Soprano Norah Amsellem is no stranger to the role of Micaela in Bizet’s Carmen. She made her Metropolitan Opera debut in 1997 in the role, with Placido Domingo as Don Jose, though this wasn’t the first time she had sung with him. As an eight-year-old in France, at the Paris choir school for children, she was in the children’s chorus in Carmen with Domingo and Julia Migenes-Johnson as the leads.
Micaela has remained a role Amsellem enjoys each time she sings her, each time adding detail and subtext to her character. “I don’t want to repeat the role over and over again,” she says.
The character, however, is whoever the stage director says she is, and that can vary, Amsellem comments, from a drug addict to a convent novice. Sometimes she feels the stage director’s ideas are “off the wall, but you have to make it work, you have to find a way to make it work or look totally stupid. In a way it’s fun to do that.”
Seattle Opera’s upcoming production of Carmen, which starts Saturday, October 15, is a traditional one. Although set in Spain, the opera is French to the core, and this production with a French director, Bernard Uzan, brings that out.
“The essence of Carmen herself is very French,” says Amsellem. “Sometimes she is portrayed as vulgar and physical (which Amsellem feels is all wrong). She looks good because of her mind. Like Violetta (in Verdi’s La Traviata, a favorite role of Amsellem’s) she is charming and intelligent and knows how to get out of situations. And she is flirty.” Summing up, Amsellem says, “She has to have a certain allure,” and she says this in the French way, allure, so that one is left in no doubt as to the subtle come-hither aspect of allure.
Micaela, on the other hand, is a strong, tough peasant girl in her portrayal. “She comes from the country where she has been looking after Don Jose’s mother, going to the well, maybe a couple of miles, to fetch water. She’s an orphan who has had a hard life, and who goes to church. When she goes to find Jose, she finds the big city wonderful, but a bit scary as it’s all new to her.”
Amsellem presumes that Micaela is somewhere between 16 and 18, because she hasn’t seen Jose for three years while he was in prison, and now he doesn’t quite recognize her as she has grown up and changed, become more of a woman. She isn’t used to being flirted with by the soldiers, but is strong enough to handle them, joking, while it is a bit scary all the same.
At this point in the opera, Micaela hopes to marry Jose, as does his mother, but she sees him arrested again at the end of Act 1, while Jose still considers her a child, and “he’s no pedophile,” says Amsellem.
Returning to find him in the smugglers’ hang out in Act 2, she says Micaela has given up any hope of marrying him and of her hopes for a happy life, and is just trying get him home to see his dying mother.
While Micaela is always a role Amsellem enjoys doing, her particular favorites are Manon in Massenet’s opera of that name, and Violetta, because they evolve so much from beginning to end of the operas. “There are so many colors you can bring to the part, so it’s challenging and interesting to me.” Then, there is Desdemona in Verdi’s Otello, again for the colors and she loves the music. Roles she has performed for Seattle Opera are Elvira in the recent I Puritani, and Gilda in Rigoletto.
On her wish list are Marguerite in Gounod’s Faust, all three heroines in Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffman, also Donizetti’s Anna Bolena and Puccini’s La Rondine, maybe Bellini’s Norma down the road. Not Lucia di Lammermoor. “It’s too high,” she says.
Meanwhile, the young soprano is happy to be back in Seattle where she feels at home—enough so to complain about the rain. “I always love coming back here. Speight (Jenkins) is wonderful, always friendly, the singers all get along, and Speight and the conductor are always at every rehearsal—and that is not always so in other places.”
This summer’s superb production by Seattle Opera is one nobody should miss. Porgy and Bess (through August 20 at McCaw Hall; tickets here) is the American opera. This is about our country, a small group of our people, and despite it being set 70 years ago, the background is one we all recognize.
We recognize the songs, too: “Summertime,” “Bess, You is My Woman Now,” “It ain’t Necessarily So” are just three arias from Porgy which have found their way into the heads of countless Americans.
