Summer Reading

I haven’t done a book post in a long time.  Don’t know why.  Here’s what I’ve been spending my time reading this summer.

I read two graphic novels:

Elmer by Gerry Alanguilan.  Imagine an alternate Earth reality where chickens are just like humans except … well, they look like chickens.  But they remember when they were treated as less than human.  And eaten.

Pride of Baghdad by Brian K. Vaughan with art by Niko Henrichon.   When the U.S. bombed Baghdad in 2003, a pride of lions escaped from the Baghdad zoo.  They were eventually killed by US servicemen.  This is their story.

Both were quick reads. Pride of Baghdad had beautiful illustrations and Elmer was fairly thought provoking.  I don’t read many graphic novels so I don’t have much to compare them with. 

I read a few “award winners”:

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan.  It won the Pulitzer Prize.  I found it hard to get into and didn’t really care what happened to any of the characters, which is always a problem for me.  It is one of those “flashback” stories where you bounce back and forth between the characters as they are now (or in the future) and how they were  “back then”.  Sort of a “The Way We Were” for the punk rock generation.   I can’t really put my finger on why it didn’t work for me except that I don’t really have much interest in examining the lives of self-destructive characters.    

The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson. This won the 2010 Man Booker Prize.  I guess I would describe this as a novel about Jewish Identity in Britain in the 21st century.  I guess.  I found this novel easy to get into but then I lost my way in the middle because, again, I didn’t really care about the characters.   There were some funny moments in it. 

We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver.  This won the Orange Prize.  It was the best of my “prize winners”. In the end I wish she had written a novel about a women who really really  wanted a child and loved that child dearly and the child turned out to be a heart breaker.  But that isn’t this novel.  Or I wish she had written a novel with this same main character, who never wanted a child and didn’t love her child (at least in the traditional sense), but who had a child who ended up great – but she didn’t care and/or could take no credit.  But that isn’t this novel.  Having a character who never wanted a child and was a bad mother and whose child ended up being a mass murderer – well it seems just slightly too manipulative and meant to provoke discussions of the whole nature/nurture variety.  But given that premise, it is really well done.   I’m sure it is going to provoke a lot of great discussion when I get together with others I know who are reading it.  Being a person who never deeply wanted kids and who was sure that if I had kids I’d be a terrible mother – it hit home for me in many ways.  

I also read a couple of mysteries by new authors (or new to me, at least):

The Mapping of Love and Death:  A Maisie Dobbs Novel, by Jacqueline Winspear.   This is my first Maisie Dobbs novel and it was good lakeside reading.  I like historical British mysteries.  Sometimes I get tired of the “daughter of the chauffer marries the lord and heir to the title” bit.  But not enough for those kind of stories to really bother me.  I’ll probably read a few of the others in this series.

Murder in the Marais by Cara Black.  Apparently there are eleven books in the Aimee Leduc series.  Aimee is a private investigator in modern Paris with a specialty in forensic computer investigations.  I really enjoyed this, the first in the series and I’m going to look up the others.

Other books I read included:

Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell.  I saw the movie last winter and loved it.  I enjoyed the book just as much.  Ree Dolly is a compelling heroine, looking for her father who skipped bail on crystal meth charges.  The novel answered a few questions that were skimmed over in the movie.   I’m going to look up more of Daniel Woodrell’s work.

One of our Thursdays is Missing by Jasper Fforde.  I picked this up early in the summer, then put it down and didn’t finish it until late in the summer.  I love Jasper Fforde’s work but I find the Thursday Next novels less satisfying than the Nursery Crime novels or even his new series set in a future where everyone is color blind.  For some reason I had a really hard time being interested in the “fictional” Thursday who was trying to find the “real” Thursday.  But after about the half-way mark I finally got into it and enjoyed it.

C by Tom McCarthy. This, very surprisingly, ended up being the top of my list for summer reading.  I bought the book last winter and then put off reading it because reviews said it was post modern and experimental and I thought that meant it would be really hard and tiring to read.  Not at all.  I can’t say I loved it, but I loved reading it.  It is the only novel I read all summer that I definitely want to read again, just to really examine how he structured it and moved me from the beginning to the end.   I read this after I read Jennifer Egan’s novel during which I had regularly thought “god I get bored reading about drug addicts and drug users”.  But parts of this novel also involves significant use of drugs and I didn’t lose interest in the character for a second. I only wish I had read this sooner instead of procrastinating.  It isn’t by any means an easy read, but I found it rewarding.   

