Heartbeat Opera Spring Festival
Baruch Center for the Performing Arts
May 23, 2017
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Heartbeat Opera's Spring Festival turns to two canonical classics
Image credit: Heartbeat Opera |
Puccini’s Butterfly
Lei: Heartbeat Opera has been
adapting scores to their “chamber” orchestra needs at least as far back as
their production of Offenbach’s Daphnis and Chloe. After last year’s
success with their truly inspired ninety-minute resetting of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, they seem to have settled on this unique reduced format of
radically cutting and condensing canonical works. This is the first year that both pieces in the festival have followed this model. In the past, if one of them did, then the other ended up being an offbeat shorter work, Kurtág's Kafka Fragments in 2015 and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas in 2016.
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Our conduit is a nine year-old boy awash in the world
Photo credit: Russ Rowland |
Lui: Director Ethan Heard’s
adaptation of Puccini’s Madama Butterfly opens with a prologue in
which we are introduced to a nine year-old boy in his twentieth-first century
bedroom. His parents are ostensibly absent, but he has his stuffed animals and
a doll to keep him company. He pulls out a laptop and begins searching various
terms germane to Japanese culture and more specifically to the story of Madama
Butterfly. Into a search engine he types things like “Asian American,” “yellow
face,” “Japanese woman,” “geisha,” and “hara kiri” that are projected in place
of the supertitles. He seems to be trying to understand something about his
mother, maybe, or his heritage. It isn’t clear and really only suggested,
however, his framing role will continue throughout.
The political correctness police has long had it out for Puccini’s
Butterfly and undeniably continues to. To some it can be as offensive
for its Orientalism as, say, any Wagnerian opera is for its sexism. Heartbeat
Opera’s Spring Festival addressed head on some of those concerns.
When the opera proper begins we are jettisoned into the thick of
its familiar psychological drama. The curtain rises not on Act I but on Act II,
where we join Cio-Cio San, already Mrs. Pinkerton, in a modest, modern Japanese
living room. She is ever patiently awaiting the return of her negligent American
husband.
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Butterfly prepares the home for the return of her husband
Photo credit: Russ Rowland |
Lei: Questions of political
correctness aside, I have never been a Butterfly fan. I have always
found the score far too sappy for my taste. The dramatic tensions behind the
heroine’s demise boil down to her being too blind in her love and so naive that
she basically allows herself to be used, knocked up and abandoned by a
womanizing colonial pig.
The opera presents an unambiguous indictment of colonialism, in
this case an offensive parody of American imperialism around the turn of the
last century. Here the locomotive of empire and male ego rolls right over the
grotesquely naive credulity of a very young girl, in this case, a fifteen
year-old Japanese geisha whose economic and familial difficulties have forced
her to turn to the trade.
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Imperial frat boy purchases his first plaything of a wife
Photo credit: Russ Rowland |
Lui: Imperialism meets naïveté
is one of the central themes of this Italian opera from 1904. In this case it’s
just that the opposing parties are adorned in American and Japanese garb. The
portrayals are equally offensive on both sides of the story, though the
emotional core, if you allow yourself to be moved by Puccini’s highly
saccharine score, lies on the side of the tragic victim. The only real dramatic
high is the final suicide following the Cio-Cio San’s reading of the
inscription on her father’s dagger:
Con onor muore
chi non può serbar
vita con onore.*
Lei: Despite my antipathy
toward the opera, I nevertheless arrived at the theater with an open mind
toward Heartbeat Opera’s co-artistic director Ethan Heard’s take. It turns out
I was very pleasantly surprised. For starters, the work was rearranged and
streamlined to roughly 100 minutes, which they achieved basically by
eliminating a lot of non-essential fluff (like the backstory of Butterfly’s
relatives). Cutting to the chase in Butterfly’s pouring forth of her suffering
and pain was actually a welcome modification. Her long drawn out emoting is
part of what I have found intolerable about this opera.
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Butterfly presented in all her stereotypical glory
Photo credit: Vincent Tullo |
Also, Heard decided to de-mystify the traditional romanticized
Orientalism associated with the piece by bringing a series of stereotypes and
fetishes to the fore, revealing them to be the real culprit in so many of the
adverse reactions the opera often inspires. He had Pinkerton sport an “I heart
Japan” T-shirt under his uniform. Likewise, when Cio-Cio San opens her kimono
to consummate their shotgun wedding, she reveals a Japanese schoolgirl uniform.
With obvious references to modern sexual fetishism and crass tourist
stereotypes, Heard’s intentions come through loud and clear.
