Ways to Reshuffle the Canon

Heartbeat Opera Spring Festival

Baruch Center for the Performing Arts

May 23, 2017

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Colonialism at its finest
Photo credit: Heartbeat Opera

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The Double Madness of Lucia

Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor

Heartbeat Opera Spring Festival

Opening Night Gala

Theatre at St. Clement’s

March 12, 2016

Soil feels like freedom to Lucia
Photo credit: Russ Rowland

Lei: How does a mad or sick person hear music? This is the point of departure for director Louisa Proske’s visionary take on Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor, featured at this year’s Heartbeat Opera Spring Festival. Hers is an adaptation of the bel canto classic, where both plot and score are stripped down to a 90-minute show (against the roughly 150-minute duration of the original), displaying the brilliant talents of 5 musicians and 6 singers. At this point, purists may be cringing – no chorus, no orchestra, wild cuts to the plot. But they would be mistaken. Heartbeat Opera’s Lucia turned out to be one of the most electrifying performances I have ever experienced. Proske delivered a chamber riff on Lucia, placing the power of bel canto vocal acrobatics front and center in the intimate space of the Theatre at St. Clement’s in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, with the result that the sound waves and the emotions they carried struck us with such force that they remained with us for a long while.

Lui: The show starts with the stage divided in two on the diagonal by a translucent curtain. On one side, the floor is covered with the dirt of the Scottish moorland, strewn with props from the opera’s plot: an antique desk and two ornate chairs, as well as a piano and music stands for the rest of the ensemble strewn across stage right. On the other side, through the curtain we can see a vaguely retro looking hospital room. A woman, the one who is going to spend the next ninety minutes living out the story of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor in the fantasy playground of her institutionalized mind, is restrained by her wrists and ankles to her bed. As the lights go up on the asylum portion of the stage, her lifeless body slowly begins to writhe out of discomfort, like a woman possessed struggling to get free. A nurse and doctor check on the patient and sedate her with an injection.  

Donizetti plays on the radio and the crazy get crazier
Photo credit: Russ Rowland

As the nurse exits the scene, she turns on the radio. Through its scratchy speaker, we hear the first signature bars of Donizetti’s score played by a full orchestra. It is as though the opera is being beamed in to the poor patient from a distant place and another time. In just that moment, one by one, the musicians file in and take their places on the other half of the stage, like musical ghosts conjured by the mind of the sick woman. The clarinet is the first to kick in. He begins to shadow the recording until the five piece ensemble takes over completely and the first scene of Enrico and his sidekicks begins to unfold right before the protagonist’s eyes. She is captivated by the action on the other side of the screen. Longing for her freedom she eventually gets up the courage to penetrate that fourth wall of gauzy muslin. She passes through it like a thin tissue that separates her life of captivity and illness from the world of story, dream and imagination. Maybe this really is how a crazy person listens to music.

Lei: In this take, the Lucia character travels back and forth between the “real” world of the insane asylum and the opera’s musical imaginary world populated by belligerent flashy gangsters (donning Versace looking jackets and brandishing gold plated guns). The line between the two universes is often blurred until the madness scene, when Lucia pushes the curtain aside and the worlds collide from that moment on. The fact that all singers (except Edgardo) doubled as actors in the hospital scenes worked amazingly well to emphasize Lucia’s fantasy attributing known faces to the opera characters. The men who make her suffer in real life are also those who make her miserable in the imaginary opera world.

Ecstatic rapture (and a toy piano)
Photo credit: Jill Steinberg

Musically, Heartbeat’s co-music director Dan Schlosberg accomplished the herculean task of adapting the original Donizetti score to something that could be performed by five musicians. Granted, the quintet was very hard working and played a slew of instruments between them (cello, clarinet, electric guitar, classical guitar, two pianos, and as many as a dozen different types of percussion). The soundscape created by the ensemble was wildly diverse and at times even bordered on the wacky (toy piano) and often consisted in a series of disjointed musical outbursts linked to the peaks of emotional distress. While this approach took away any real fluidity to the score, it did work perfectly with the concept of a mad person listening to music. Schlosberg’s adaptation work was ambitious and impressive, with heaps of out of the box and irreverent ideas (some more successful than others), all while conveying the musical core of the Donizetti original. The guy not only inventively adapted, but effectively conducted and played (pianos), too, truly executing his vision with force and energy. Having managed so much with only 5 musicians, I would be curious to see what Schlosberg could do with a bigger ensemble.

