Messiah at Handel and Haydn Society

Jesse Levine plays like an angel.  Photo(s): Kyle T. Hemingway.

One of the sillier aspects of our age is the proliferation of pseudo-"rebellions" in the performing arts. As the populace behaves more and more like sheep in the political sphere, ironically enough, they seem to be aping revolutionaries at the theatre.  Sometimes I think there ought to be a word for this phenomenon (I nominate "fauxbellion") - or at least for its more irritating forms, like the new-fangled tendency not to stand during the "Hallelujah Chorus"of Handel's Messiah.  People who yawned at the invasion of Iraq seem, oddly enough, to take this issue close to heart.  Apparently they imagine being couch potatoes throughout the rousing climax to this fantastic oratorio counts as some sort of statement.

But to be blunt, you should stand during the "Hallelujah Chorus."  Not for George II, of course (who, legend has it, began the tradition, perhaps without realizing it).  And not for the Baby Jesus, either - at least not necessarily.

You should stand for Handel.  For artistic greatness.  For recognized artistic greatness, which it doesn't hurt to re-recognize once a year.

And you should stand for the Handel and Haydn Society chorus and orchestra, too, at least when they're in as fine a form as they were last weekend.  Artistic director Harry Christophers once more worked a kind of miracle with their combined forces, conjuring from many of the choruses huge, exquisitely balanced musical experiences that seemed to expand before your eyes like fields of stars.  This year's "For to us a Child is born," for example, was hands-down the greatest performance of this chestnut I've ever heard, ever (even from H&H), and hot on its heels were powerful renderings of the fugue "He trusted in God that He would deliver Him," and, of course, that famous chorus discussed at top.

Meanwhile the orchestra was (mostly) in just as splendid shape - new concert mistress Aisslin Nosky was missing (due to commitments entered into prior to signing with H&H), but the strings sounded just as transparent and robust as they had at their last outing, and on their first appearance (as the trumpets of the angels, up in the balconies of Symphony Hall, at top), the horns sounded wonderful, too - alas, later on, in the most exposed playing of the oratorio ("The trumpet shall sound") things got wobbly - which is always a risk when you're playing a "natural" horn (that is, one with no valves).

As for the soloists - well, as has sometimes happened before, they were a slight puzzlement.  Fine singers all, but rather a motley crew; I still don't understand what Christophers is going for in his line-ups for Messiah.  This time we got a bel canto soprano, the elegant Sarah Coburn, with a glowing bloom at the top of her range; but she didn't have the crispest diction when set against the pinpoint enunciations of the chorus (from her bio, it's clear she's used to singing in Italian).  And Coburn was paired with a countertenor, Lawrence Zazzo - who had an intriguing timbre and sang with mournful fire, but who, like most countertenors, scraped a bit on the low notes of the role.  Meanwhile Tom Randle, who is familiar from many previous H&H outings, seemed to take his time warming up - although his initial diffidence did give way to more assured power as the evening wore on.  Baritone Tyler Duncan, by way of contrast, was powerful from the start, and also boasted an intriguingly complex timbre - but he, too, dicted a bit slackly, mostly because he tended to drop away at the ends of his lines.

To be fair - all had fine moments, and all are interesting singers; it was just hard to see how they fit together as a set, as a statement.  That question only exists, though, because by now the orchestra and chorus have become so cohesive.  So someday, I'm sure (perhaps after years of tinkering), Christophers will find a dream quartet to match the accompanying musical forces he has tuned so finely.

It's a Wonderful Life, but a lousy market economy

The brilliant "bank run" scene from Capra's classic.

I took last Saturday night "off," as it were, and let the performing arts fend for themselves - and instead  curled up at home before the TV.  And to my happy surprise, I found It's a Wonderful Life had begun its holiday rotation.

It's by now a commonplace, of course, that Shakespeare seems to map to every age; and maybe great films do, too.  For certainly Frank Capra's last masterpiece qualifies as great, and certainly in today's hard times it seems more resonant than ever.

Of course to some, the movie's sentimental message makes it a tough sell - and I won't make any apologies for the angels and twinkly stars that overlay much of Life; Capra lays it on pretty thick in spots. But I've often noticed that the movie's skeptics always miss the hard center beneath the sweet surface of what used to be called "Capra-corn."

For there's a worldly awareness at the bottom of Capra's vision that you won't find at the multiplex today - not even in the best from Spielberg or Pixar.  Indeed, Capra regularly trades in situations we just wouldn't tolerate in family entertainment anymore.  Consider that It's a Wonderful Life features (right off the top) a little boy who, playing with no supervision, almost drowns in a frozen pond - his brother saves him, but as a result loses his hearing in one ear.  This is disturbing enough, but then a drunken (and heart-broken) druggist boxes that boy on his injured ear until it bleeds (as he wails in pain); in Spielberg, retribution would be swift: such a character would quickly be eaten by a dinosaur or shark.   Yet in Capra's movie, it's natural that innocents are left unprotected, and suffer as a result - and that people who under some circumstances can be terribly cruel are also redeemable, and even perhaps basically gentle and good (that druggist, Mr. Gower, becomes one of the hero's closest friends).

In fact throughout It's a Wonderful Life a highly un-sentimental view of existence prevails, beneath the sweet fairy tale of angels getting their wings.  People cut ethical corners left and right (like George Bailey's handsome brother Harry, who leaves George stuck with the family building-and-loan), and are constantly tempted by the blandishments of money and sex (like Gloria Grahame's Violet, who's always on the edge of slipping from "bad girl" status to something worse).  Or they're simply weak, like George's Uncle Billy (the great Thomas Mitchell), who fumbles through life, making messes of things, then drinks to console himself.  The seemingly bucolic Bedford Falls is really no kind of utopia - something serious is always at stake there, and someone or something is always hanging in the moral  balance.

Of course the film constantly reminds us, too, that people can surprise you.  The callow Harry becomes a war hero - just as Mr. Gower turns out to be a saint - and even Violet thinks better of her ways.  The movie's conceit is that there's a kind of moral force field in town that keeps nudging people back on, or at least near to, the straight and narrow (and which draws its only real power from the sacrifices of people like George).  Thus no one in It's a Wonderful Life is precisely, or only, what they seem to be; they're always capable of far better, and far worse.

The dark side of Life - George in crisis.

Even the idealistic hero, George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart, at left, in an iconic role), isn't really what he at first appears.  The townsfolk always seem delighted with him, but every time I see It's a Wonderful Life, I'm struck by how much anger and frustration are roiling around in Stewart's performance.  All George wants to do is escape from Bedford Falls, and he's often furious when over and over again, his moral duties and feelings frustrate that desire.

And yet in that very frustration, he nevertheless finds something - well, wonderful (and so do we).  Which leads me to something else intrinsic to the movie that you won't find at the multiplex: the admission that moral action demands sacrifice.  The sentimental, consumerist bromides of our own age insist you can become rich by being virtuous - which easily bleeds into the sleazier insinuation that riches operate as their own moral validation.  But Capra (pardon my French) calls bullshit on all that crap.  Morality has its rewards, the director tells us - and great ones - but they're not physical or financial.  George saves his brother only by losing half his hearing; and he and Mary only preserve the building and loan by giving up their honeymoon.  Being good will cost you something.

All this, of course, speaks of a kind of moral scope (and sense of everyday moral danger) that's all but lost to us today. And it's hard not to feel that this moral dimension is tied to something else that's more striking than ever about It's a Wonderful Life: the fact that it offers the most sophisticated view of economic life ever committed to American film.  Indeed, the famous "bank run" scene (at top) is so financially complex that - even though its developing situation is described quite accurately and explicitly as it unfolds - everyone I've ever spoken to about it essentially mis-remembers it (the Bailey Building & Loan isn't actually in any trouble, for instance, even though most people imagine that's the case - the crisis has been precipitated by a run on a bank down the street).

