of an attractive woman who, for no good reason, has a husband who has lost interest in her. I was more touched than usual in the final scene when the Count asks her for forgiveness. I can’t put my finger on what it was about her performance; it was maybe even a combination of the way she carried herself and the slightly risque costume that they had her in. At intermission I was surprised to read that she sang Musetta in that production of La Boheme last year that I disliked and I remember really not liking her performance. Looking up what I wrote about her last year, I said she “got all the notes right and that's about all I can say for her.” Well, she more than made up for it this year.

Another pleasant surprise was that the woman who sang Cherubino actually made us forget she was a woman. I always have trouble suspending disbelief for the “trouser” roles but Jamie van Eyck pulled it off. Her voice wasn’t perfect, it didn’t seem as if she was hitting every note with the precision that Mozart requires. But her diction was the best of all the women and I really did believe she was a boy.

On the other hand, I was very disappointed with Maria Kanyova’s performance as Susanna. She was Marie Antoinette last year in Ghosts and I was really looking forward to hearing her again. She didn’t bring nearly enough playfulness to Susanna and I had a very hard time understanding her even (maybe especially) during the recitatives. There is no point in having an opera sung in English if the diction is going to be so bad that they might as well be singing in Italian. Oddly, I remember her diction last year being perfect, so I don’t know what happened. And the other thing was … she wasn’t funny enough. Susanna is a comic role, she needs a commedienne to play her. I got tired of watching Kanyova fan herself whenever Susanna got into a tight spot. I always assumed Susanna never sweated the small stuff or the big stuff.

Finally, although I did enjoy the production I thought that, musically, it was a little bit sloppy. It sometimes seemed as if the orchestra and the singers weren’t quite together, which is something that almost never happens at Opera Theatre (and the orchestra was FAR too loud which is something that happens a lot at Opera Theatre). I started paying attention to the conductor and noticed that he seldom looked up from the music – which seemed a bit odd. I finally realized that he wasn’t the conductor listed in the program, but was Steven Lord who I ordinarily think is wonderful. Turns out that the scheduled conductor had to back out at the last minute and Lord took over for the season. Maybe that was part of the problem. I admit that at first I thought maybe I was seeing one of the first performances of this production and they just weren’t quite “ready” but at intermission I looked it up and we are already far enough into the run that these problems should be ironed out.

Anyway, while it was not the best production of Marriage of Figaro that I’ve ever seen it was certainly not the worst and I enjoyed most of it. Here is a link to a preview.

UPDATE:

Here's a promotional video I found on youtube I found for OTSL - most of the scenes are from last year's season (the wonderful Ghosts of Versailles, Il re Pastore, and Salome and the not so good in my opinion La Boheme). It shows the lawn where we picnic and the tent for intermission and after opera partying and clips from productions. I encourage anyone in or near St. Louis to give it a try: