The pros and cons of getting drunk at the theater

Ten years ago I wrote a post about a performance of Ibsen's Ghosts at Stratford (link). The production was powerful, tragic and grim - but the seemingly-drunken audience tittered and laughed all the way through it.

Last week I had the opposite experience - a production of As You Like It that was so amped up on audience participation - being on stage during Pee-Wee's Playhouse would have been more sedate - that I suspected the only way to enjoy it was to be drunk.

At least, looking around at the third-full Festival Theater at the mostly blank faces of people being yelled at to wave pine boughs, hold up stars, proffer carrots, hold out lights, clap and sing, and even get on stage to dance - it seemed that the only person truly enjoying himself was the man seated directly behind me, who had obviously imbibed heartily from the theater bar.

(The production, when it was allowed to continue, was quite good. Petrina Bromley played Rosalind - and Petrina Bromley is a great, great talent. This is her first year at Stratford and if we're lucky she'll stick around for a long time. She brought a whimsical incandescence to Rosalind that I haven't seen since Maggie Smith was at Stratford in the 70s. Bromley is a naturalistic actor but has all the gravitas of a great Shakespearian. From now on, if she's in something, I'm going.)

For a couple of years now, Stratford has been aiming to involve the audience more in the play, and to make the play a more immersive experience. Actors talk to the audience before the play, people sit on the stage, actors talk directly to the audience at times during the play, and so on. This year's As You Like It takes this idea to an absurd degree and it distracted from the play... but I like the sentiment behind blurring the separation between fluffy musicals and Shakespeare. I like the idea of making the play a raucous experience, as it might have been in Shakespeare's day. I thought the setting really worked (Newfoundland in the 70s). It's just that I drive 30 minutes to get to Stratford so I can't get drunk enough to enjoy waving a pine bough over my head every 10 minutes.

Review of Hamlet (Stratford 2015)

This year's Hamlet, directed by Antoni Cimolino, makes sense. I say that as the highest praise. I've seen the play many times and it never flowed so naturally before.

Like... Ophelia's pregnant. She always struck me as a bit of a cry-baby, going bonkers because she gets jilted and her dad dies. Add the pregnancy, and we see a young woman whose brother is far away, whose father is killed by her powerful ex-lover - who is without protectors, pregnant... it all clicks into place. When Laertes says to the other mourners at Ophelia's graveside, "Now pile your dust upon the quick and dead" - it's completely obvious that she's meant to be pregnant, but I have never seen a production before where she was.

Once Ophelia is pregnant, she becomes much more central to the plot. For example, it makes sense that Laertes is in such a murderous rage at Hamlet, to the point that he wants to stab him with a poisoned sword and poison his wine.

Another first for me is that Cimolino's production is not introspective. Hamlet doesn't do soliloquies in this production: he narrates. He speaks directly to the audience, even at times pointing at individuals. That turns the whole play on its head. It took me a bit to get used to that.

In this production, "To be or not to be" is perfectly easy to understand. There's nothing cryptic about it. Hamlet is facing two options: keep quiet and stay alive, or take action against his uncle. He knows that he has to take the second option, and that it will lead to his death, so he muses about death.

The dialog in this production is naturalistic. Everything makes sense, and the characters interact naturally. Even in very good Shakespeare productions, there is often a problem that the actors focus more on the magnificent language than on creating a character. Of course the language is the jewel, but I want distinct believable characters with depth and nuance.

Elora Festival - Bach B Minor Mass (review)

Friday night at 7:30 the audience was seated in the Gambrel Barn in Elora. Onstage were the Elora Festival Orchestra, Elora Festival Singers, the VOCES8 choir, and Studio de Musique Ancienne de Montréal. Noel Edison was at his podium, his back to the audience, arms at his sides. There was an almost-overlong pause, maybe a minute of dead silence. Then Edison raised his arms and the choir and orchestra opened up at full volume. It was like a knife edge between silence and music. If beauty can be shocking then that's what it was. It was so beautiful I cried.