For years the opera was considered a hybrid, more a musical, and the recitatives taken out and replaced with speech, perhaps because the subject was homegrown, but George Gershwin who composed it, and Ira Gershwin and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward who wrote the libretto, intended it as a full-scale opera. Since 1976, that’s how it has been regarded, and that is where it belongs.
However, not everyone loves grand opera. Stories are often mythical or historical, set in another country in another era, often in another language (though with supertitles so we can understand what is going on) and not everyone is tuned into what can be a rarified art form.
Porgy and Bess, however, speaks to everyone.
There are 20 singing roles, and in Seattle Opera’s production every one is strong, from the smallest cameo like Strawberry Woman (sung by Ibidunni Ojikutu), to the nine principals. And the chorus! Gershwin gives a huge role to the chorus, and the new young singers who were auditioned last November to be this chorus have delivered in spades.
Gershwin stipulated that the entire cast, bar a few small speaking roles, be black, and in this country that dictum has been faithfully followed.
Seattle Opera’s general director, Speight Jenkins, has said that he wouldn’t present Porgy without the right lead roles, and for this, he was able to bring in a veteran Porgy, baritone Gordon Hawkins, who is no stranger to Seattle Opera (who will forget his Rigoletto?). His acting and powerful singing inhabit the role of this crippled man, though there is a bit wider vibrato these days in his voice. Soprano Lisa Daltirus (remember her as Tosca? Aida?) is his Bess, in a portrayal which shows her as, literally, a troubled, “scarlet” woman who tries to leave her abusive man, goes straight for a while with Porgy, but falls back when forcibly tempted. Her singing Saturday night was at the top of her form, as expressive as ever.
Opening the opera on a qualitative high note which never drops, soprano Angel Blue sings “Summertime” as Clara; soprano Mary Elizabeth Williams, one of Seattle Opera’s former Young Artists, shows that her promise as both singer and actor has arrived at fruition as Serena; tenor Jermaine Smith has impeccable timing, great acrobatics and fine singing as the natty dope peddler Sportin’ Life, while tenor Michael Redding embodies the smoldering menace of Crown, Bess’s dangerous lover; Donovan Singletary provides a beautiful and powerful bass-baritone as Clara’s husband Jake; tenor Michael Austin’s Robbins is yet another voice to be reckoned with., and contralto Gwendolyn Brown held the stage whenever she came to the fore, as Maria.
It’s worth mentioning every one of these singers is a performer it is sheer pleasure to hear, and you hope that they all will be returning to Seattle Opera in the future. All of them, the women particularly, sang with what I can only describe as a glorious green-gold iridescence to their vocal quality.
None of this would have come together as it did without the stage direction of Chris Alexander. He was the novice here, the only one who had never done this opera before, though he knew it well. The close rapport between him and the singers meant he could apply his considerable art at staging while they gave him their take on all sorts of details. The collaboration has been extremely successful.
Today’s digital possibilities added another dimension with the projection of the hurricane on a scrim at the front of the stage. For a while, the orchestra was silent while the fury of the storm and the pounding rain and scudding clouds traveled across the screen, and the sound of the howling winds masked the sound of scene changing behind it. More projections, including the aftermath of the storm with broken fishing boats, added to the overall ambience.
Sets by Michael Scott, lighting by Duane Schuler, and costumes by Christina Giannini all furthered the action, while John DeMain who conducted that first 1976 production of Porgy at Houston Grand Opera, and has conducted many since, did so here with a sure hand and expert pacing, the orchestra negotiating the difficult score with ease, while Beth Kirchhoff achieved miracles with her hardworking chorus.
“What struck me very strongly is that it’s a well-made play,” says Chris Alexander, stage director for the upcoming Porgy and Bess for Seattle Opera (at McCaw Hall from July 30 to August 20; tickets $25-$241: 206-389-7676). Alexander saw the opera live for the first time in Dayton, Ohio, last year.