Lui: One of the most striking adaptations of the Donizetti score was the mad scene, the first bars of which evolved out of a guitar accompaniment akin to something out of a dreamy Beach House song. The soundscape then morphs into the uncanny creativity of a Pet Sounds-era Brian Wilson. Yet you could still feel the Donizetti at its core, underneath it all along, even in the tinkling of the toy piano keys that pianist Schlosberg deployed to heighten the sense of childish regression implicit in this extreme phase of her psychiatric state. Leaning down to his right while conducting and seemingly doing a million other things at once, he put to good use the toddler’s instrument half buried in the dirt of the dreamy moorland.

The flashy gangsters
Photo credit: Russ Rowland

The highlight of the mad scene, though, was soprano Jamilyn Manning-White as Lucia. It was a real star turn for her, as everything about her was well suited to this take on the opera. When she was in love, reunited with her Edgardo in the first “act,” her eyes glistened and sparkled with real feeling. As her madness intensified, her eyes grew to big tender full moons, inspiring compassion for this sensitive soul who only seems to ever find herself under the thumb of oppressive patriarchal society in one way or another. What is a girl to do? I was afraid her voice would be too shrill and friable in its upper range to carry the evening, but instead she showed that her voice has continued to mature with her exploration of the role. I found her to be ever dynamic, moving from a girlish chest voice to an increasingly crazed head voice. She made for a thrilling Lucia in every way.

I just stabbed my husband (or was that my hand?)
Photo credit: Russ Rowland

Lei: The beauty of Manning-White’s voice is untraditional to say the least, but she nevertheless used every inch of her instrument to stunning effect for this take on the Lucia role. The soprano carried the show between the two worlds with a sensational performance vocally and acting-wise. Particularly endearing was her joyful rolling in the dirt in her first moments of freedom in the world of music, when she also dreamily cozies up to the pianist/composer as the music is so beautiful. But, all the extremity of her emotions quickly explode back into madness, and the wall between the two worlds comes down with some highly dramatic moments (think of the husband-murdering scene: Lucia mimics the climactic killing on her hospital bed though it turns out she is really stabbing her hand with surgical scissors). This Lucia was ALWAYS on stage either actively or as a spectator from her insane asylum room, reminding me a lot of the take on Verdi’s Giovanna D’Arco at La Scala earlier this year. Really a tour de force for Manning-White who managed to express an incredible range of colors and emotions through the sheer force of her singing: crazy, happy, loving, furious, defiant, scared, victim, murderer, desperate. And that’s when you know that you have a sensational Lucia.

The doomed couple
Photo credit: Jill Steinberg

Lui: Tenor David Guzman’s Edgardo exuded experience and confidence. It shows that he is a singer who has been around and he really brought a lot to the role. His sound is warm and his characterization was of the dutiful young man ready to serve with integrity and poetry the demands of love and war. So many of Edgardo’s arias are central to the thrust of the story that by the end he fully inhabits the emotional core of the opera right alongside Lucia. And Proske’s take really put him right there with her. His Tu che a Dio spiegasti l’ali was transcendent. Though here they cut eight minutes of the build up to his big dramatic final gesture, jumping right to the crowd pleaser aria was still potent, especially in Guzman’s hands. He was tender but guttural and his big masculine voice soared like the wings he gives to Lucia’s soul with his song. It sent shivers through my whole body. As he slowly walked backwards off the stage singing the last few bars of his concluding aria and thus fading to black his presence in Lucia’s dream life, he left us alone with a nearly lifeless inpatient sprawled out on the side of her bed, I did not want the steady euphoria to end.

Lei: Guzman is definitely a warm, swoon-inducing tenor. His is a full voice, manly, heart-wrenching, solid and secure. Both his Sulla tomba and Tu che a dio spiegasti l’ali were masterfully delivered, he did not flinch once, not even on the highest notes of the final aria, that he rode with superhuman control. This is a charismatic singer of that rare breed of earth-shaking irresistible and seductive tenors. To follow closely.

