Crowning achievement

Every ill wind, as the saying goes, blows someone some good, and ironically enough our current economic downdraft has wafted an operatic masterpiece our way: the Boston Early Music Festival, which generally devotes itself to extravagant obscura (which once or twice has turned out to be deservedly obscure) was forced by financial concerns to cancel Christoph Graupner's Antiochus und Stratonica and substitute Monteverdi's smaller-scaled, better-known masterpiece, L'incoronazione di Poppea (with Gillian Keith and Marcus Ullmann, above left).

And with all due respect to Christoph Graupner (who knows, perhaps Antiochus and Stratonica is brilliant!) I have to say: lucky us. For Poppea has remained in the repertory for nearly four hundred years for a very good reason: it is simultaneously ravishing, heart-breaking, and startlingly profound, an amalgam of the warmest romance and the coldest irony that keeps us constantly on our emotional and intellectual toes. And while it's hardly unknown to the opera buff, it's rarely been seen in these parts - and, I'd hazard, rarely seen anywhere to better advantage. For not just the economic stars have aligned for this production: its setting, the Wimberley Theatre at the BCA, turns out to be a superbly intimate venue for chamber opera, and BEMF has assembled one of the best casts - in dramatic as well as vocal terms - in its history. In short, L'incoronazione di Poppea is good enough to make you feel that the downturn in your 401(k) may just have been worth it.

Still, marvelous as it is, this Poppea's not perfect. Specialists could disagree with some of the instrumental and vocal decisions made here (any performance must be "reconstructed" from two varying versions), but I've got no dog in any of those possible fights. There's a slight, but understandable, fudge to the tone of Gilbert Blin's direction, however, and there are vocal and/or dramatic gaps in the two leads (it's the supporting cast that pushes the opera well over the top). In the case of the direction, it must be said that the tone of this libretto (by Giovanni Francesco Busenello) is among the subtlest challenges in opera, and one that puts to shame the seemingly tinny ironies of most modernist and postmodernist works. The piece centers on the Roman emperor Nero and his consort Poppea, whom he eventually crowns as empress, after disposing of his understandably-scheming queen Ottavia (banishment), the protesting philosopher Seneca (death), and Poppea's own husband Ottone (again banishment, but this time with the loyal Drusilla by his side, whom he slowly learns to deserve). But Poppea's day in the sun didn't last long: once pregnant, she was kicked to death by her unstable hubby. So "The Triumph of Love" this ain't.

Oh, but it is. Perhaps only Vladimir Nabokov has pulled off the kind of trick that Monteverdi and Busenello manage with L'incoronazione di Poppea: an ode to love which simultaneously seduces and sobers - even horrifies. The opera begins with a standard-issue quarrel among the gods (here Virtue, Fortune, and Love) over who has the most power over life on Earth. Love claims precedence, of course, and then sets about proving her dominion via the elevation of the lovely Poppea against all arguments of reason, political justice or morality. But hey, that's amore! That Poppea is wedding a budding sociopath, and that her ascension will wreak havoc on the state (Seneca prepares for his "suicide," at right), are but trifles before the power of sexual attraction.

What proves most haunting about Poppea, however, is that throughout this ongoing moral and political travesty Monteverdi manages to keep some level of sympathy with everyone (even Nero). Because all the characters are at some level a victim of emotional or political forces beyond their control. (Even Poppea is the plaything of her own beauty.) But this perspective requires, at bottom, a certain chill in a production's conception of Love - the godlet can't be merely some mischievous putti, but requires at least the alien distance of Shakespeare's Ariel, and perhaps even the terrifying calm of Apollo while flaying Marsyas. Director Blin, however, keeps soprano Nell Snaidas's Amore well within a certain winking cuteness, which is fine at first but begins to feel inadequate to the eventual size of the opera's moral debate. To be fair, the director does work Virtue and Fortune back into the action at appropriate moments, but then he seems to drop the ball again with Nero and Poppea, whose relationship isn't nearly glamorously twisted enough - although one could argue that the central gap here is simply Marcus Ullmann's Nero. Ullmann was re-purposed from the cast of Antiochus und Stratonica, and he's none too comfortable with the upper vocal reaches of his new role (which was originally written for a soprano), and perhaps that's hampering him dramatically. But at the same time he is simply neither a complex nor powerful enough presence to anchor the opera - which leads to an implicit presentation of Poppea (Gillian Keith) as a gold-digger, another slight error in interpretation. But if Keith doesn't quite limn the fearful uncertainty of her political position, she nonetheless sings the role ravishingly, with a honeyed soprano that is simultaneously light, rich, and luminously subtle.

And the vocal riches just keep on coming, generally combined with pitch-perfect dramatic characterizations. Stephanie Houtzeel all but steals the show as the spurned Ottavia, with a vocal power and a tragic hauteur that would have filled a much larger house. She was nearly matched in stature, however, by Christian Immler's Seneca - Immler deployed his deeply vibrant voice to poignant effect, while holding back dramatically from any overt melodrama; thus his preparation for his suicidal bath was probably the most heart-rending scene on a local stage in recent memory.

The list of wonderful performances in this production is long, however. Amanda Forsythe made an emotionally compelling and vocally radiant Drusilla, while as her eventual mate Ottone, Holger Falk negotiated many an emotional twist without missing a beat, all while sporting an agile and rich baritone (although he too was occasionally stretched in his upper register). Another scene-stealer was Laura Pudwell as Poppea's nurse (above) - an earthy busybody straight out of Shakespeare. I was also taken with Deborah Rentz-Moore's Virtue, Ross Hauck's Lucano, and Jesse Blumberg's Mercurio. And all received truly dazzling accompaniment from the period orchestra, which featured particularly sparkling work from Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs on Baroque guitar and theorbo (those giraffe-like period banjos), Luca Guglielmi and Jörg Jacobi on harpsichord, and Maxine Eilander on Baroque harp. It was hard not to feel as the curtain fell (to rapturous applause), that L'incoronazione di Poppea would prove the cultural event of the summer, and perhaps the Boston Early Music Festival's crowning achievement.

The Shakespeare syndrome

The many Shakespeares?

A recent post on the Arts Fuse brings word that a "symposium" was held in Watertown last weekend for "Oxfordians" - that is, people obsessed with the idea that Shakespeare was not actually "the man from Stratford" (as they call the actor/manager whose contemporaries collected and edited most of the canon, and published it under his name), but was instead Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, whose portrait is appended to several supposed likenesses of Shakespeare, above.

There is, of course, no actual evidence linking Edward de Vere to Shakespeare's plays. Zip. Zero. And he died too early to have written several of the them (that is, unless we pretend along with the Oxfordians that Macbeth, The Tempest and others could actually have been written well before there's any mention of them in the historical record - the truly bizarre Oxfordian chronology is available here).

But the Oxfordians distract opponents from this lack of historical evidence with parallels between the texts of the canon and de Vere's biography - and these are, to be sure, plentiful and intriguing. De Vere traveled to Europe (while as far as we know Shakespeare didn't), and his travels map neatly to the locales of Shakespeare's plays; likewise, his personal life contains echoes of the plot of Hamlet, and offers a possible explanation to the mystifying "biography" seemingly evinced by the sonnets.

There are many more such correspondences - enough to make any reasonable person scratch his or her head and ponder whether there's any truth to this particular rumor. But Oxfordian textual claims are easily undermined by the possibility that Edward de Vere may indeed have been a model for Hamlet without having been the author of Hamlet. (As it's known that de Vere sponsored theatre companies and therefore probably mixed with actors privately, it's quite possible Shakespeare could have picked his brain for all manner of details for Hamlet, or other plays.) Indeed, after a little thought, one realizes that the central Oxfordian argument is a bit like insisting that F. Scott Fitzgerald was secretly a Long Island millionaire, or that J.R.R. Tolkien must have been a hobbit.

Indeed, the real mystery about the "man from Stratford" is why so many people have tried to usurp his authorship (almost always in the name of a nobleman, which is rather telling). The Oxfordians themselves point out that Shakespeare is unique in this regard; there are plenty of lacunae in the biographies of other major authors, and composers, and artists, but only Shakespeare has inspired a virtual cottage industry devoted to denying his authorship.

Why is this so? If societies are prone to collective neuroses, as Freud claimed, then what accounts for "the Shakespeare syndrome" (which the good doctor himself fell into)?