Some viewers have watched this scene and claimed that the moral points it scores are false, assuming that the Bailey Building and Loan must have been involved in the kind of high-risk mortgages that contributed to the Great Recession of 2008.  But of course nothing could be further from the truth.  First, as I stated earlier, the Bailey Building and Loan is presented as quite solvent (Uncle Billy only locks its doors because the local bank, in full melt-down, has demanded its liquid assets on short notice, so there's no cash in the till).  And we understand that while the Bailey collection policy has involved flexibility in hard times, its customers aren't deadbeats.  Indeed, George Bailey certainly hasn't off-loaded his debts in the derivatives market, because he knows his customers - and in hard times, their character has sometimes operated as their collateral.

All of this is alien to the economy of 2008, but wait - it gets "worse" (if you're a libertarian, that is): George Bailey bails out the Building and Loan (note that pun in his surname) by giving Ayn Rand the swift kick in the ass she deserves, and offering up his own assets - he and Mary's nest-egg for their honeymoon - to cover the day's cash demands.  He also makes a slew of promises and statements to his customers that are perfectly illegal, and he swings the entire deal without ever consulting his Board. The whole scene is a short course in how when the bottom falls out of a market, no amount of economic tinkering can fix it; only personal commitment can assuage the panic.  And thus George holds the building and loan together - but only by ignoring both his legal "responsibilities" and the mores of the free market.

Which is no surprise to anyone who has spent time in Real Life, as opposed to Second Life, and knows that the "invisible hand of the market" must always be guided from self-destruction by another invisible hand - that of the community.  But if the people like George Bailey who gave that guidance were to vanish, then there would be no salvation possible - and thus the film's final nightmare vision of the world as it would be without him.  The new main street of casinos, honky-tonks and pawn shops that George faces there plays today as amusingly hysterical - but is it so far from the truth?  Indeed, isn't that precisely what Massachusetts is turning into even as we speak?  To be blunt, to today's viewers, "Pottersville" is no hypothetical dystopia - indeed, it looks utterly familiar; it's a Las-Vegas vision many people promote every day with a straight face.  Only look at the faces you find there - this is when It's a Wonderful Life becomes far more frightening than its ultimate source, A Christmas Carol.  In the world as run by Ebeneezer Scrooge, Mr. Gower is humiliated and utterly abject - desperate and dazed, he even chuckles along with his own abuse; Ma Bailey runs her flophouse with a face like a hatchet and eyes like a vulture; and we see poor Violet, screaming at the top of her lungs, as she is thrown out into the street for lewd behavior.

Of course maybe all this seems more poignant now because we're so lost as a nation, so unable to even envision what we must do to prevail over our current crisis.  When It's a Wonderful Life was first enshrined on the nation's cable channels, the Reagan Republicans had only just begun to tear at the social fabric - and the movie's liberal platitudes had begun to sound quaint.  Now, of course, free market theory is triumphant, and so It's a Wonderful Life has quickly morphed from a corny Hallmark card to a sad memento of a paradise lost.  For there are no George Baileys left to save us from Mr. Potter, and we all live in Pottersville now.

Thoughts on the phony progressive politics of the theatre

Gandhi's statue at Occupy Boston.

You know, I am not really an activist, but I do try to get out there when it counts, when showing up makes a difference. I support Occupy Boston financially, and visit as often as I can. Back when the Massachusetts Supreme Court made marriage equality a possibility in this state, I went to the marches and spent days at the State House, laughing at the praying nuns and the bleach-blonde moms shipped up by bus by the Baptists.  And I was in the crowd facing the riot police when the protests got a little rough at Boston's Democratic Convention - which I admit was frightening, although I still remember with affection the guy who kept yelling, "They're not scary if you picture them naked!" as we were pushed relentlessly back by the advancing line of plexiglass shields and automatic weapons.