Games with medical gauze
Photo credit: Russ Rowland

Lui: Even though Edgardo’s emoting in the finale was reduced to the greatest hits, Lucia’s mad scene was given all the stage time it deserves and Manning-White was up to the task. She rose to the occasion and put all of her virtuosity on display. Particularly impressive was the passage of her metamorphosis into a bird. Suddenly interacting with the orchestra in a dynamic call and response, she seems to be hearing voices riding on the air. Then she tests out her voice in a fantasy conversation with the instruments that call back to her, only to sprout vocal wings and soar out in front of her musical accompaniment like a joyous little bird, either that or a woman possessed. This is the moment that she unfolds her wings to God, virtually literalizing the metaphor that Edgardo deploys in his final aria, Tu che a dio spiegasti l’ali. Is this what a crazy person experiences when they listen to music? I can’t speak for all the crazy people out there, but it sure was phenomenal for me.

Enrico torturing his sister
Photo credit: Russ Rowland

Lei: Baritone Matthew Singer was a brutal, powerful yet lyrical Enrico. In his opening aria Cruda, funesta smania his voice boomed with menace but also possessed a seductive beauty (this is bel canto after all!), the finale of which was punctuated by the most violent apple-chopping I’ve ever seen. Singer’s Italian is impeccable and his characterization of the opera’s main villain was deliciously vicious. In Lucia’s sick mind, this Enrico is a threatening, scary thug sporting a red leather coat and bowler hat (and playing Russian roulette with a gold-plated gun). Interestingly, after showing Lucia the fake letter from Edgardo, Enrico injects her with a drug, to emphasize that Lucia would not have changed her mind so easily if she was in her senses and to make a dreamlike connection back to the hospital. This was a clever touch that attempted to lend an air of greater believability to a juncture in the plot that usually demands the suspension of disbelief from the audience.

All of the men oppressing Lucia
Photo credit: Jill Steinberg

John Taylor Ward as the priest Raimondo was mellifluous and Mephistophelic, through a beautiful smooth bass, which was surprising to me as I was never particularly impressed by or interested in the Raimondo character in other versions of Lucia I’ve seen. This Raimondo was key to the repulsive yet hypnotic scene in which the gang of men conspire to finally convince Lucia to surrender as he dressed her into her wedding gown with medical gauze (incidentally, the same singer doubles as the doctor in the hospital world who would later wrap her hand after she stabbed it in her hospital bed). Ward’s slightly perverse and very corrupt clergyman was one of the highlights of the evening. Tenor Christopher S. Lilley on double duty as Arturo and Normanno displayed solid lyrical bel canto phrasing. Mezzo Monica Soto-Gil as Lucia’s confidante Alisa had a nice sound and was particularly brilliant in the ensemble pieces.

Moving to the musical world
Photo credit: Russ Rowland

Lui: Louisa Proske outdid herself with this one. It takes real courage to play so fast and loose with Donizetti. Though she is not catering to the purists with this outing, she nevertheless undeniably has real vision and her Lucia is hands down one of the most accomplished evenings of theater I have experienced in a long time. All the moving parts came together for an experience that was just: Wow! Beyond wow! She mustered all the tools in her box of stagecraft tricks to tell an utterly invigorating version of this classic operatic story. The lighting, stage design, directorial concept, and setting were all superbly polished. And it didn’t hurt things at all that the singing was so top notch. Not to mention the phenomenal talent of Dan Schlosberg who reset Donizetti’s brilliant bel canto score. His fantasy alone had us on the edge of our seats. He took us on a musical journey from an ostensibly Max Richter-style riff on a classic, into which he introduced pop elements in the guitar accompaniment, to the kind of the experimentation one has come to expect from creative minds as diverse as Brian Wilson and John Cage. This was an evening of opera like few are able to deliver on any level of the spectrum from the best independent companies to the major leagues. Louisa Proske (and her team) is one to watch out for!

An inmate gets treated
Photo credit: Russ Rowland

Lei: This Lucia was a display of bold, innovative vision, exquisitely executed with an attention to detail and perfectionism in every single aspect of the production. We may have come to appreciate Louisa Proske for some of the frilly comedies she has done in the past, but here she definitely flexed her dramatic muscles and delivered a hauntingly multi-layered tragedy that was both deep and dark. This is a cutting edge innovative fresh reinterpretation of the operatic canon done at a miniature intimate level. Opera distilled to its essence, indeed, and reinvented too, casting a new thought-provoking light on a classic while staying true to the core of the original. It’s with artists like Proske that opera remains timeless yet radically new at the same time – there is hope for the art form after all. I cannot wait to see what Proske does next (rumor has it that she may be conducting LoftOpera’s Così in the fall, which would be the best of all worlds!).

– Lei & Lui