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Samaurai chic: Cio-Cio San goes rogue
Photo credit: Heartbeat Opera |
To a contemporary observer, the world of opera is full of clueless
heroines who, like Cio-Cio San, are victims of a male-dominated world: think
Gilda from Rigoletto, Senta from The Flying Dutchman, Lucia di Lammermoor, the list goes on. It is, however, true that Butterfly has always
felt like the least credible of them all (how can she be that stupid?).
Lui: Take away the cultural
colors of the principal players and I think that far too many of us recognize
types that are all too familiar reflected therein. Who hasn’t been foolish in
love like Cio-Cio San at least for a spell? Who doesn’t know an opportunistic
male like Pinkerton? The fact of the matter remains, there is indeed some
universal truth lurking beneath the surface here.
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Pinkerton snaps selfies of a culture he doesn't care to understand
Photo credit: Mackenzie Whitney |
Lei: In Heard’s take, Pinkerton
is the classic American prick, entitled and ignorant from the get-go. Tenor Mackenzie
Whitney did an excellent job in portraying the crass soldier by mimicking
cowboy moves, chugging whiskey and beer, and taking selfies. His sound was
exuberant, self-assured and playful. He has a brightness that perfectly suited
this fresh faced “Yankee vagabondo” who is enchanted with a new world where he
perceives there to be very little at stake and so feels free to act
irresponsibly. “Real” life will begin for him upon his return to the States.
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Butterfly and Suzuki wait while our interloper looks on
Photo credit: Vincent Tullo |
Lui: But the singer that truly
stole the show was soprano Banlingyu Ban in the title role. Her sound
was as fresh and lovely and hopeful as the rays of a rising sun. She was an
extraordinarily delicate little blossom who somehow managed to pull off all
that fatal naïveté with both gusto and composure at the same time. She achieved
the kind of blend of Italian powerful passion with Japanese poise that is hard
wired into the DNA of the opera. And her Italian was also extremely good
throughout.
Lei: Baritone Matthew Singer played a steady, avuncular Sharpless. Having sung Enrico in Lucia di Lammermoor last
year, Singer is a Heartbeat veteran. While his sound was warm and grounding and
sincere as Puccini’s “good” guy, I still think I prefer him as the dangerous
Donizetti villain.
Daniel Schlosberg’s
adaptation of the score also managed to maintain if not even heighten some of
the vaguely Orientalizing touches especially in his use of the harp as well as
that of certain percussion like cymbals and a gong. It doesn’t get much more
fetishistic than that and so it is worth noting that in every way they could
they emphasized rather than downplayed all of the stereotypes of the original.
There is no attempt to shy away from the politically incorrect.
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The pathos of the situation left noting lacking
Photo credit: Vincent Tullo |
As part of their adaptation process, Heard, Schlosberg and
conductor Jacob Ashworth also decided to switch the order of the opera
by starting with the first half of Act II (in “waiting” mode), before jumping
back in a flashback to highlights from Act I (the “happy” times) and then
forward again to the rest of Act II (when she finally gets it and high drama
ensues).
Lui: Implicit in the decision
to reorder the sequence of events in this way, all of the romanticism is
drained out of the love duet between Pinkerton and Butterfly at the end of what
is usually Act I. Shown in flashback, after their wedding, he ties her in a net
of red ribbons, leaving her like an insect trapped at the center of a spider’s
web (and in the middle of a cage-looking structure, in case there were still
any doubts regarding the victim theme). None of this makes Butterfly any less
naive by the time we return to Act II, but it sure does wag the moralizing
finger at Pinkerton’s arrogant brutishness.
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Tie me up, tie me down. Pinkerton traps his school girl butterfly in a web
Photo credit: Vincent Tullo |
The only thing we actually gain is the heightened sense that
Butterfly truly is even more clueless than we previously imagined. If he really
left her in that state, tied to her prison cage-like walls with her limbs all
bound as well, whether literal or metaphorical, when your lover leaves you in
that state you can almost certainly rest assure that he’s probably never coming
back. Why would you want him to?
But yet, remember in this production this information is divulged
in flashback, we have already seen that she is still disingenuously waiting for
him to return with no word from him for what is going on three years. The
flashback has only served to belittle her more, it would seem. In much the same
way that putting her in schoolgirl outfit belittled her too.
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One day his ship may come
Photo credit: Vincent Tullo |
Lei: Then there is the question
of the directorial framing device of the whole thing through the eyes of “an
Asian-American boy who is trying to understand his parents’ separation,”
according to the program. The darling little boy in modern-day garb who opened
the show hung around for its duration as a more or less active observer and
finally became Butterfly’s son on stage during her final moving monologue.
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Boy is consoled by the story
Photo credit: Heartbeat Opera |
Other than that, though, the boy’s background, motivation or
understanding was not really fleshed out as per the Director’s Note. It may
have been interesting to push the framing idea a bit further as a final
commentary to close the loop. I failed to grasp the payoff.