That’s about it for the summer.  On my nightstand I have The Very Thought of You by Rosie Alison.  Another historical British book, it is the story of a little girl evacuated during the Blitz to a large country estate.  I bought it for a plane ride home two weeks ago and read three quarters of it on the plane but have never picked it up since.  While I feel sure I’ll probably pick it up  and finish it, I think the fact that I could put it down for so long when I was that far into it tells you something about how I feel about it.  I’d say it’s a  nice way to pass the time.

That’s all for now.  I’m hoping fall will bring a bumper crop of good reading.  I haven’t been much in the mood for books the last few months but colder weather usually brings on the “I need a good book to read” itch.

The Flesh was weak …

Ok. I gave in.
 
I downloaded the 2011 (half) season of Doctor Who from iTunes and I watched it.   (And may I say how much I dislike that Doctor Who has picked up on this modern invention of half seasons?  It’s bad enough where there are 23 episodes so at least a half season would give you 12 episodes.  But where you only have a 13 episode season, the whole concept seems absurd. Or particularly exploitative of the audience.   But I digress.)

spoilers ahead…

Captain Jack’s Almost Back

Reviews of the new Torchwood are starting to come out and it premieres on Friday.  Over the last couple of months I’ve been reading some bloggers who have been watching Torchwood in preparation for the new series.  I’ve noticed that those who don’t want to watch Doctor Who seem really confused about Captain Jack’s background. 

So I present the only Doctor Who scene you have to watch to kinda sorta understand Jack’s past.  In this scene he has re-joined the Doctor for the first time since his very first death at the hands of the Daleks.  The Doctor has been less than welcoming to him.  But then, suddenly, the Doctor volunteers Jack for a mission in a room full of radiation that is certain to kill anyone who enters.  Jack, of course, goes along with the plan.

It really is a nice scene. The Doctor seldom gets to talk to a man his own age who isn’t an enemy. And this might be one of John Barrowman’s best scenes as Captain Jack. And as a bonus, you get glimpses of Derek Jacobi trying to remember what he has forgotten.  That isn’t important for these purposes, but I always like to see Derek Jacobi.

Hello Eleven

I just finished the 2010 season of Doctor Who and I’m quite liking Matt Smith as the Eleventh Doctor.  I worried that, after being swept up in David Tennant’s tour de force performance as the Doctor, I wouldn’t. But I do.  I like him and I like what he has done with the role. 

I think it helps that Smith has had great scripts to work with.  In fact on the whole I think he had better scripts to work with as a whole in 2010 than David Tennant did over all his years.  DT was saddled with the whole silly Rose story his first season.  He inherited Rose as a companion and inherited her relationship with the Doctor.  It also seemed as if Russel Davies wasn’t quite sure in what direction he wanted the Tenth Doctor to go.  Or, at least, couldn’t let the character go there until Rose was out of the way.  There was a lot of silliness in the scripts DT had to work with in his first season but by his second season he was firmly ensconced in what would be the Tenth Doctor’s persona.  A combination of wonderful people-person and arrogant all-powerful being.

Smith, on the other hand, entered into a story that seemed to know exactly where it was going from the first episode.  He got a brand new companion so there was no need to provide any continuity between the old and the new.  But he did inherit River Song, who was one of the best characters from the DT era.   I think that helped.  And of course Smith got Stephen Moffat as the show runner and chief writer. 

I do keep finding myself wondering what DT could have done with the 2010 scripts, since he was so wonderful in the Stephen Moffat stories that were given to him during his tenure. But he’s gone and Smith is here and I’m enjoying Smith’s  performances.

The Eleventh Doctor’s chief characteristics seem to be manic energy combined with intense thoughtfulness.  Manic intensity?  So far he doesn’t seem to have the angst that the Tenth Doctor had.  The Tenth Doctor reacted to his difficult regeneration by slipping into a coma-like state; the Eleventh Doctor reacted with ravening hunger. The scene where he has Amelia make him lots and lots of food, none of which he likes, and then settles on fish sticks dipped in custard was funny.  It was almost like he was pregnant.   And he was – pregnant with a new doctor who wasn’t yet fully formed and out of the womb yet.

