Opera in the underworld

Mention “opera” and most people envision what’s now called “grand opera” — mammoth war horses, mostly from the form’s reputed 19th-century heyday. While grand indeed, this is also the era that gave opera a bad name with many of these same people, thanks to preposterous plotting and general obviation of basic acting skills, not to mention extreme length.

You can thank a handful of far-sighted directors, notably including Peter Sellars, for rediscovering baroque operas, where dramatic tensions often arise less from what happens and more from internally divided characters, like Xerxes and Orpheus. But wait! Doesn’t that sound like a modern sensibility?

Bingo. Many astute commentators, including the venerable Mr. Scatter, have noted an operatic curiosity: contemporary opera, written by notable composers such as John Adams, Philip Glass and, yes, the trailblazing Leonard Bernstein, seem to have returned to exquisite miniatures of opera’s earliest composers.

I myself discussed this with Portland Opera’s visionary General Director, Christopher Mattaliano, when we were seated together at a banquet a couple years ago. Which proves that once again, the advance guard of American culture is all thanks to me. Case in point: PO’s current offering is a dazzling triple bill that gives you Bernstein’s unfairly overlooked Trouble in Tahiti along with two Monteverdi gems, Il ballo delle ingrate and Il combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda, all in scarcely more than two spellbinding hours.

Together the two composers comprise nearly the full span of operatic history. Monteverdi is justly immortal for composing opera’s first masterpiece, Orfeo. It’s exciting to see his two neglected chamber pieces presented together. First we see The Dance of the Ungrateful, which is essentially a meditation on a human cynicism that tends to take love for granted, eschewing its ennobling power. As a corrective, Venus bargains with Pluto to allow damned lovers to return to earth and scare the living back to their true purpose.

In a dazzling coup de théâtre, the opera moves seamlessly and without warning into the second piece, The Battle of Tancredi and Clorinda, which we understood is a corrective tale counterbalancing the wuthering ennui deplored by the previous story. This is reinforced through seeing the condemned of hell, who were mute in the first piece, adopt major roles in the second.

Following intermission, Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti seems at first to be … well, centuries away from Monteverdi’s brooding concerns. It’s a bright and sunny day in Suburbia -- in any suburbia, as the libretto makes clear. But we see at once that this is a feint, and underneath the cheery Formica surfaces is the very ennui Venus railed against earlier.

The two lead roles, played by Jose Rubio as Sam and Daryl Freedman as Dinah (pictured at left in the photo by Portland Opera/Cory Weaver, with a blind Cupid upstage) are outstanding as the husband and wife trapped in this Mad Men-like scenario, who feel unable to halt or even slow down their drifting apart. Gradually and inexorably, figures from the Monteverdi pieces populate the stage, sometimes adopting roles and other times simply bearing silent witness to the lives of the two mortals. Toward the end, there is the merest hint that this state of desuetude may be bettered — or will it merely be accepted?

If changes do happen for the better, you feel that it will be partly due to the invisible influence of Pluto’s emissaries, doing their best to provide a cautionary vision for Bernstein’s struggling 1950s couple.

Overall, this is a bracing and moving conception, one that brilliantly combines three very different operas into a single, cohesive vision. It’s also a glimpse into how opera can be so much more than the mere cultural duty to which it’s often relegated. Mr. Mattaliano and his company are to be commended to bringing us work that matters — opera that sticks with you long after the applause has died down. Bravo and bravi.

So take note: The triple bill has just three more performance, inclding today’s matinee, and then April 1 & 3. Make sure you see this extraordinary presentation. Leave your preconceptions about opera at the door, whether they’re pro or con, and treat yourself to a trip to the underworld you’ll not soon forget.

Orpheus a là mode

Forget what you believe about Philip Glass. If you’re accustomed to associated his music with numbing repetition and avant-garde antics, his opera Orphée is going to come as a surprise. Oh, it sounds like Glass all right. But yoked into the service of narrative, his music finds depths and nuances you don’t always find in classic operatic warhorses.


Even the avid opening night audience last evening, who clearly showed up ready to have a good time, was caught off guard by the Joplinesque music of the opening scene. From there the music morphs gradually through a series of musical moods, from movingly lambent intimacy to “heroic” set pieces that would please even grand opera enthusiasts.