Lui: One thing is for sure; he
helped to heighten the emotional catharsis at the end. Just before she commits
hara kiri, he tries to console her and begins to take of some of her white face
makeup for her, while she holds him tenderly to her breast. It was an
incredibly affecting moment. And it would not have been possible with a mere
puppet or doll. Not even Schlosberg’s take on Puccini’s notoriously
melodramatic music evinced the emotional response that this little boy was able
to.
Lei: And so Heartbeat’s take on
a canonical opera, one that neither of us has ever particularly appreciated
eventually won us over not least of all for the food for thought it provided.
Radical modifications were made – enough of them to make any purist cringe –
but they nevertheless still managed to distill Puccini’s opera to its essence
and so a different kind of faithfulness to the source material transpires.
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Colonialism at its finest
Photo credit: Heartbeat Opera |
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Carmen: South of the Border. Unlike any you've ever seen
Photo credit: Heartbeat Opera |
Bizet’s Carmen
Lei: Heartbeat Opera’s
advertising materials boasted that their Carmen was going be like no Carmen
ever seen before. Turns out they were not kidding. Director Louisa Proske
and composer/arranger/conductor Dan Schlosberg played so fast and loose
with Bizet’s opera that by the time they were done with it, it may have still
been a version of the Carmen story but it was hardly Bizet’s Carmen
anymore.
Lui: After all the buzz about Ethan
Heard’s Butterfly being a “radical” take on Puccini’s classic work,
it actually turned out to be the more faithful and conservative work of the
evening. Louisa Proske’s riff on Bizet’s Carmen treated its source
material even more irreverently. We may not be purists (by a long shot) when it
comes to modernizations and adaptations of the classics, but we do draw a line
or two in the sand as to how much a new interpretation needs to respect the
original score, libretto (words and meaning), narrative arc, main archetypal
characters and core emotional drivers.
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Micaëla attempts to save a lost soul
Photo credit: Russ Rowland |
Lei: In this case, the original
score was masterfully re-arranged for six musicians (playing over ten different
instruments that included electric guitar, accordion and three saxophones).
Their riffing and toying with Bizet’s score was titillating, intelligent, jazzy
and exciting, if not always entirely fluid in terms of the continuity of
musical narrative. It almost felt like Bizet musical vignettes, or a Carmen
jam session, with start-stop moments and big eruptions here and there. Which
was all fine and dandy until they started performing modern jazz entr’acte
pieces between big scenes. They were lovely stand ins for the interludes, but
they really had little to do with Carmen and also kind of broke any Carmen
mood they may have managed to conjure. Rather than Bizet, the band seemed to
often be channeling Goran Bregović’s Balkan gypsy genius. Which is fabulous and
kind of works with the bohemien vibe, but they start to walk one of
those fine lines in the sand.
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Micaëla is a woman without a country in this tale of border crossing
Photo credit: Russ Rowland |
Lui: Dan Schlosberg’s reworking
of the score was truly brilliant. The musical accompaniment for the Carmen
character featured lots of sultry gypsy saxophone and classical guitar, even a
few electric guitar flourishes now and again, with lots of tribal, slightly
Spanish feeling beats in the percussion. The colors would then shift to capture
Micaëla’s purity and her innocence through a melodious almost spiritual sweep
of the piano and violin.
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A somber Habanera from the afterlife
Photo credit: Allegri con Fuoco |
Lei: Aside from a portion of the
greatest hits arias and duets that were kept in the original French, the
libretto and narrative were for the most part either re-ordered or thrown away
and re-written from whole cloth in English to create a new plot. Granted,
several of the main Carmen plot points were there (somehow), but the
whole package, while at times exciting, lacked the original’s punch and
fluidity.
Like the music, the new plot, too, felt like a series of riffs on
Carmen themes. To name a few radical differences: (i) the Seguedille
becomes the first aria of the opera, (ii) the love and chemistry between Carmen
and Escamillo is reduced to a toreador ring tone on her cell, (iii) Don
Jose kills Zuniga, (iv) Escamillo is a deranged repulsive criminal, (v) all
fellow gypsy women are out of the picture, (vi) La habanera becomes an epilogue delivered after the end of the opera by a
blood-dripping Carmen as an (admittedly powerful) commentary.
Lui: The new English dialogue
often winked too much to modern audiences, almost dumbing down the content. It
just didn’t sound good. At times, the awkward English recitatives even elicited
laughs from the public. And in my book, if you’re playing for the laughs during
Carmen, something is not entirely right. With its reliance on the easy
joke, and at times even hokey acting, this outing with Heartbeat was really
less faithful to Bizet and followed more in the footsteps of Oscar Hammerstein,
who did something similar to the same source material in his musical Carmen
Jones. At least Hammerstein had the decency to change the title.