I worried that he was too young. The Doctors seem to be getting progressively younger looking while the Doctor himself continues to age.  But there is something about the combination of Matt Smith’s eyes and the way that he plays the character that makes him seem older than DT’s Doctor.  Whereas DTs Doctor had to come to grips with the danger that he himself posed to the Universe, the Eleventh Doctor seems to simply accept that he is powerful. (In that way he reminds me of the much older Doctors).   He almost seems tired of it.  The Tenth Doctor had a certain edge to him that made him seem dangerous – culminating in the Time Lord Triumphant scene in The Waters of Mars.  The Eleventh Doctor doesn’t seem dangerous at all.  He just reminds aliens of the fact that he could be dangerous if he wanted to be.  And they believe him. 

Compare the two, both of them in episodes scripted by Stephen Moffat in scenes with similar themes – he’s the Doctor and doesn’t need to prove anything.   Here is David Tennant’s Ten – “I’m the Doctor, look me up”:

Now compare Matt Smith’s Eleven in his very first episode.  Again he reminds the alien that he is the Doctor and makes the alien look at his history.  It’s a longer scene because it sets Smith within the history of all the previous Doctors (I particularly like how they run images of the past Doctors and have him walk out of the image of the Tenth Doctor).  But his “basically … run” moment is much more calm and controlled than Ten ever was:

Ten was a Doctor in the heroic tradition – always rising to the occasion is a big way.  But then beating himself up a bit after.  Very Shakespearean, as befits an actor like David Tennant.  When Ten tells an alien to watch out because he’s the Doctor, his eyes blaze. 

Eleven is a Doctor who looks and sounds like an ordinary guy even when confronting the bad guys, but who really isn’t an ordinary guy.  He’s a more tired Doctor.  When he says “basically … run” his eyes don’t blaze. You know that he means it, but you also can tell that he’s said it many, many times before.  He looks almost tired of having to say it one more time.  So in an odd way, Eleven seems older than Ten even though the actor is younger.

At the end of the 2010 Season, the Doctor gets locked in the Pandorica.  The Doctor says “Think of the fear that went into making this box”.   He says that it was meant to hold a “nameless terrible thing soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies.”  Nothing could stop it or halt it or reason with it.  He had no idea that it was him.

I think if DT had acted that scene I might very well (MIGHT) have guessed that it was the Doctor it was meant to hold.  The Time Lord Triumphant who is beyond reason with no one to restrain him.  But that version of the Doctor was redeemed when he sacrificed himself for an old man.  And he has been regenerated into a Doctor who has the power to destroy galaxies but really seems to not want to think about those kind of things anymore.  He just has to keep saving the universe because that’s what he does.  So I could understand Matt Smith’s Doctor’s surprise when he found out that it was him it was meant to hold.

The other thing I like about the 2010 season is the Doctor’s companions, Amy and Rory.  I enjoyed Rose during her time with the 9th Doctor.  Nine needed someone to bring him out of himself.  If Eleven is manic intensity, Nine was manic moroseness.  Rose was more sympathetic than Nine in many ways.  I remember wondering, though, if the creators of the New Doctor Who didn’t trust that the actor or even the character of the Doctor could carry the show without a strong companion who could take the full focus off the Doctor.  I feel a bit the same way about Amy.  Having her be such a strong character really worked in this first Smith season.  It let Smith ease himself into our imaginations.

But I didn’t enjoy Rose so much the second season.  DT could have carried the show from the first moment he appeared on screen; yet the writers couldn’t relegate Rose to a fully subjugated companion position.  So they wrote the love story that every Doctor Who fan knew could go nowhere and could only end badly. It wasn’t until the Tenth Doctor got Donna as a companion that they worked out a good modern buddy-relationship between Doctor and companion where the Doctor was the full focus but the companion was a good foil.  In fact, the writers went so far as to have the Doctor travel for a time without a companion but gave him story lines that proved he needed a human to restrain him.  In a way, it was a way to justify him having companions at all. So the character of the Doctor needs a companion to rein him in even if  the actor playing the Doctor can carry the show himself.

Amy seems to be a bit of a combination of both Rose in the first season, keeping the audience’s entire focus off of the new Doctor, and the outspoken Donna.  In general, I like her.  I didn’t mind that she was the center of the entire first season for Eleven.    And I liked that they brought back little Amelia at the end of the season.  As I said in a previous post, Stephen Moffat seems to be good at writing scenes for children.  