Well, one obvious cause is the genuinely strange disjuncture between an achievement that later ages deemed perhaps the greatest artistic legacy ever left by anyone, and the seeming indifference to that legacy exhibited by its author. In a word, when Shakespeare retired, he seemed to shrug off the fact that, as Harold Bloom would have it, he had just "invented the human." There are hints that he collaborated on a few more texts, but his affairs in retirement (and the handful of documents that survive from the period) are utterly quotidian. And he made no effort to gather up, edit, or publish his own work, as Ben Jonson did. What's more, upon his sudden death there seems to have been no outpouring of public mourning (although eventually a monument was raised in Stratford).

I agree that this makes Shakespeare an unusual case, although not quite as unusual in Elizabethan or Jacobean eyes as modern ones (the whole idea of editing and publishing "collected works" was in fact brand new at the time). But for the Oxfordian theory to pass muster, it must, of course, offer a more reasonable explanation for this strange, eventful history than the "Stratford theory" does.

But it doesn't. Indeed, if Edward de Vere actually wrote the canon, his behavior is even more bizarre than that of "the man from Stratford." It's possible, of course, that de Vere used Shakespeare as a front for his plays, as it was widely thought inappropriate for noblemen to write for the theatre (and we know other noblemen used pseudonyms and fronts for their efforts). But this explanation can't actually cover the sonnets, as other noblemen wrote sonnets - and de Vere himself even published a few. What's more, these are generally thought inferior to Shakespeare's, and a computer analysis found little stylistic similarity between his work and the Bard's. Now perhaps there was a bug in that software - but we're still being asked by the Oxfordians to believe that de Vere would publicly take credit for his lesser work while crediting his greater work to someone else. Likewise contemporary accounts actually mention de Vere's plays, and even cite their quality. So he was, in fact, known as a playwright among his set at the time. Oxfordians are therefore in a pretty tight logical knot - their argument is that de Vere was keeping his writing a secret even while his writing was being discussed in public. And that he was taking credit for his weak work, while granting credit for the greatest artistic achievement in history to a nobody from a hick town outside London. And that no one in de Vere's set wanted to rectify that miscarriage of literary justice after his death - while friends of the "man from Stratford" were eager to gather together and publish the same work under Shakespeare's name. Huh?

As I think is pretty clear, the Oxfordian "explanation" for the Shakespearean mystery is actually no explanation at all. Instead, it's a parallel, competing mystery. Of course someday some sort of factual evidence linking de Vere to the canon may emerge. But until then, I'm afraid I'll continue to think of the Oxfordian theory as the latest manifestation of "the Shakespeare syndrome."

Back to the future

You could be forgiven for abandoning the Nora's new production of On the Verge (at left) at half-time - because at that point Eric Overmyer's script seems too postmodern-ly twee, too drunk on its own Victoriography, and too dependent on dramatic filler (the abominable snowman even shows up). But stick with this wordy trek into nebulous metaphor. Because it's actually on the verge of cohering into a sweet, rueful piece of boomer nostalgia. And the able cast, which has a little trouble balancing their vocabularies with their characterizations early on, quickly relaxes (once given some real dramatic material) into a wittily poised ensemble.

Not that Overmyer's early scenes lack charm; it's just that charm is all they've got - and it wears thin over the course of an hour. We quickly get a handle on his affectionately patronizing attitude toward his Victorian ladies (Mary, Fanny and Alexandra), who venture into "Terra Incognita" armed with umbrellas, pith helmets, and apparently the Oxford English Dictionary (don't worry, the Nora provides a glossary for such tongue-twisters as "somnambulist" and "polytopian"). As this trio sallies forth, however, we likewise soon glean that they're actually venturing into Tempus, not Terra, Incognita - soon they're encountering such artifacts as "I Like Ike" buttons and stainless-steel eggbeaters, as well as seeming denizens of the future (all played by the energetically versatile Barlow Adamson).

Now perhaps at its premiere, the play's free-ranging conceptual conceit took longer to sink in; but after two decades of postmodern narrative pranks, we feel we're always a step or two ahead of these determined ladies. And the show's politics likewise feel - well, almost as antiquarian as their bloomers. For we also sense early on (indeed, as soon as that " Ike" button appears) that "the future" is going to turn out to be the American 50's or 60's. (After all, that's where all of history was headed, wasn't it?) And that the play's central concern is going to be these ladies' "liberation" in that great suburban tide of pop commerce and consumer choice.