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Call it "Schlosberg's Carmen (After Bizet)," with all the liberties taken
Photo credit: Russ Rowland |
Lei: Unfortunately when the
original words and meaning of an opera are not only ignored but entirely
re-written, a serious line is crossed. When an opera is broken into pieces that
are then loosely used (or not) to better fit a director’s vision, it kind of
ceases to be that opera and morphs into something else.
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A gypsy jam party down at the border
Photo credit: Russ Rowland |
One thing is to play with sets and costumes, come up with framing
devices, display radical acting, cut out some minor scenes and characters. But,
when a production starts replacing both original score and libretto with
entirely new material that diverges radically from the source, then it goes
beyond “Regietheater” (not even Willy Decker dared to touch Traviata’s
score and libretto) and starts navigating dangerous waters – unless there is
intellectual honesty about the work being a radical new riff on a classic (but not
that classic anymore).
Think, for example, of a recent new adaptation of Mozart’s Nozze
translated into Spanglish and re-worked to portray a tale of undocumented
Mexican immigrants in modern day L.A. Radical, yes, but at least they too
retitled it, ¡Figaro! (90210).
Lui: It makes me wonder if
Heartbeat will begin commissioning new works from its collaborators. It seems
like a natural progression. If they are going to play so freely with the canon,
it only seems like a matter of time before they turn to reinventing the
tradition outright. They can riff on it until their heart’s content, but when
will they begin being upfront about what their actual intentions are? And there
is nothing wrong about those intentions, it’s actually pretty exciting stuff.
Let’s just call a spade a spade. New work is in our future and it can very
legitimately build on the archetypes and traditions of the past in all honesty.
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Carmen's fatal encounter at the border
Photo credit: Russ Rowland |
Lei: Labeling aside, though,
Proske’s production had moments of sheer brilliance: like the whole idea of
setting the opera at a fictional fenced border or else transforming the tavern
scene of Les tringles des sistres into a Dionysian gypsy jam session on
the near side of the border, their side, where the fence itself was played like
a percussion instrument and the energy was electrifyingly palpable. Setting up
the band with the fence dividing the group in two was also a stroke of genius:
such a powerful image for divided and divisive times.
Lui: Casting, however, was
uneven. Mezzo Sishel Claverie was a sensational and very captivating
Carmen. With her hair dyed violet, she carried herself with a restless anarchic
abandon and exuded an explosive sexual energy that was infectious. She was
independent and free, a woman on the loose, a wild animal with real sex appeal.
She may have been more La Reina-style gangster than your typical
voluptuous Mediterranean earth goddess, but she was damn good. It was readily
apparent that she has sung the role in the past. She was vocally seasoned and
skillful and delivered her showcase arias with sensual verve and real feeling.
Lei: Soprano Jessica Sandidge
embodied the angelic good girl Micaëla with grace and poetry that were at times
heart-wrenching. On the other hand, tenor Brent Reilly Turner as Don
Jose was not always on the level, both vocally and acting-wise.
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Where in the world is Escamillo?
Photo credit: Russ Rowland |
Lui: But perhaps the character
that I found the most problematic was Escamillo as portrayed by bass Ricardo
Rivera. Every time he was on stage I could not help but think, “Who let
Escamillo’s deranged cousin out of the loony bin? I want the real Escamillo
back!” He’s supposed to be a star, dashing and smooth, musical and
crowd-pleasing. Rivera portrayed him like a possessed cokehead; almost vomiting
out his lines so that most of what he sang was either mispronounced or incomprehensible.
He completely devastated all of Bizet’s gorgeous musical lines.
Lei: It is unclear if this was
Rivera’s or Proske’s idea, but the poor toreador was transformed into a cracked
out egomaniac who was bouncing off the walls too much to savor the depth of the
music that is supposed to portray a brave, manly champion who is the toast of the
town and admired by all. In this interpretation, everybody treated Escamillo
with a mix of fear and derision, which is so not what music and libretto
suggest. Very difficult to see how anybody, let alone Carmen, can fall in love
with this piece of work.
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Escamillo's deranged cousin goes head to head with Don Jose
Photo credit: Russ Rowland |
Lui: This is what makes the
current opera scene and discussion so interesting. How do you keep the art form
alive and relevant and engaging? Where do you draw the line between reverence
and irreverence? Is there anything too sacred to tamper with? Is the
uber-traditional “museum” approach really dead? I.e., must an opera be
performed in tights, corsets and powdered wigs or not at all? What does the
future of opera look like? Heartbeat’s take on Lucia last year struck
what I thought was the perfect balance between reinvention and respect for the
essence of the source material. Modernizations, though, indeed present
seductive yet dangerous territory on which to tread.
– Lei & Lui
* With honor dies / he who cannot / live with honor.