Eleven and Amy have good chemistry but it isn’t sexual (although they do enough to keep us guessing at mid season to keep things interesting).  Rory is very likeable so I don’t wish or expect Amy would dump him in the way that Rose dumped Mickey.  And it is nice for the Doctor to have a guy around.  It happens so seldom.

The story arc for this first Eleven season was written in a way to keep my attention although I’m still not sure I completely understand how the rift in the Universe happened in the first place.  I liked the way they used the River character during the season.  Alex Kingston does such a great job with that character.  Yes, I did find myself wishing for DT during those episodes because the two of them had such great chemistry together on screen.  But she and Smith do fine together.

All and all a good season of Doctor Who.  We’ll see how I feel after another season.  By the end of the Tenth Doctor I had grown very fond of him and was really sad to see him go.  So far I like Eleven but I don’t feel the same strong attachment.  Not yet.  But he has time.

I’m considering downloading the 2011 episodes from iTunes so I don’t have to wait for it.

The Daughter of the Regiment

Donizetti’s The Daughter of the Regiment is a lovely bit of fluff which, although I saw it a few weeks ago, I’ve saved for my last OTSL review because it was so much fun.

It is a comedy.  Tomboy Marie was found as a baby on a battlefield and was adopted by an entire regiment of French soldiers.  All of these fathers pose a problem for the young man, Tonio, who wants to marry her.  Eventually he joins the Regiment to prove his worth.  But in the meantime Marie’s “Aunt” finds her and takes her away to be trained as a lady and to marry a Duke.  Fortunately, the “Aunt” turns out to be Marie’s mother and so, as a bastard, she isn’t eligible for the Duke and gets to marry Tonio.  Simple plot, lots of high notes to hit.  The part of Tonio made Luciano Pavarotti famous because of an aria that contains a whole lotta high “C”s. 

Rene Barbera hit all the “C”s effortlessly.  Ashley Emerson’s Marie was perky and, although I might have wished for her voice to be slightly stronger, she sang well.  She was a good actress and made a very believable Marie.  Dale Travis, who played her principal “father”, was a delight and he was a good actor too and his scenes with Emerson were delightful.  Dorothy Byrne, as the “aunt” was a good comic actress.  Her lower notes were a little bit lost but it didn’t matter.

One of the highlights of the evening was the return of Sylvia McNair to the OTSL stage playing the Duchess of Crackentorp, whose role was expanded from a few moments of comedy to include a musical number.  McNair, who no longer does opera, was delightful and the audience loved it.   She had a few nice moments interacting with conductor John McDaniel in the pit.

McDaniel did a great job and no one would have known this was the first opera he has conducted if we hadn’t been told by numerous newspaper articles.  He kept things moving at a nice clip and kept the orchestra from overwhelming the singers. There wasn’t a moment in the performance where the orchestra and the singers weren’t as one.   Full disclosure requires me to say that I know McDaniel, a native St. Louisan, from long ago but that isn’t influencing me when I say that I hope they have him back for another opera (if he wants to take time off from Broadway, of course).

The costumes were colorful and the scenery was fun.  There was lots of movement and the scene where Marie is supposed to be learning the ballet is hilarious. 

All in all, it was a wonderful night at the opera.  My group agreed that it was the most enjoyable opera of this season.  I was not able to see Peleus and Melisande so I can’t compare it to that, but it certainly beats The Death of Klinghoffer and Don Giovanni for entertainment value. 

Here’s the link to OTSL’s video preview and again, I have no idea why they don’t make them able to be embedded. (And again, I can’t get it to play correctly on any of my computers).

A Little Aside about Who’s Stephen Moffat

I’m more than halfway through the 2010 season of Doctor Who, the first season with Matt Smith as the Doctor.  This is also the first season where Stephen Moffat took over as show runner.  I went back to look at the episodes that Moffat wrote for the other seasons of Doctor Who and realize that he wrote almost all of my favorite episodes. 

In the Christopher Eccleston era he wrote the two part story The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances. It was a great “historical” episode, capturing the life of orphaned, homeless children during the London Blitz.  It introduced us to Captain Jack Harkness.  It reflected a period of growth for the emotionally damaged Ninth Doctor who learned to dance again (with all the double entendres that entails).   I thought that it was the most creative episode of that season, with the “monsters” being ordinary people living during the London Blitz who had been turned into zombie like creatures with gas masks fused to their faces. And what was especially scary was that the principal “monster” was a little boy looking for his “mummy”.