The women of On the Verge - Alicia Kahn, Deanna Dunmyer, and Anna Waldron.

This perhaps explains the weakness of Overmyer's first act, with its amusing but extraneous cannibals and snowmen - he's just been biding his time before he got to his real material. And once there, he suddenly displays (with the help of Wesley Savick's likewise suddenly-subtle direction) a surprisingly rueful depth. The playwright has only superficially differentiated his characters until now - Mary's the plucky explorer, Fanny's the romantic conservative, Alexandra's the spunky young thing who wants to wear trousers. But at the top of his second half, his theme suddenly deepens, with the introduction of an Angel-of-Death-like figure called "Mr. Coffee," who hints at the sad underside of the explosion of "freedom" in the 50's. For our postwar commercial paradise essentially undoes the adventurous spirit of Fanny and Alexandra (just as it perhaps did our own) - they both settle down, in beehive hair-do's and capri pants, happy with the vast expanse of pop culture paraphernalia that slowly fills the theatre (and which seems to replace their enormous vocabularies). But inevitably, the sense of genuine romance that once animated them evaporates (indeed, Mr. Coffee's big news was that Fanny's lost husband had both betrayed her and subsequently died - and so soon she's curled up with some smarmy lounge singer). Only Mary hangs on to her sense of mission, eventually disappearing into an as-yet-undiscovered future - perhaps where America, too, hangs onto its progressive spirit, and Reaganism never happens.

So there's a kind of mournful critique buried in Overmyer's script that makes it worthwhile - and it's given its full due by the Nora cast. The stand-out here is Alicia Kahn, once a mainstay of the Wellesley Summer Theatre, and who I hope is on the verge of wider visibility in the mid-size theatre scene. Kahn's Fanny gets the best material, I suppose, but the actress also makes the most of it, hinting at a spooked sense of alienation beneath her slow embrace of 1955. Deanna Dunmyer and Anna Waldron remain perhaps slightly more imprisoned in Overmyer's Victorian ventriloquism, but both blossom to a lesser degree as the script marches onward. As their multifarious masculine consort/escort, Barlow Adamson keeps the manic energy level high, but only occasionally slips into caricature (as when he actually has to play a cannibal with gas - can you blame him?). Jacqueline Dalley's costumes are wittily appropriate, and Ryan McGettigan set is surprisingly evocative, while props coordinator Sacha Schawky has amassed a truly impressive collection of pop Americana. This is the strongest offering from the Nora I've seen for some time, and it's nice to see this theatre company get back on track.

Totally off-topic, as well as off-color, but -

The Boston Globe has finally given us a reason for its continued existence. And the story is here.

Be sure to read all 319 comments.

More spring Hubbies

Yes, it's time for another "gratuitous" Michael Phelps photo (but are they ever gratuitous?) - because I've got a new round of Hubbies to distribute, this time to the best productions of the spring 2009 season. (For those who haven't heard, the "Hubbies" are virtual awards in the shape of my favorite Olympic swimmer holding up something inspiring.)

But enough about me and Michael. Looking back, this season seems a strange one - for the first time, almost all the really interesting work came from the smaller companies, although the large and mid-size theatres did manage to squeak in to the runners-up. I should ponder that trend further, but that post can wait till another day. So without further ado, the 2009 Spring Hubbies for the best local theatrical productions go to:



A Moon for the Misbegotten, by Eugene O'Neill, directed by Edward Morgan - Merrimack Repertory Theatre. The kind of production our in-town theatres just don't seem able to do anymore: a classic, challenging text; an insightful director; and a deeply affecting cast (above). That's all, but it was more than enough.

Dark Play, or Stories for Boys, by Carlos Murillo, directed by Danielle Fauteux Jacques - Apollinaire Theatre. This amoral look at the sexual mores of the Internet was performed and paced to near perfection. Mark Vashro and Erez Rose played the alternately deceived and self-deceiving protagonists, at right.