Bach doesn't do filler. It started and then it just carried on as this breathtakingly beautiful experience. I wish the soloists hadn't walked out to the front from their places in the choir because it broke my concentration a little, but I suppose the musicians needed to catch their breath.

The Elora Festival Singers are better than ever this year. There are such distinctive, beautiful voices, and Edison has made use of them in many solos during the festival. VOCES8 added three countertenors to the choir for the B Minor Mass, and Edison created moments when their sound was able to shine through.

It's a tragedy that the barn was only two-thirds full. This was the greatest musical event of the summer in southern Ontario and seats were just $45. The production wasn't promoted or reviewed by local or Toronto media, as far as I can tell.

Chili Cook-Off in Uptown

I take my chili seriously. One of the nicest things anyone ever did for me occurred a number of years ago when a colleague brought a container of his chili to work - and his recipe. He used coffee, cocoa, beer, cumin and oregano in his chili. I have been riffing off that recipe ever since.

At today's 4th annual Uptown Waterloo Chili Cook-Off, the people's choice award and judge's award both went to Dana Shortt Gourmet. Here is my assessment.

Winner: Taco Farm
This was a sophisticated chili. Instead of simmering everything together for a long time, it tasted like some of the ingredients were mixed in at the last minute. The base was smoked beef shoulder in a light-colored, smoky-hot sauce. Along with that came crunchy vinegar-marinated sweet onion slices, fresh corn kernels, chopped jalapenos and fresh cilantro. The chili was arguably a tiny bit too sour when eaten with a spoon, but it was perfect on a homemade tortilla chip (which they provided). This is a recipe I am going to try to replicate.

The Taco Farm team dressed up like Mexican wrestlers:



Runner Up: McMullans
McMullans dished up a classic ground beef chili, heavy on the meat. It could have used some condiments: with some grated cheese, chopped raw onion and hot sauce, it would have been great. (Condiments weren't part of the cook-off however.) McMullans also deserves kudos for being the only establishment to have participated in all four years of the uptown chili cook-off.

Honorable Mention: Dana Shortt
Shortt made a braised beef brisket chili. The beef was cooked perfectly - moist and falling apart - but the chili was bland and did not have much depth of flavor. Worse, it was sweet (this is a particular bugaboo of mine). The main ingredient was meat, and other than sauce and a few beans there was nothing in it. To sum up: it was well-executed but not to my taste. It came with a peculiar deep-fried avocado ball.

Sad Regrets: The Red House
The Red House ran out of chili just before I arrived. The Red House is my favorite uptown eatery and my go-to spot on a Friday night, so I was very disappointed in myself for tardiness. Next year (shaking my fist), I vow to not be late...

Henry V (review)

A pivotal moment in Shakespeare's Henry V is when Henry tells his army to kill their prisoners.

Shakespeare has taken Henry through a long epic of personal change. In Henry IV Part I, Prince Hal is a dissipate, fun-loving, rich man's son, feeling guilty about the bad deeds his father performed to get the crown. Over the three plays Hal changes a lot. As he assumes the responsibility of becoming king his transformation is so great that he initiates a war to obtain French land. But the chillingest thing he does is during the battle of Agincourt when Henry decides to kill the French prisoners - a gross violation of any rules of war or morality.

Many productions of Henry V leave out the killing of the prisoners. Branagh and Olivier both left it out, and you have to assume that they didn't want their regal portrayals of Henry to be tarnished by such brutality. It's a pity. It changes everything to leave it out.

Des McAnuff's current Stratford production of Henry V leaves in the killing of the prisoners but makes no sense of it. The production is enjoyable fluff, but it makes little sense of anything. The biggest problem is the casting of Aaron Krohn as Henry; Krohn may be a decent actor, but he's more a matinee idol than a Shakespearian: he doesn't have the gravitas or the technique for Henry.