And you know, I have to say one thing - I've almost never seen people from the theatre out there when it counted.  I don't remember seeing any actors or directors or playwrights at these events (or critics either).   Instead I always seem to see the same folks - the earnest, scruffy college kids, and the lesbian ministers, and the guy in the wheelchair, and the crunchy septuagenarians with their stringy hair and their beads and rainbow shirts who, let's face it, have always been in the right about everything.

I don't really feel the presence of the theatre, though.  And certainly nobody at the protests thinks about the theatre (aside from maybe the Bread and Puppet folks).  They know today's theatre follows, but never leads, the breaking political movements.  You can count on the theatre to show up late, watching itself in the mirror.

But God, you would imagine from reading the theatre's own journals and blogs that it was somehow on the barricades.  There's a constant ongoing battle, in fact, over who can look more progressive than whom.  The world marches on without it, but the theatre still dreams it's leading the charge, and that its internecine squabbles are somehow mystically driving the dialogue.  If only!

Which may be why I get pissed off (too pissed off, I know) when I read self-promotional material like this.  On the one hand, I suppose, good for its author: she certainly understands how to get ahead in her little fishbowl (the other fish are all applauding).  On the other hand - for chrissakes, to somebody who shivered in the cold and shouted down the opposition for the sake of marriage equality (or any equality) this all just looks so spoiled and obnoxious: an elaborate moral toilette that's all but indistinguishable from narcissism.  No wonder nobody really takes the theater seriously!  It has no fucking skin in the game.  (I note the Youngblog's latest gambit is to "Brunchify Wall Street" - oh, how clever!) Seriously, you can't be a saint and a self-promoter at the same time - well, maybe you can in the blogosphere, and on the new play circuit, and even in Paula's playwriting class - but not at the pearly gates, if you know what I mean.  And I think the people on the ground can feel the difference.  The theatre won't really be politically relevant again until that changes.

Ain't quite Misbehavin'

Robin Long, Lovely Hoffman, Davron S. Monroe, Lori Tishfield, and Calvin Braxton in Ain't Misbehavin'. Photo: Mark S. Howard.

You've probably already heard the news about the Lyric Stage's Ain't Misbehavin'; this edition of the venerable revue tries a little too hard for its own good, and so never achieves the happy, ribald ease of earlier versions seen at the North Shore and Trinity Rep.  The cast is certainly talented, but most of them read as a little young - and while Fats Waller wrote his wicked, knowing hits when he was in his twenties and thirties (he died at 39!), his best numbers go down best when sung by performers who exude a certain experience and maturity - and let's be honest, are of a certain size, too; a Fats Waller revue is one of those rare forums where a plus-size power mama can get as down and dirty as she wants to be, and half this cast is just too skinny, eager and cute!  It doesn't help that director/choreographer Josie Bray has removed the revue's traditional piano from the stage (okay, I guess it's still there - in a way - in David Towlun's elegant backdrop), and tried to fill the resulting void with lots of high-energy dance routines.  (Indeed, at times you half-expect Ben Vereen to jump in from the wings and make with the "jazz hands" - and that's just wrong!)

Still, what can I say; the cast is talented, and of course the material is great - Waller aficionados won't be satisfied with this version, but I think virgins will find it fun.  And the band is tight, the musical direction strong, and the cast is well-trained - they manage an exquisite five-part harmony, for instance, even though they're spread across the stage, in the mournful Black and Blue (at top) - probably this production's highlight.  There are other good moments, too - the show seems to warm up (and loosen up) as it goes along. Lovely Hoffman, who's most often at home in the material, brings a genuine broken heart to Mean to Me, for instance, and the versatile Davron S. Monroe slinks sleazily, if somewhat calculatedly, through The Viper's Drag/The Reefer Song.  And Robin Long brings a witty edge to Squeeze Me, while Lori Tishfield definitely gives Your Feet's Too Big everything she's got.  Meanwhile the effervescent Calvin Braxton does manage to sell every number - just by being a tireless dancer (he's surprisingly light on his feet) and an utterly determined entertainer.  Braxton's a bit innocently blank to conjure Fats himself, however - whose arched eyebrows and gleaming eyes always hinted at a brainy, bemused critique of the sated appetites his songs so often celebrated. There's just something too squeaky-clean about Braxton - and about the whole revue, in fact. Which may be why, though often diverting, this show ain't quite Misbehavin.'