He has been working with theater all his adult life. “Coming from stage theater, it’s like a home game to direct Porgy. It’s remarkable how much of the original well-made play (by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward) is here,” he says.
Alexander has returned to Seattle for his twelfth stint as stage director in the past eleven years, beginning with Boris Godunov in 2000, and including such highlights as The Tales of Hoffman, Don Giovanni, Electra, and the recent Magic Flute.
Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess is different. Alexander says he is learning as much from the cast as it is learning from him. Porgy and Bess is set in a poor black enclave of 1920s Charleston, South Carolina, called Catfish Row. Gershwin requested, was adamant, that the entire cast of Porgy be African-American, bar two small speaking parts. Alexander has never directed the opera before, but virtually all of the principals have performed it at least several times.
“It’s a collaboration. I give them input from the standpoint of putting on a well-made play. They have to teach me about their rituals, at church, burials, a parade. They say: I think they’d behave like this. I ask: What’s the wailing all about? How individual is it? How long does it go on? How do bodies sway? I’m playing it by ear.”
He is grateful and pleased that the cast is as eager to hear his directions as he is to get their feedback.
Alexander has respect and admiration for the experienced group of singers general director Speight Jenkins has brought in for this opera, which opens for eight performances Saturday, July 30, at McCaw Hall. He’s also thrilled by the chorus. So many of the songs from Porgy are familiar to almost everybody, whether their backgrounds are in classical music, jazz, pop, gospel, even rap.
Seattle Opera’s regular chorus has been mostly white. For this opera, it went into the community to find an all-black chorus. Auditions, last November, brought in a group which amazed chorus master Beth Kirchhoff and assistant conductor Philip Kelsey both with its youth and its talent.
Some have come from local choruses, some have worked in theater, at least one was a child supernumary in a production of the opera. Although Porgy has been seen here twice in the past 20 years, both times they were touring productions: This is the first time Seattle Opera has mounted it.
“I gave every inhabitant of Catfish Row an occupation, a family and a name. They all have identities,” says Alexander. “The way they found out is when they went for costume fittings, before I got here. For instance, Mice is older and blind. He is led around by News, who always carries a newspaper. Mice is frightened in the hurricane, holding onto News. The chorus was fascinated; they weren’t just singing bodies on stage.”
Heyward wrote the dialect in Gullah, a local patois native to an island off Charleston, South Carolina. It’s a speech which has pretty well gone by the wayside now, and the singers each, as do we all, have variants in our speech according to where we were raised. Seattle Opera has brought in a dialect coach, Judith Shahn of the University of Washington, to help make sure everyone is on the same page.
”Judy made everyone aware of how certain vowels and consonants differ in the black south and the black north, and the ensemble is listening to her,” says Alexander.”What we are trying to do is to see that the sounds of vowels in the ensemble are together but the challenge is to get the words across to the audience so they don’t necessarily need to look at the supertitles.”
Working with Lisa Daltirus as Bess and Gordon Hawkins as Porgy, veterans in these roles, Alexander’s challenge has been to give them a fresh view. He is seeing the opera through a different set of eyes which looks for new layers of depth to their characterizations.
Bess, to Alexander, is a troubled woman with a difficult background. “She is addicted to a dominant male and sexual submission and hates herself for it. She tries to rise out of it, with Porgy, battling her own personality, but when she is tempted, she loses the battle. It’s tragic. My feeling for her is one of compassion, and I wish she had more backbone.”
Porgy’s story–in Hawkins’ and Alexander’s minds–is that of a stevedore who was disabled in a terrible accident, lost his job, turned to begging, now embittered. “Gordon plays him as a grumpy beggar at the start, marked by his own fate. What makes the difference is this encounter with Bess. When she comes into his life, Porgy changes.”
Alexander has both of them playing their own ages, not meeting in the first stage of life. “This opera has nothing to do with age.”