The second biggest problem is what McAnuff has told Krohn to do. It's like Krohn is just creating scenes without any context. After Henry's ruthlessness with the prisoners, McAnuff has Henry become a lighthearted lover who inexplicably falls in love with the French princess - there's no hint that the alliance solidifies his hold on France - that Henry's transformation is now so complete that even love is for him nothing but politics.

Henry V is full of stirring moments and great lines, but this production lets them all slip away. Henry's stirring pep talk to his troops becomes a conversation with a few of his generals. "Once more into the breach... the game's afoot!" is lost in monotone. Henry has no character and the play ultimately has no meaning.

Stratford doesn't fail the way it used to. Even in this remarkably vapid production, there is much that is good and the play overall is enjoyable, with great staging, music, sets - and a huge talented cast.

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Robert Lepage Wrecked the Ring Cycle

He had help.

Costumes
Throughout, the costumes were an unfortunate distraction. They didn't enhance the characterization or help to set a tone or place. They were unflattering. Poor Waltraud Meier, who played a thrilling Waltraute in Gotterdammerung, had a bodice about three inches too low for her age, and the typically over-close Met HD camera work never let us look away from her huge cleavage wrinkles. I don't even want to remember Wotan's giant leather pants or the faux-leather codpiece-bedecked gods in Das Rheingold.

Lighting
At times, the harsh white lighting made the filming look like a 1970s era sitcom. I'm a fan of well-lit operas (the Toronto Ring was so dark that I couldn't see whole chunks from my seat at the back of Ring 3), but this production was at times ridiculous.

Cinematography
Good god, when will the Met HD get it together in the filming department?

• In Valkyrie, Jonas Kaufmann was brilliant as Siegmund, but the poor man drools, and the camera relentlessly zoomed in on those great gobs of drool falling out of his mouth, down his chin, and off in gobby strands to the floor. It was icky and embarrassing and completely unnecessary - he didn't drool continuously, and they could have changed to a long shot when he did.
  
• In Gotterdammerung, Deborah Voigt wore running shoes under her long dress, and kudos to her for doing that: she's on stage for the better part of six hours, after all. Nobody needed to ever see those running shoes, but the Met HD cinematography department made sure we saw them several times.
  
• The Ring is a grandiose piece of art describing the destruction of the gods, but it is built around intimate, one-on-one moments. When two people are interacting, it removes the effectiveness to focus on only one face at a time. The cinema has a huge screen: they don't need to zoom in on people so much.

The cast
There were a lot of geniuses in the cast, but in Met performances you expect them all to be great: great singers and great actors. This Ring had too many weak links. At its center, Deborah Voigt's middle register is not pleasant to listen to: it has a strained sharpness. In addition, she mugged and aped without creating a believable Brunnhilde. The problem with her acting could have been one of scale; she was acting for the back row and it didn't work on the big screen. But surely the director should have figured that out. This was Voigt's first Brunnhilde and she clearly wasn't ready.

The other main characters were superb, as you'd expect, but there were problems with some of the small parts. Patricia Bardon was an embarrassment as Erda in Siegfried (and you had to wonder if her dress threw her off: it clung tightly to her full body including her hands and was covered with sharp-edged pieces of broken mirror). In the broadcast of Gotterdammerung, Iain Paterson as Gunther was very uneven: his acting was wonderful but his voice was at times warbly and weird. There were little glitches like that throughout, and that just shouldn't happen in a Met Ring Cycle.

Special effects
Siegfried establishes himself as a hero by killing the terrifying dragon (and giant) Fafner. Lepage's dragon looked like a big, silly muppet. It was hands down the worst special effect I have seen in a Ring cycle - and this from Lepage, the supposed master of FX. When special effects failed (as also happened with the horse and on several occasions with The Machine), I kept suspecting that what we saw was an incomplete idea or a last-minute substitution.