In 2006, for David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor, he wrote the Girl in the Fireplace, the episode where the Doctor meets Madame de Pompadour.  The creativity of this episode was that it combined great “historical” drama with futuristic space drama since the Doctor and his two companions were stuck on a spacecraft in the future which contained windows into 18th Century France.   The relationship between the Doctor and Reinette is beautifully written and it is a serious story but still has great comic bits (I love the horse on the spaceship).  

Much of the first season of David Tennant involved the Doctor in situations where he reacted with his “silly Doctor” persona.  But in Girl in the Fireplace Moffat gave Tennant scenes of quiet intensity and Tennant took them and ran with them.  And again Moffat created new “monsters” in the clock/clown people (I’m sure they have a name but I don’t know what it is).  He also proved that he is just very good at writing scary scenes that involve children:

Then in 2007 he wrote Blink.  I know I’m sounding like a broken record when I say that it is one of the best pieces of television I’ve ever seen.  David Tennant’s Doctor is barely in it and the story is carried by Carey Mulligan before she became a well known actress in the United States.  Again, he created new “monsters” with the Weeping Angels, incredibly scary but very simple (and cheap) creatures who don’t move if you look at them directly.  They turn to stone and look like statues.  But the minute you aren’t looking … watch out.  I may never look at stone statues the same way again.  I don’t even like to put a clip of it on, because I don’t want to ruin it with spoilers for anyone who hasn’t seen it.  But here’s an early scene that doesn’t give much away:

In 2008 he again wrote one of my favorite two part episodes:  Silence in the Library/ Forest of the Dead.  Of course I loved the concept of the little girl and the library in her mind just to begin with. Again, a great use of child actors. Again, he created really scary but very simple (and low budget) monsters – just shadows really, but shadows that eat the skin off of people.  Forest of the Dead was an especially good vehicle for Catherine Tate’s character Donna Noble.  I always hoped (and still continue to hope) that Moffat finds a way to reunite Donna with the guy she met in the virtual world (yeah, I know she’s now married to someone else but …). 

And of course those episodes introduced us to River Song.   I’ve now seen River reappear in the 2010 season (with the Angels) and YES I’VE SEEN ARTICLES WITH SPOILERS from the 2011 season but I don’t want to talk about it or the remainder of 2010 until I actually see those episodes. But I loved River in that 2008 season because she was the first human woman character I can remember in Doctor Who who not only acts as an equal of the Doctor but who proves she is as much of an equal as any human is ever likely to be.  And although I don’t like sexist behavior in men or women, I have to admit to a chuckle at this scene:

The really, really nice thing about these episodes is that Moffat got such great actors to play the parts he wrote.  He of course had David Tennant, but he also got a great actress to play against DT with the casting of Dr. Corday, oops I mean Alex Kingston.  (Funny, I seldom watched E.R.but the moment I saw her I thought “oh look, there’s Dr. Corday”).  David Tennant always is at his best when the actor on the other side is great and the scenes with he and Kingston together were wonderful.  DT was always good at the talking side of the Doctor, spewing forth lines of dialog in record time episode after episode, but here, with a wonderful script by Moffat and playing against Kingston, his reaction shots show his incredible strength as an actor:

Oh heck, I’m going to throw in one more scene.  I love the following scene for the lighting and the camera angles and the way that the Doctor and the TARDIS are facing each other like people.  It is just beautifully filmed.  And I also love it because David Tennant never says a word, the story is in his face.  River has previously said that the Doctor (HER Doctor) can open the TARDIS with a snap of his fingers.  The Tenth Doctor (who doesn’t yet trust that he really has met River in the future) disputes this and says it is impossible.  But here at the end, after an emotional separation from River, he comes back to his TARDIS and tries it out  …

In 2009 there was no series, only a few specials that culminated with the regeneration of the Tenth Doctor into Eleven and the end of the David Tennant era and the beginning of the Matt Smith era.   Moffat had no part in those specials except that he wrote the final moments of The End of Time part 2 which introduced Matt Smith’s Doctor.