Alexander, who though American-born grew up in Germany where his parents were opera singers, had never been to the South until last month. He went to a wedding, and then from there to Charleston for 48 hours, as he says, to sniff the air, have conversations with people there, trying to get an understanding of the comunity. He found the original for Catfish Row, called Cabbage Row, though it’s very different now from 70 years ago.
“I think Porgy and Bess is about a community, and having these characters presented so lovingly to the audience, that is how DuBose Heyward wanted it to be.”
The very model of a modern arts administrator (Photo: MvB)
I spent the ’90s working at non-profit arts groups, mostly Seattle Opera. It was an interesting vantage point because the Opera reputedly–if you believed the people I talked to at the Rep and Symphony–had it all: Not only were there the artistic benefits of gesamstkunstwerk-ing, but we were understood to shower with money from donors and the ticket-buying public. A live orchestra! Million-dollar sets! International opera stars!
Opera was a license to print money. Especially among performing arts organizations in Seattle, the Opera stood out for its annual budgets in excess of $10 million.
But the reality was that, like every other arts organization, the Opera spent a little bit more each year than it had made, and so there was a last-minute push each spring to “close the gap” and “help us balance the budget.” Even record-breaking subscription and single ticket sales, we’d inform the 100,000 people on the Opera’s mailing list, makes up only half the Opera’s income. The rest is thanks to your donations. Please give.
Years after, fellow SunBreaker RvO, also an Opera alum, and I used to half-jokingly talk about writing an Arts Marketing for Dummies book. There are plenty of arts marketing books out there, of course. But ours would be different. Ours would actually respond to the longer-term economic trends that were making the old, inefficient arts business model unsustainable.
But then, we thought, who would buy it? There was a reason neither of us worked in the arts anymore–we’d both gotten burnt out by the continual chore of persuading colleagues and leadership to embark on necessary change. (Near the end, my morale suffered a little: “Work harder, not smarter!” I used to tell people.)
In 2009, I went to an arts conference, and discovered that almost nothing had changed in the intervening decade. Rather, things had gotten much worse. But arts organizations had resorted to belt-tightening; they were going to starve themselves out of a funding famine, despite the research that showed the problem wasn’t purely recessionary:
While it may take five years to climb out of this current recession, this crisis is masking the effects of a five-to-ten year shift in philanthropy in response to the global economy. It’s not that the well has gone dry, necessarily, but it’s being decentralized and outsourced where possible.
Peter Senge gave a talk at the conference:
He qualified the problem-solving mindset that came up with sustainability with the creative orientation that asks, “What are we trying to create?” (Dinosaurs, in their way, were probably very interested in sustainability.) Any arts organization wants to matter, to be relevant, but our impression is that Senge isn’t betting on any whose relevance is primarily theoretical or abstract. For him, the arts matter if they arise from how we actually live, not from how we like to think we live.
Tragically, this was in June, and so most of the fundraisers had balancing the budget on their minds, rather than revisiting their organization’s mission and business model.
I don’t mean to go head to head with Senge, but he was arguing a strawman sustainability, using the word to mean “survival,” and questioning whether some arts groups deserved life-support. But the principles of sustainability, when it comes to arts organizations, help leadership ask the right questions about the structure of their arts-delivery systems.
For instance, how much of what arts groups could be said to stint on (or waste) is required by self-preservation?
Gad-playwright Paul Mullin makes the trenchant observation that theatres offer jobs to everyone associated with theatre but playwrights. Arts administrators at larger houses frequently make six figures with benefits; playwrights…do not. The point is not that anyone is being overpaid; the point is that someone very important seems to have been left out. Where is our local playwright non-profit (or cooperative) that seeks to leverage those resources? (Rule: Form a more perfect union.)
Because self-preservation is the defining aspect of arts institutional life–ironically, the non-profit model virtually guarantees it–the business model warps in that direction. People begin to have trouble distinguishing between best business practices and those that have worked in the past to pay everyone’s salaries. Over time, the institution’s existence–its habits and proclivities–mediates the art presented. It’s not just a question of the popularity of one work versus another–it’s a question of box office receipts. That’s what’s being discussed when the directors meet: saleability.