And then, of course there was The Machine, which dominated every single goddamn scene - that's four operas: 15 hours of looking at a giant xylaphone. It had its advantages: it served as a screen for some good animation; it was nice that there was never any need for scene changes; and some scenes worked. But ultimately it was a failure. It was there all the time, and three-quarters of the time it shouldn't have been. It was a distraction from the opera. It forced the singers to do most of their performing on a thin strip at the front of the stage. And we spent half the opera staring at the castors on the end of the planks - how I came to hate those castors! After all the deficiencies and flaws in the four operas, the really unforgiving thing about Lepage's Ring Cycle was the ending. Or should I say non-ending. The ending of the Ring Cycle is paramount. After all the emotional highs of the series of operas, the ending should be a great emotional release. The final bars of the score are the lietmotif of humanity: the coming of a new era after the age of the gods. What did Lepage show us, after Brunnhilde sat on a fake horse and rolled towards an underwhelming funeral pyre? --Some statue heads exploded and then there was nothing for the last several moments: just the ugly xylaphone. It meant nothing and it emoted nothing, except disappointment.

I'm a huge Lepage fan, having seen several other operas he's directed (Damnation of Faust, Erwartung, Bluebeard's Castle, The Nightingale and Other Short Fables). In a 2009 post I reviewed his 9 hour play Lipsynch. I'm a huge Ring Cycle fan, having seen the 2006 Toronto production, Otto Schenk's previous Met production, Francesca Zambello's 2011 San Francisco Opera production, and others. In fact, I'm hard to disappoint on either count, but Lepage did it... and I think that calls into question his approach of theater as experimentation. It's one thing to create a play like Lipsynch in an iterative process over several years. It's another thing to present a half-assed, unfinished Ring Cycle at Lincoln Center.

Update: This post was quoted in Macleans. Update 2: I went to New York to see this production remounted in 2019. The problems with is were all resolved to my satisfaction--or at least there were fewer so I didn't mind them--and it was fabulous.

Molecular Gastronomy Part Two

A recent meal at Aphrodite Restaurant.

To save writing "This tasted super!" six million times, I'll say upfront that every bite was outstanding. This was one of the best meals of my life. It was performance art. It lasted over four hours, and despite the long list of dishes, it wasn't too much food - the courses were small, some only one bite - and it wasn't very rich. Also, despite what you might think when reading the details, nothing was gratuitous or gimmicky; everything made sense, was delicious, and was edifying.

Chef: David Faure
Address: 10 bd Dubouchage, Nice, France

The Revolution menu at 98 euros each:

Tangerine-vodka cocktail with dry ice (-78 degrees). Served in a round fish bowl steaming like a science fair exhibit, with a hollowed vanilla bean as a straw.

The virtual oyster ("A la recherche de l'huitre perdue"). On a bed of kelp, an oyster shell with what looked to be a raw oyster, but turned out to be eggplant and kiwi with a pearl made out of something in gel form. Also on the plate was a small glass of sea urchin mousse, and a tiny piece of buttered bread - we were instructed what order to eat it all in.

Nitro-Dragon of Vodka and green apple, curry wrong-smoked caviar, and Rai Faure cream. The waiter prepared them at the table, and made one for himself first to demonstrate. He dipped the Vodka/green apple espuma in liquid nitrogen and then put the result on top of the rest of the ingredients in a ceramic spoon. You slide the contents of the spoon into your mouth, where they create a sort of flavor-texture explosion. Then you breathe out through your nostrils, causing two huge jets of steam to shoot out your nose (like a dragon). Much giggling ensues.

The bread without bread. Long narrow strips of breadless bread are presented in a glass vase. One is a long strip of cooked parmesan cheese. Another is a strip that is akin to a big potato chip. I couldn't identify all of them.

Illusion of meat macaroni with duck liver. The meat-truffle macaroni was an extruded gel. It was served with peas, pea mousse, and some perfectly prepared, rare liver.

Warm spherification of liquid Pissaladiere, olive oil, oregano. Pissaladiere is a Nicoise specialty of pastry with caramelized onions on top. This rendition was a deconstruction of the traditional dish in liquid/gel form.

Texture and temperature. Ravioli of "sot l'y laisse" with roasted chicken juice (+70 degrees) and morel ice cream (-20 degrees). Morel ice cream is an AMAZING accompaniment.