Three Viewings at the New Rep

Joel Colodner, Adrianne Krstansky and Christine Power in Three Viewings.  Photo by Andrew Brilliant.

For those who appreciate the fine art of acting, I'd say that Three Viewings (at the New Rep through Dec. 18) may be required viewing. The script itself, by Jeffrey Hatcher, is a set of three highly (almost ostentatiously) crafted solos for individual actors - all, we slowly realize, on the themes of love and death; indeed, all are set in the same funeral home (God, I seem to be seeing a lot of this kind of thing these days, but that's not Hatcher's fault).  This up-and-coming playwright [Whoops!  Rob Whiner-Kendt, of the "Wicked Stage" blog, wants you to know the play is from 1994, and that Hatcher is not "up and coming," but rather an aging hack who wrote at least one good play that is making the regional rounds; he is better known - as far as he IS known - for forgettable movies like "The Duchess."  Thanks Rob!  Now back to the review.] strikes me, after a second exposure (his A Picasso played at the Merrimack last year), as quite clever and certainly skilled, if not highly original.  Some of his scenarios push the edge of credibility (are there really jewel thieves who nibble the earrings right off corpses? - much as I enjoyed this metaphor, I found it a hard sell), and the tone of his script is familiar from the likes of Six Feet Under and other cable fodder (like a lot of playwrights, Hatcher has had most of his success writing screen- and tele-plays, and something of the conceptual limits of those formats has leaked back into his stage work).

Still, there is that craft, whether it's ostentatious or not (just about every detail Hatcher drops in exposition he returns to as he ties up his narrative bow at the finish).  And the playwright juggles various metaphors with ease, while conjuring distinct voices for his characters; all that (plus his Rod-Serling-esque Twilight-Zone sense of irony) leads to a lot of pleasing turns and dips in his narrative line.  After a slow start, Three Viewings definitely hooks you, and teases you expertly until its satisfying, campfire-story conclusion.

Of course, it's hard not to get hooked on a narrative line with actors like these as bait.  All three of the performers at the New Rep - Joel Colodner, Christine Power, and Adrianne Krstansky - are stalwarts of the local scene, and under Jim Petosa's nuanced direction (and on Cristina Todesco's elegant set), all are either holding to their usual high standards or (in one case) completely transcending them.  Colodner probably seems the least secure in his performance right now; but then he's the opening act, so he has to somehow sell the whole concept, and to be honest, his storyline is the simplest, and weakest, of the three - although it's not without interest, and does eventually open up to reveal an affecting depth.  (Hatcher is a pretty good critic of his own stuff - he has cannily structured the evening so it builds to his best work.)

The next two "episodes" (sorry) are more satisfyingly complicated, and slide smoothly back and forth between complex moral questions.  To Hatcher's tale of a funerary thief with a devastating secret, Christine Power brings a confidently smug corporate finish, along with an intriguingly wounded emotional undertow (and a precise command of detail).  But it's really Adrianne Krstansky who walks off with the show in the last and best vignette.  As a nice-but-naïve matron who discovers her dead husband was hardly the man she thought he was, Ms. Krstansky is very much in her element, and is working in the kind of intimate space where her familiar emotional transparency is at its best advantage.

Even so, it must be said that she lights up the room (even though she barely moves) with a performance that seems to explore and extend every nook and cranny of her character. Indeed, watching Krstansky, you feel that she's getting at something like the essence of emotional presence, and the variety of her vocal performance may become a legend.  The New Rep seems to save its best acting for its small, basement space; after Anne Gottlieb's turn in Frankie and Johnny last December, I recall the critics buzzing in the lobby in precisely the same way.  For those who are curious as to what it takes to get an award nomination in this town, I'd advise a trip to Three Viewings for the short course.