Humble Boy, by Charlotte Jones, directed by Diego Arciniegas - Publick Theater. Jones may be too clearly an imitator of Stoppard - but what's wrong with that, particularly when she's doing better by the old boy than he seems to be able to do himself these days? Director Diego Arciniegas deftly guided a gifted cast through a pastiche of Hamlet, Alan Ayckbourn, and bee-keeping that never quite headed where you thought it was going to.

The Superheroine Monologues, by John Kuntz and Rick Park, directed by Greg Maraio - Phoenix Theatre Artists. Mix two parts loving satire to one part spandex, and you have this witty, original romp from two of the funniest guys on the theatre scene. There were, it's true, a few bumps in these superheroines' respective flights, but at their best they soared above the competition - the script was easily stronger than any of the new work developed and premiered by our larger theatres this year. And the costumes were to die for. I mean it. That's fellow blogger Art Hennessey and his main squeeze, the talented Amanda Hennessey, playing out their personal relationship onstage, at right.

But just so no one feels left out, I do have a few runner-up statuettes, to distribute to the other worthy productions of the season, which included:

Picnic, by William Inge - Stoneham Theatre; The Corn is Green, by Emlyn Williams - Huntington Theatre; A View of the Harbor, by Richard Dresser - Merrimack Repertory Theatre; Picasso at the Lapin Agile, by Steve Martin - New Repertory Theatre; Speech and Debate, by Stephen Karam - Lyric Stage.

Well, that's all for now; but coming soon: more Hubbies for actors, designers and directors.

Singing a song of Shakespeare

Musica Sacra in action.

Last weekend's concert by Musica Sacra was devoted to choral works derived from Shakespeare's texts, and proved for me an exercise in a strange, but pleasurable, displacement. I am so familiar with these songs (or speeches) in their dramatic context (I once even penned my own setting for a song from Midsummer) that it was hard for me to adjust to their translation into a musically beautiful, but thematically simpler, new form. Here, for instance, the symbolism of Sylvia in Two Gentlemen of Verona had gone utterly missing, as had the irony of "Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind" from As You Like It, along with the rueful experience of "O Mistress Mine" from Twelfth Night. Stranger still, as music is one of the Bard's great subjects, I was struck by the fact that a concord of sweet sounds seems somehow far more intellectually interesting when Shakespeare's talking about it than when it's actually being heard.

Perhaps that's why relatively few great composers have attempted to set the Bard to melody; a great musical artist can probably perceive the peculiar challenge of lyrics by the greatest writer who ever lived - and who needs that kind of competition? A lesser talent, however, might hope to bask in something like the Bard's reflected glory. Hence many of these pieces were lovely, but superficial, as they almost have to be - as choral writing. with its multiple vocal lines and endless rising and falling dynamics, inevitably puts a focus on a song's musical surface rather than the contradictions and subtle inflections of its lyrics. For those with little knowledge of the plays, of course, Shakespeare's verses can look deceptively simple and pretty, and this approach is charming. For me, however - and perhaps many others - the effect was rather like sensing a huge aesthetic statement floating silently just off-stage.

Still, sometimes this wasn't the case; plenty of songs in Shakespeare are pure diversion - some, like "It Was a Lover and His Lass," are almost obviously designed to cover a costume or scene change, and perhaps not surprisingly, these were brought to a richer musical polish than ever could be managed in a stage production. Elsewhere gorgeous sound-painting reigned supreme - the eerie whistling in Matthew Harris' "Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind," for instance, was highly effective, as were the calling cuckoos in George Mcfarren's "When Daisies Pied," from Love's Labour's Lost. And sometimes a setting did seem to conjure something close to the mood of the play at that point - stand-outs along these lines were Harris's setting of Ariel's "Full fathom five" speech, and David Hamilton's intriguing treatment of Caliban's "Be not afear'd; the isle is full of noises" soliloquy from The Tempest. And the evening ended with a spiritedly spooky (but hardly menacing) setting of the witches' cauldron song from Macbeth by contemporary Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi.