It should be discussed! Don’t get me wrong. But, as before, is anything important being left out?
Jeremy Barker, our At-Large Arts contributor, forwarded me some “new thinking,” that reminded me of the kinds of solutions that conflict with institutional values. Joanna Harmon in Minneapolis asks:
What if small companies and loose collectives of theatre artists were enabled by a single group of administrators, rather than each company reinventing its administrative wheel?
This will sound more or less interesting to you–I’m willing to bet–depending upon your role in arts administration. Anyone currently “making it” in the arts will be less enthusiastic about downsizing administration even if the result is that more art is being produced. That’s not odd at all. But consider that very difference: What if administrators’ fortunes weren’t tied to any one institution? What sort of choices might they make?
We have an example, actually, in ACT. ACT is both a theatre and, as owner of its venue, a producer. Not coincidentally, ACT has also invented the ACT Pass. It’s innovative to adopt a pure membership model, yes, but it could easily be the last thing a standard 5-play-per-season theatre tried before it went out of business. ACT is not acting like a theatre. (What is Pacific Northwest Ballet’s relationship to Seattle’s dance community? What about Seattle Symphony and chamber music? Too often, partnerships are outreach-oriented, which are more burdensome than synergistic.)
I would take Harmon’s question a step farther. The optimal use of resources is a tenet of sustainability, and as it happens, arts administrators are not the soulless quasi-corporate drones they are at times portrayed to be. So it’s already the case that most arts organizations collaborate and share a great deal, more than you might expect if you considered how competitive the marketplace is. The problem is, they collaborate inefficiently.
To some arts patrons’ chagrin, for instance, arts groups frequently broaden their marketing base by trading direct mailing lists. But it’s relatively unregulated, depending on who is doing the trading–on the arts-goer side, there is no master arts-attendee list you can opt into and set your preferences for. Instead, every single organization reinvents the database, usually in their own way, and the results are sometimes anarchic.
The situation is unlikely to change because, at an institutional level, there’s no apparent incentive and the loss of control disturbs leadership. Thus, database management and mining remains a core function of organizations theoretically devoted to art production. (Rule: We create art and outsource/outshare the rest.)
In the same way, theatres share lighting, costumes, props. Some share box offices. But these are usually contingent partnerships and collaborations–it’s not a true pooled ownership because no single institution has the right, after all, to donate its resources at what might be its own expense. They have a duty to their donors, not necessarily the health of the greater arts community.
So it’s necessary, I think, to look beyond the individual arts institution, and even the non-profit model, to consider the whole arts community ecology. (Can we move beyond opportunism in siting arts venues, so that disruptions don’t eliminate spaces? Cf. Odd Fellows Hall and 619 Western.)
As I said, this was all supposed to go into a book. There’s too much to discuss–I can only hint at the scope of reorganization around shared function–and of course, the arts being what they are, there are many over-educated people willing to argue about minutiae rather than broader principle. However, I’m happy if this is a book that writes its own history–Seattle happens to have strong entrepreneurial spirit, and arts start-ups are refreshingly eager to innovate (if only because, just starting out, they have so little institutional capital to coast on). Go ahead, kinder, macht Neues!
There’s seemingly no end to the ways you can stage Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
Different times and milieu see different things in the Don: he can be a Sinatra-esque rake, an iconoclast anti-hero, a compulsive seducer, an irredeemable rapist. Mozart’s music allows a certain latitude–it can illustrate a scene, or take up an ironic distance.