Surreal love story

Once again time has gotten away from me and I haven't written about something I meant to.  This time that something is Man Ray/Lee Miller, Partners in Surrealism, which closes at the Peabody Essex Museum this weekend.

And it's one of the best museum shows of the year, so if you haven't caught it yet, this is your last chance to take in perhaps the only exhibit I've ever seen that actually operates as a heart-breaking love story.

For Partners in Surrealism details the decades-long relationship between Lee Miller and the more famous Man Ray (his besotted portrait of her, at left).  At first the two knew each other as teacher and student; soon, however, they became lovers, even though Ray had the look of some beetle-browed Kafka character, while Miller, already a famous model, was widely considered one of the most striking women in roaring-twenties Paris.  Actually, while gazing at her own calmly rendered nude self-portraits, it's tempting to claim she was one of the beauties of the century.  With her delicate yet plush frame, and a boyish bob framing features that would have rivaled Lauren Bacall's, Miller seemed both an androgynous seductress and an alienated innocent, and the combination all but drove Ray mad; her lips alone inspired one of his most famous icons (below).

Miller's lips dominate the landscape in an iconic Ray image.

For a time the two thrived together, working as near-equals in Ray's studio (Miller is often credited for accidentally discovering solarization, which Ray claimed as his own).  But Miller was a notorious free spirit - a popular wineglass was actually molded from her breast - and was hardly content to play surrealist muse for Ray;  her various liaisons brought their affair to an end within two years.  But in some ways, as the Peabody Essex show demonstrates, it never ended.  Ray was all but shattered by her departure; and tellingly enough, soon began designing surreal works derived from her image which he could shatter in turn - preferably, as he put it, "with one blow."

He was never successful, however, no matter how many blows he struck - years later, he was still painting his memories of Miller, even though she had long since moved on to a career of her own in photography (she never made the kind of conceptual breakthroughs that Ray did, but many of her portraits and photographs - particularly those from Germany after the war - are clearly the work of a master; at left, an image of a Nazi suicide).  Eventually the two reconciled as friends - indeed, the exhibit includes one of the most touching letters I've ever read (clearly a love letter) from Ray to his former muse near the end of both their lives.  Some seventeen years her senior, he died only a year before she did;  but then I don't think he would have wished to outlive her.

To hell and back with Boston Early Music Festival

Douglas Williams, Mireille Asselin and ensemble in Hades.

What is period musical performance for?

For its enthusiasts, the answer is simply the beauty of the music itself, which is most authentically conveyed in the language of the instruments for which it was written.  And this argument has proven so convincing over the years that organizations like the BSO - which basically plays on nineteenth-century instruments - has slowly had to shed from its schedule much of the early "classical" repertoire (and some argue should really shed Mozart and Haydn, too).

But when it comes to period opera, things get a bit trickier, and the early music movement must face the issues with which theatrical artists have long since grappled, which perhaps could be summed up as, "How do we stay true to classic values while remaining contemporary, too?"  Given that the major aim of many in the early music movement is to replicate as closely as possible all the original performance conditions of the works in question (whole concert halls are being designed after period models, in fact, and built of "authentic" materials), the attempt to provide contemporary meaning in what amounts to a costume drama can seem almost paradoxical.

But over recent years the brilliant Gilbert Blin, house director at the Boston Early Music Festival, has reliably devised smart, subtle subversions of this apparent contradiction.  Blin isn't really all that interested in period tableaux vivant for its own sake - he's intrigued instead by what it actually tells us about its period, as well as what it tells us about ourselves.  Thus, particularly in his chamber operas, he sets his productions in precise historical moments (sometimes a specific weekend) in which actual historical figures like Alexander Pope or Molière may figure in the action, or even take the stage.  What Blin attempts to conjure is a kind of meta-historical performance, in which something like the period itself appears before us, draped in its own theatrical trappings.