Likewise, the story leaps through various dramatic styles. That story is not just the ancient Orpheus myth of a man who follows his wife to the underworld, but also Jean Cocteau’s pre-postmodern gloss on it. Now: I haven’t seen that film since my early 20s, which was probably too young to see a film about the power of love over time and about the way foreknowledge of death affects that love. At the time, I thought Cocteau’s effort was a pretentious snooze. Thirty years later, whether it’s thanks to Glass or from sheer dint of personal experience, I found the same story profound.


References to the movie abound – most conspicuously in an ongoing motif involving mirrors that provide both dangerous reflections and passage to unseen worlds -- but I digress. I was going to say that Glass’s unique dramaturgy recalls ancient storytelling more than modern; now we tend to expect a unified tone throughout, where the ancients had no problem mixing comedy and tragedy. The scene in which Orphée tries not to look at Eurydice is treated as out-and-out comedy – close to buffonery, really – yet you know what’s coming, and the permanent loss of Eurydice is all the more poignant because you’ve been tickled into forgetting it for a few minutes.

Most surprisingly of all is the opera’s final scene. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil it for you. Suffice it to say that it’s a marvelous bit of playwriting prestidigitation that makes you recast the entire myth.

Can you tell I was impressed? This is one opera you should catch – never mind if you don’t usually care for the form, and not to worry if you think you don’t care for Glass. It’s all too rare to see an opera that works as theater, so do yourself a favor and go. Just three more performances.

By the way, almost as much fun as the opera itself was the fab celebrity blogging table, which was very much its own event. To catch up on what the opera experience was like as it unfolded, started with Art Scatter’s preliminary account here; Mr. Scatter provides you with links to all the bloggolalia. His cohorts included Cynthia Fuhrman, Storm Large, Byron Beck and even (from backstage) cast member Marc Acito.

Three shows it’s (almost) too late to see

Heard this old theater joke?

ACTOR: You must come see me in my new show.

CRONY: When do you close?

It’s a semi-joke, anyway, and it’s on me. I’m as bad as every other theater person, always waiting to the last minute to see plays. It’s a bad habit, because I’ve often wished too late I could see a show twice. Yet here I am, up to my old tricks, recommending shows to you at Hour 11.75.

Portland Opera’s Turn of the Screw is now history, in fact, but I want to record what a transcendent experience it was. Britten’s music still seems as fresh as when he first wrote it, starting out with bright notes glancing all over the place that turn darkly fulsome in due course. I love this piece because it’s a rare opera that works as theater. And it stays much closer to Henry James than the movie version of the book, The Innocents (which is fabulous for different reasons). In Britten’s version (libretto by Myfanwy Piper), you have to ask yourself: are there really ghosts haunting the children? Or are the children actually bedeviled by a tweaky, sex-starved caretaker on the verge of mania?


At this writing, you’ve still got three hours to get over to Profile Theatre Project and see Neil Simon’s Biloxi Blues, in an excellent production directed by Pat Patton. Yes, I know. Neil. But BB is one of Simon’s best; it’s far less self-congratulatory than his other autobiographical works. The reason to go, though, in addition to the taut direction and the cleverly designed set (by Tal Sanders), is the seamless ensemble performance. What a cast—terrific across the board, though I have to single out a young actor named Alec Wilson, who plays Eugene, the stand-in role for the playwright. His earnest, self-deprecating and effortlessly warm portrayal makes him the young man that every guy hopes he was at that age.


Also playing in a few hours, and again at 7:30 for its closing performance, is ART's must-see powerhouse The Seafarer, by Irish sleeper Conor McPherson. This playwright is often compared to his countryman Martin McDonagh, and unfairly; the McPherson has a well-observed fascination with the apparently ordinary, to which he adds an ear for the eerie that turns naturalism inside out. (Not to ding McDonagh for something he doesn’t aspire to, though. But that’s another post.)

This is Allen Nause’s best directing to date (since I’ve been around, anyway), and the entire cast is outstanding, especially Bill Geissinger as a man who commits the worst deadly sin of all: despair. He believes his soul is so utterly lost that not even God can save him.

Not that the play’s a dirge – far from it! There’s a twist to the play that not even this jaded old structuralist saw coming. You won’t, either. Two more performances – get your butt over to ART, or wonder forever what all the fuss was about.