Plume Iberique. Spanish pork, from the back of the neck, smoked with el Gringo, grilled green asparagus, peanut juice. This was served in an upside down glass dome full of smoke. When served, the waiter lifted away the glass dome and the smoke swirled around the diner's head. The meat was flash cooked in something very hot that caramelized the outside more than I've ever tasted.

Brie cheese ice cream, gingerbread, violet jam.

Sorbet. Made in front of us with liquid nitrogen (-196 degrees). The waiter took what looked like juice, combined it with the nitrogen, and whipped it with a whisk. It was amazingly creamy and lucious. The only drawback: the cold and acidity caused my tongue to hurt for a few minutes.

Virtual fried egg. Prepared at the table in a frying pan dipped into freezing liquid nitrogen, the waiter broke an egg into the pan (the egg was faked up) and it looked just like a fried egg - but it was a mango "yolk" with an unsweetened coconut "white". Cool trick and tasty.

Deconstructed dessert: wrong caviar or Irish coffee? The waiter ran up to the table an apologised profusely that he'd forgot to bring one of our first courses. He put down what appeared to be caviar, sour cream and blinis. But the caviar turned out to be irish coffee turned into tiny gel balls, and the whipped cream was unsweetened with an intense coffee flavor. (The blinis were regular blinis.)

Sweet morphing: The final dessert of the evening was a tray with a series of little things on it. One diner was chosen to serve, and instructions were given about the order and way to eat each:

• Green lemon sorbet sparkling lollipop - this crackled and popped in the mouth.
  
• Fruit jelly without fruit.
  
• Cornetto of strawberries and white balsamic vinegar.
  
• Wasabi chocolate with a tube of raspberry chok to spread on it.
  
• Solid "sex on the beach" - a tiny version of the cocktail, deconstructed.

Helium balloons to suck on and talk funny.

Here's Molecular gastronomy part 1.
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Did You Get Pears?

"Did you get pears? Did you get pears? Did you get pears?" "We'll discuss it inside."
- the last lines of last Sunday's episode of Mad Men

What the heck was that all about? Were they showing us that Don has sunk so low that his decrepit old neighbors don't trust him enough to discuss produce purchases in front of him? Were they telling us that Don has returned to his roots - left upper middle class suburbia for a low-rent dump? Was this Don observing what he might have become - a whiny, dependent old man - if his marriage hadn't ended? Were we seeing that even when he's sunk into alcoholism and isolation, Don is always observing things about people that help him be a great ad man (as opposed to the focus groups he dismissed earlier in the episode)? Was it a comment on the paranoia in America during the 60s? Or was it a coded message to the audience, with pears really being "pairs" - telling us to observe the dualities in the episode?

Could it possibly be that all those meanings were packed into that one, brief, seemingly pointless little segment? Or is this show so enigmatic that we can create our own meaning?

Sometimes Mad Men seems more like a poem than a novel.

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Anthony Lane Review (review)

Anthony Lane's New Yorker review of Kick-Ass bugs me - not because he hated the movie and I dug it, although that's true - but because his objections are rooted in the main character being an 11 year old girl.

Lane has various problems with the character who calls herself Hit Girl. He thinks her swearing is a cheap trick to generate buzz. He thinks her presence turns the movie into "cartoon violence" and makes the movie appeal to children. He thinks that viewing it will make children mistake savagery for slapstick and so "coarsen and inflame" them. Underlying all his other criticism, he thinks she's pornographic. While not being able to provide any evidence, Lane is preoccupied with her sexuality; he even says that she is "the dream of every pedophile."

To be clear: the little girl in question doesn't dress provocatively. She doesn't act provocatively. There's nothing sexual about her. If the actress had been 12 or 13 she might have had budding sexuality, but Hit Girl is thoroughly a child.

Lane tries to argue the pornography angle by saying that that the difference between a sexualized child and a violenc-ized child is a "false dichotomy" and a "cowardly distinction". I think he's engaged in some fuzzy thinking there. There is most definitely a difference between a child who is sexualized and one who is violent: there is no child-violence-voyeur equivalent of a pedophile.