Admittedly, Blin's aim can sometimes wobble (last year's Dido was a bit of a mixed bag), but his ideas are always suggestive, and at any rate he was firing on all cylinders this year, with a double bill of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's La Descente d’Orphée aux Enfers and La Couronne de Fleurs that transfixed audiences at BEMF last weekend.  The musical performance was always exemplary, Blin's elegantly simple staging was often haunting, and the historical metaphors he teased from the material were pleasingly resonant.  My only regret was that the production had only two performances; like his great Acis and Galatea, this is another Blin masterpiece that deserves to tour.

Aaron Sheehan as Orpheus

Blin's first brainstorm was an inspired gambit to get around the fact that, to put it bluntly, we've lost the last act of Charpentier's Orphée; the extant manuscript simply ends with Orpheus and Eurydice groping their way together out of Hades - before the final tragedy that dashes their romantic dreams a second time. To explain this gap, Blin has nestled the larger opera within a kind of operatic short subject - La Couronne de Fleurs, Charpentier's prologue to Molière's Le Malade Imaginaire, a satire which, believe it or not, opened at the court of Louis XIV with an opera and ballet attached.

La Couronne de Fleurs is a fairly simple set of ditties in which Flora asks her friends (who happen to be nymphs and shepherdesses, of course) to compose odes to Louis XIV's grandeur. The ensuing concert is eventually cut off by the god Pan, however, who explains that it's pointless; try as they might, they can never do justice to the big guy himself. Blin's conceit is that Orphée is part of this brief performance - with Pan's interruption explaining the loss of the third act. Okay, we're never quite sure how Orpheus precisely maps to Louis, but in general the opposition of these two works is hauntingly resonant; Flora recalls Proserpine, the nymph of spring confined to Pluto's court in winter, and of course poor Molière departed for the underworld himself after a performance of Le Malade Imaginaire, never to return.  Blin even dresses Pan as one of Louis's courtiers - hinting that what is being silenced is not just Orphée but Charpentier himself (who soon fell from favor before the rising star of Lully).

So Blin's meta-opera is like a wreath of historic and artistic allusions to love and death - it keeps ramifying subtly in our consciousness even as we watch.  And luckily the director seems to know his ideas are so strong he can keep his staging to an exquisite, evocative minimum - while what design touches he does choose often perform double thematic duty: Flora's ring of roses around the musical consort, for instance (at top), could serve as either a bouquet for Eurydice's wedding or her funeral; likewise, the ghostly shades in Hell wander about in bridal veils.  And I'll never forget Eurydice and Orpheus's slow, sombre march (almost touching) out of the auditorium as Charpentier's gorgeous farewell song unfolded.  In this truncated Orphée, of course, they seem to get away - Orpheus never turns, and Eurydice is never lost again to Hades; death is suspended; it is only in "life" itself (as opposed to "art") that their story is interrupted, and their love destroyed.

Of course the ensemble of talented musicians and vocalists BEMF has by now attracted had a lot to do with the success of the production, too. Local star Aaron Sheehan made a clarion, committed Orphée, but he faced stiff vocal competition from Douglas Williams's powerful Pluton (whose bass notes indeed seemed to scrape the roof of the underworld) as well as Olivier Laquerre's bemused, lyrical Apollo. Meanwhile Mireille Asselin made a delightfully ripe Flora, and Carrie Henneman Shaw a startlingly moving Eurydice; indeed, her death scene, which I've seen dozens of times in countless versions of the myth, gripped me here as it never had before. The chorus was likewise in fine form, with subtle solo turns from Jason McStoots, Michael Kelly and Brenna Wells. The instrumentalists were equally dazzling, under the direction of resident early-music geniuses Paul O'Dette and Stephen Stubbs. The entire production cohered admirably; my only regret regarding it was that it only played for two nights (and over the Thanksgiving weekend, no less)! Perhaps, if the gods smile once more on Orpheus, it will get a second chance at theatrical life.

Tea Lobo, Mireille Asselin and the chorus join Orpheus in song.