In the Seattle Opera Young Artists production of Don Giovanni (through April 9, at Bellevue’s Meydenbauer Center), he’s a 1950s Eurotrash party boy with more than a hint of the talented Mr. Ripley. Krohn sings the part well, with bravado, but his Giovanni is not at the core motivated by the love of seduction. Then, the Don is a charming rogue, teasing and cajoling. Here, he reminds you a little of a Ted-Bundy-in-training, someone who’s trying to work himself up to something more. His servant Leporello is always complaining and recalcitrant, but in Erik Anstine’s hands, you sense a foreshadowing of worse to come, if the Don crosses a line that can’t be uncrossed.
Director Peter Kazaras, perhaps making financial necessity the mother of invention, supplements a set of extraordinary costumes from Candace Frank with a little scaffolding stage left and right (from set designer Donald Eastman), and projects video and stills against the back wall. The projections at best add an immediate ambiance, and at worst distract from the live action. Intense washes of color, from lighting designer Connie Yun, serve to elevate scenes from the banality of place as the characters access heights of emotion.
He’s also added a little girl (she’s not from the “Prague version” of the score the Young Artists are using) whose purpose and identity is left vague. She’s not simply a framing device, though, since she interacts with the Don and other characters. She might be the Don’s little girl, she might be his prey. (She might be a thousand things.)
I’m of two minds about her presence. You might say she activates the moral field, without defining it: Is the Don, despite all, a caring father? Is he a sexual predator? Not knowing, you can’t feel comfortable settling on a reading of the Don, one where it’s all in fun, or one where he’s a simple sociopath. (The drawback is that her identity is never disclosed because she doesn’t exist; for the plot, she’s extraneous.)
The people who do exist for the purposes of the plot are served well enough by the Young Artists cast here. Marcy Stonikas is an imposing Donna Anna, with more than enough voice to fill Meydenbauer’s auditorium–it even seems slightly preposterous that when the Don accosts her in her room in the middle of the night, her scream brings no one. You would like to hear more dynamic nuance, but this should come throughout the run.
Her Don Ottavio (Andrew Stenson, last night) is a doormat, caught up in a pattern of appeasement. As Stonikas plays it, she only tolerates Ottavio’s presence as a means to avenge herself on Giovanni. She doesn’t bother even to humor Ottavio’s awkward attempts at romance.
Amanda Opuszunski’s Donna Elvira is a spitfire–you believe her woman-scorned side more than her relapses as the Don woos her back. She’s joined by a lively, flirtatious Zerlina (Jacqueline Bezek, a guest artist) who’s not so much innocently swept off her feet by the Don as willing to kick the tires of this wealthy admirer. She’s well-matched by her gruff beau Masetto (Adrian Rosas), who also channels the Voice of Doom as the Commendatore.
A perk in this production is Zerlina threatening Leporello with a cleaver after he’s caught impersonating the Don (while the Don works his wiles in Leporello’s outfit). Once again, there’s no firm ground to stand on–it’s not precisely a wink-and-a-nod as Zerlina terrorizes Leporello. Though Mozart’s music, conducted with brio by Brian Garman, is not particularly threatening at this point, its formal disconnect from an enraged woman stalking around waving a cleaver creates a sense that anything can happen.
The most striking thing about this production, you may find, is not the Don himself, but how his behavior deranges everyone he comes into contact with.
Seattle Opera’s Falstaff, all on its own, might make you believe in the future of opera. (It runs through March 13, and for this Sunday’s Family Day matinee tickets are $15 for students.) Verdi’s last opera reminds you that everything grows old and decays, and yet there is spring. Similarly, director Peter Kazaras finds a way to bow to opera convention, while returning the work to rowdy life. Falstaff‘s motto, that we humans are ridiculous creatures, can fall flat–if it’s delivered without risk or sincerity.
This production–comic, high-spirited, gorgeous, and incorrigibly lusty–makes that realization an unexpected gift.
I’ll start with Falstaff, as he would have hoped if he weren’t fictional. This is the British bass Peter Rose’s first outing as Shakespeare’s rotund fount of self-regard, and it is “The first of many, I predict,” said General Director Speight Jenkins. Seattle operagoers have seen Rose as Baron Ochs (Rosenkavalier) and King Marke (Tristan), but neither of those roles called for anything like Falstaff’s world-devouring charisma.