There is one major similarity between children who are sexualized and who are violenc-ized: both situations give the child a sense of empowerment but are ultimately damaging to them. But for a pulp fiction movie, the movie is very sensitive to the child's problems. The movie makes it clear that this is one very damaged little girl. She was raised by an insane revenge-obsessed father who made killing a game. When we first see father and daughter, they are standing in a culvert and he is repeatedly shooting her in the chest with a large hand gun (we then learn he's teaching her to get used to her new bullet-proof vest). At the end, she is placed in a safer environment.


The difference between a movie about a sexualized little girl (and there have been many, from Lolita to Pretty Baby to Taxi Driver and on and on) and a movie about a violenc-ized little girl, is that millions of little girls are sexualized but few in the Western world are turned into Ninja fighters. There isn't a social issue here.

There is shock/novelty value. There may have been an 11 year old pig-tailed assassin in fiction before, but I can't recall when. And Lane is right that the Hit Girl character might appeal to kids - but this is an R-rated movie. As long as a movie is rated appropriately, I don't see how you can criticize its effect on kids.

I can't believe that Lane would have had such strong objections to violenc-izing a little boy. His review, at heart, is just old-fashioned disapproval of girls being action heroes. And he's really, really bothered about it - to the point that he expresses disgust with people who disagree with him - and to the point that he misses the good stuff in the movie.

The actress who plays Hit Girl, Chloe Moretz, has an impressive resume even though she was 11 at time of filming, and she did a brilliant acting job. When she says "Oh daddy, I'm just fuckin with ya", it's a show-stopper. She doesn't swear much in the movie, but when she does it's the best swearing I ever heard. She is convincing in a role that most actors would make laughable.

On top of all this, Lane and many of the other reviewers I read just don't get the movie. It's about the yearning and futility of wanting to be more than you can be. The character who calls himself Kick-Ass wears a baggy mail-order Hallowe'en costume and makes zero progress in becoming a superhero. He has a wealthy classmate who is able to buy a more convincing costume but does no better at the superheroing. Hit Girl is the closest we get to a human superhero, but she's ultimately just a little kid who's over-eager to please her dad. Even at the closest they get, when Kick-Ass dons a jet pack and flies himself and Hit Girl across the city, they have still failed to cross the line between being a superhero and just pretending.

In the short form of the review that appears in later New Yorkers, Lane writes that Kick-Ass "has the makings of a pointed - and much needed - poke at comic book afflatus, but the satire backs away all too quickly." Again, he misses the point. Superhero movies tend to play with the edges of the genre, exploring it and examining its internal flaws, but you shouldn't expect them to satirize and criticize the genre. The superhero genre simply isn't serious enough for satire to have any relevance.

Except for her age, Hit Girl is has a lot of similarities to Uma Thurman's character in Kill Bill, and Kick-Ass owes a lot to Kill Bill. If I hadn't liked Kick-Ass I might have thought it was too derivative. But I wouldn't have blamed it on the kid.

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Bigger is Better (review)

Opening nights at the Elora Festival tend to be wowee experiences. Tonight went beyond wowee. My ears are ringing. I feel drained and buoyant, energized and rung out. I'm not sure I understand what I heard or how it fit together, but it sure did sound good.

Noel Edison mounted the Berlioz Requiem. Along with the 20 members of the Elora Festival Singers he had the entire Mendelssohn Choir, so there were over 150 singers. The rest of the stage was packed with about twice as many orchestra players as a usual performance. There was a timpani player on the floor in front of the stage, and another somewhere at the back of the hall. There were two sets of trumpet players at the back of the hall (one in each corner, as Berlioz intended). Then there was a tenor dead center in the hall, in the middle aisle.