I didn’t realize all of this when I started watching the 2010 season.  But as I watched the first episode of 2010, which again involved the Doctor (the Eleventh Doctor) working with a child and a scary (low budget) crack in the wall, I started to think that there were some parallels with earlier episodes I liked.  Then, when I saw the return of the Angels and  River Song, I finally decided to look him up. 

There’s no point to all of this other than that I like to pay attention to specific writers once I figure out I like his or her work.  Once I discovered all of this I wasn’t surprised to learn that Moffat had a hand in the new modern, updated Sherlock that ran on PBS last year with Benedict Cumberbatch.  He co-wrote A Study in Pink and has creative credit on the series.  

So you know what’s coming from me, don’t you?   Yes, of course you do. 

I’d like to see Stephen Moffatt and Jane Espenson do something together.   And since she’s just worked with former Doctor Who showrunner Russell T. Davies on Torchwood maybe that’s a possibility?  Maybe?  Pretty please?

The Death of Klinghoffer

The chorus was magnificent. This might have been the finest choral work I’ve ever heard in an opera production. Every word was intelligible and every measure was pitch perfect and the intensity was palpable.

Conductor Michael Christie was a joy to watch in the pit (as he was during Ghosts of Versailles) and he had the orchestra and the chorus in perfect balance. There were times during the very difficult music that every eye in the chorus was trained on him and he brought them through safely.

If only I had liked the music they were singing.

I’m just not a fan of John Adams’ music. So it is high praise indeed from me when I say that I, at points in the performance, thought that I’d like to hear the choral pieces again sometime outside the confines of the opera.

The opera opens with the chorus singing the “Chorus of Exiled Palestinians” and then moves immediately into the “Chorus of Exiled Jews”. The chorus never leaves the stage. I would guess it was close to a half hour of choral singing. And I tip my hat to costume designer James Schuette because with the adjustment of a shawl, a change of handbag, the losing of a hat, the chorus changed identity so completely between the two pieces that they might have been different people.

After these two long choral works the action of the opera begins, if you can call it action. This is, of course, the story of the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro by a group of Palestinian terrorists and the killing of wheel chair bound, American Jewish tourist Leon Klinghoffer. The two long choral pieces at the beginning set the stage for the political situation.

OTSL’s production of this opera is the first staged United States production since it was staged in 1991. This is, apparently, a controversial opera. OTSL spent a great deal of time and money on community outreach. OTSL General Director Timothy O’Leary described it as “educational events designed to help the production inspire the kind of informed, thoughtful dialogue among diverse groups that the arts have a special power to help create.” I didn’t go to any of them but I know people who did go and found them very informative.

My biggest problem with the opera wasn’t the subject matter. It was the libretto. During most of Act I we are told what happened to characters but are seldom shown what happened. I’ve noticed this a lot with modern opera librettos. Characters stand on stage and sing at the audience, telling them a story. Let’s face it, most operas involve singers standing on stages and singing at audiences. But usually they are singing about their interior lives. Usually love. Often rage. Sometimes despair. But modern operas seem to eschew the steamy emotions and prefer to simply tell us about the character’s actions. So we hear … And then I went to my stateroom and there I washed my face and then I went to find some lunch. It’s like Facebook status updates set to opera music.

I find it really boring. And when it is combined with John Adams minimalist style it is usually a recipe for me to go to sleep and most likely leave at intermission. I barely made it to intermission when OTSL did Nixon in China. So the fact that I stuck it out to the end of Klinghoffer tells you just how much I enjoyed the chorus.

Of course one reason that this particular group of chorus members may have sung this particular opera so well is that the blocking for this particular opera was also minimalist. Mostly non-existent when it came to the chorus. They often stood in rows on stage, facing the conductor, and sang. They didn’t have to sing and dance around and interact with other each other and the main characters. They just had to sing. And they even, at one point, sang touching each other’s arms which must have been a huge help in timing their breathing so that the long, utterly beautiful, sustained notes just floated around the theater.

It would have been nice to have some choreography or, at least, a little more movement. But at least we had the glorious sound of their voices.

Kudos also to Christopher Mageira, who played the Captain and who was outstanding. The others in the cast were also quite fine.

In the end, I would say this was a brilliant production of an opera that I never intend to see again. But I’m glad that I saw it once.

Here’s a link to OTSL’s multimedia preview of this opera (although I can’t get it to play correctly on any of my computers).