Perhaps most strange, however, was that the best pieces on the program, Macfarren's "Orpheus with His Lute," Orlando Gibbons's "What is Our Life?," and Robert Ramsey's "Sleep, Fleshly Birth," weren't based on Shakespeare at all - which made one wonder whether lyrics less dense than those of the Bard may actually be best suited to choral song. And this kind of perceived anomaly inevitably led one to wish for more analysis than that proffered in the program by director Mary Beekman, whose comments tended to run along the lines of "What a treat!" Indeed, yes - still, one longed for more insight into her selection process, which seemed to skip back and forth across time and space, yet generally settle in a rather conservative musical mode. Beekman delivered on the podium, however - she drew a lovely sound from the Musica Sacra singers, and managed a subtly pleasing dynamic. The chorus is strongest in its sopranos, who strike a beautifully clear, almost crystalline tone - in general its women are stronger than its men, who don't seem to have much of a low end. And Beekman doesn't really have an outstanding alto or baritone, either, so the polyphony of several pieces tend to blend rather than variegate. That she triumphed over these gaps by sculpting the resulting amalgam into a consistently pleasing form spoke to an un-showy but resourceful and sensitive talent. The Musica Sacra singers are lucky to have her, and we're lucky to have them.

Rumpelstiltskin revised

I spent Friday evening in the basement of the Boston Conservatory, checking out Marti Epstein's Rumpelstiltskin, a new chamber piece presented by Guerilla Opera, a local group dedicated to shaking up the opera scene (the final performance was Monday). The production had much to recommend it: the minimal staging was consistently intriguing, with a clean physical design and evocative rear projections (and even a simple but effectively creepy digital animation at the finish). But it was inevitably limited by its rather obvious politics, and its circumscribed musical vocabulary.

For this was hardly the Brothers-Grimm version of "Rumpelstiltskin," (Arthur Rackham's version, at left) which is a potent amalgam of folk-tale motifs (the pretty commoner who becomes queen, the wicked forest sprite, the search for a magical name or talisman, etc.). Composer/librettist Marti Goldstein (with adapter/director Greg Smucker) had instead transmuted this familiar material into a sad feminist fable, in which Rumpelstiltskin (Aliana de la Guardia) was a deformed, psychologically wounded woman, and even the miller (who gets the story going by foolishly bragging that his daughter can spin straw into gold) sang a soprano vocal line (although he was played by a male, Matthew Truss). Thus victimized "wymyn" crowded the scene, gender issues were somewhat pointlessly in play, and the only unambiguously-rendered 'male' on hand was the oppressive, self-satisfied king (Victor Jannett), who marries and - at least in this version - eventually executes his mate with impassive alacrity.

This is not to argue that the original tale does not reflect a cruelly sexist social hegemony - it does; but somehow this provides more narrative kick than the barely-disguised political instruction proferred here. Although frankly, with more variety in the voices, even this reworking might have proved fairly compelling. But with three sopranos duking it out for stage-time, things got a little dull vocally, largely because composer Epstein had mostly provided her singers with what my partner calls "standard-issue academic writing" - that is, quasi-Asian, vaguely gamelan-esque post-minimalism that pretty much defies the normal cadence of speech and song: a recipe for fairly aggressive (if somewhat exotic) tedium. To be fair, the music was highly wrought, and Epstein sometimes generated a haunting atmosphere from her small, talented ensemble: but as opera, the music often felt stillborn. Epstein seemed to be subconsciously subscribing to the idea that operatic music should create a contemplative atmosphere, rather than foster dramatic development, pace Philip Glass (after Bertolt Brecht); but the victimology of her Rumpelstiltskin was essentially as sentimental as Puccini, just in the academy's progressive political mode.

Still, Epstein and adapter Smucker had thought up an interesting final twist, in which Rumpelstiltskin does not disappear in a fury, but rather leaves a very unpleasant legacy behind. This idea, of a literal deformity perpetuated by political deformity, was certainly resonant, and in addition to the successfully avant staging made at least the opera's last moments memorable. Of the singers, Aliana de la Guardia, decked out in horror-movie contact lenses, fared best as Rumpelstiltskin (and her strange, distracted body language gave hints that the music was intended as a concrete emanation of her seeming autism). Perhaps most striking, however, was male soprano Matthew Truss, who brought impressive lung power to a startlingly high vocal line; alas, perhaps too much power - at close range the soprano ensembles got shrieky. As an experiment, I suppose all this was laudable; still, Guerilla Opera might be wise to admit that sometimes, experiments don't yield their desired results.