Rose is wearing a fat suit–if you arrive early enough, you see him get into it, as part of Kazaras’s idea to bring you closer to the stage–but it’s not that heavy. It’s his acting chops that send him crashing onto a bench when feeling beleaguered or lumbering across the stage in pursuit of Alice Ford (Svetla Vassileva).
Shakespeare wasn’t out to make fun of fat people–he wanted to skewer instead his famous knight’s self-serving appetites. It suits Falstaff to both ignore and celebrate his girth, as the mood seizes him. In Rose’s take, Falstaff’s eyes are always roving for an angle. His insincerity in perfectly sincere. Yes, he will say anything to get a drink, a meal, or laid, but how could anyone miss that? Fair’s fair. Rose’s voice was as agile as his characterization: booming, cooing, snorting, petulant. He only seemed less than perfect in a few patter-ish runs, but honestly, you could argue that that too was characterization.
He is only matched–and what a match!–by Stephanie Blythe’s Dame Quickly. Blythe pulls this off mostly on her own recognizance, the opera doesn’t give Dame Quickly anything like Falstaff’s word count. It’s just that she makes her words count. And as an actor, she’s unstoppable. She backs Falstaff down with a mesmerizing display of bustle, and owns the stage from then on. (The bustle and many more beautiful and wildly serviceable costumes are the work of Anna Björnsdotter.)
The three hours goes quickly. There’s very little besides the plot’s progress to the libretto–and Verdi wasn’t interested in musical elaboration, either. The score is mercurial. If Verdi felt like just a few violin phrases were enough to accompany a singer, he wrote that. But a minute later, the full orchestra might be standing in for a raucous tavern brawl. Then, why waste time–nine singers can sing, variously, to Alice’s husband Ford (Weston Hurt), fomenting his jealousy; about turning the tables on Falstaff; and a love song. It’s conductor Riccardo Frizza’s task to keep all this in line, and to infuse joie de vivre besides, which is what Italian conductors seems born to do.
Kazaras keeps the rest of the cast onstage the whole time, they have seats left and right. While this kind of directorial inspiration can just lay there, here Kazaras never lets his cast feel offstage. Without stealing focus, they’re engaged, in character, ready to jump in if they feel it’s called for.
The two young lovers Fenton (Blagoj Nacoski) and Nannetta (Anya Matanovic) are continually flirting around corners and across the stage, which pays off in the final act, when their big moment comes. Nacoski’s voice has a remarkably supple, lyric sound–something in his delivery reminded me of John McCormack, of all people. He and Matanovic (whose Nannetta is perkycute incarnate) generate some believably half-love, half-lusty heat.
Not to be outdone by the wealth of roles, the set co-stars as well. Donald Eastman summons up the dusty boards of the Globe Theatre, invites the Opera’s huge rear projection screen into the mix, and creates a massive oak tree from two ladders and a host of suspended oak chairs. Lighting designer Connie Yun has huge washes of color–orange, red, pale blue–play on the rear screen, casting the actors into storybook silhouette.
She echoes a crimson from Ford’s jealousy aria in Falstaff’s post-Thames pep talk later. Just as Verdi doesn’t allow Ford’s sudden, angry suspicions a foundation, the dramatic red as background to Falstaff’s ruminations on his injury comes as a visual snicker.
Then comes a “comic fugue,” an orchestrated uproar. And then…it’s over.
Why is this the future? I think because when you’re 80, as Verdi was, you see the future more clearly for not getting there. The horizon is outlined with young people refusing to “behave,” and making themselves happy instead of you. Kazaras has tapped into that restlessness and zest, and how lines, in being blurred, wake us up from old habit. You feel he means something by laying bare the stage and the actors on it–but what? We don’t know. It’s ridiculous.