The Gambrel Barn has great acoustics. It's not like a church and it's not like a concert hall: it's big and has that big-house sound, but it's sort of unique. I've heard a lot of great music there over the years I've been addicted to the Elora Festival, but tonight was in a class of its own just by having so many musicians. I think the ratio of audience to musician was about 2 to 1. It was big. This provided new opportunities for layers of sound to weave through the big space and show off new acoustical properties.

The Berlioz Requiem is in turns dramatic, punchy, wrenching, sublime, and weird. There are weird tunings and weird little solo bits. At times the tenors sing a falsetto like a boy's choir but not... at times the basses were so powerful that I felt like their voices were reverberating inside the cellos. (The men really shone.) The tenor solos, sung by Lawrence Wiliford in a brilliant bit of casting, made me cry.

After the performance we were treated to a reception with wine and lots of good food, but the highlight was a spectacular fireworks display (I heard Noel say that he and the Elora Festival chair paid for it out of their own pockets). What a way to start their 30th season.

Upcoming performances include Carmina Burana (July 24), the Fairy Queen (July 26) and A Night at the Opera (July 31). There's a lot of other stuff... those are just ones I have tickets for.

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Fringe Toronto 2009 Round-Up

I only made it to five plays this year, but four of them were magnifico. There's nothing like a Fringe. The festival continues through Sunday. (Complete schedule and mini-reviews here.)

Pen Pals
Two guys, best friends, are trying to break into the TV/movie business as script writers. They collaborate on screenplays. They're also roommates and soul mates. The two actors do not give the most polished performances I've ever seen but they create compelling characters nonetheless. The writing is brilliant: very very funny, especially when they're pitching ideas to each other. I was laughing so hard at a couple of points that I feared I'd start snorting. Delightful.

Written and performed by Andrew Patterson and Holm Bradwell.

Lysistrata
A reconceptualizing of Aristophane's classic sex comedy. This is a play I've read but never seen before; this team really brought it to life. The plot is that women in Greece stage a sex strike to force their men to end the Peloponnesian war. In this production the anti-war message is emphasized. It went from being a sex farce to a hard-hitting drama and just when I wondered how they'd pull it all together, they did... with some help from Abba.

Written by Peter McGarry. Performed by Nell Corrin, Dee Watson, Lara Bradban, and Carly Tarett.

Today Is All Your Birthdays
It's essentially a bunch of skits performed by four guys in coveralls, but the piece is unexpectedly woven together into a story about a rift in the space time continuum, employees at the CERN large Hadron collider, Darwin, and, well... I really need to see it again. It's very, very funny and flawlessly performed by actors who are bursting out with talent and appeal.

Written and performed by the Uncalled For troupe.

Circus
One-man play about a little boy remembering when he was seven and the circus came to town. (Warning: spoiler alert.) This is one of those things that seem to be about one thing and then turn out to be about something else. The boy thinks he's telling a story about a supernatural circus that somehow took over his soul and changed him into something evil, but gradually we see that he's telling a story about being the victim of child abuse: his mother, a creepy blind woman who speaks in psycho-Dr Suess rhymes, beats him and drugs him until he loses his sanity. The slow unfolding of the real story means it's not difficult to watch: we think we're seeing one kind of horror and then later realize we've seen another.

Written and performed by Sebastian Kroon.

Nebraska
The only dud I saw, and it was still watchable. A musical about serial killers in the 50s, this story has been told many times (Natural Born Killers was about the same duo), and this production adds nothing whatsoever to the story. Plus, the female actor simply wasn't very good. Still: a musical about serial killers!

Written by Kevin McGarry. Performed by Lindsey Frazier, Kevin McGarry, and Gabriel Antonacci.

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Lipsynch (review)

One of my favorite scenes in Robert Lepage's nine-hour play Lipsynch occurs at the end of the first act. The young man Jeremy has fought with his adoptive mother and is in a plane flying off to make a new life for himself. We see him lighted in a window of the plane, clouds scudding behind it. It's startling when his adoptive mother (an opera singer) appears outside the still-airborne plane, singing a beautiful piece from Gorecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, and even grippier when his dead birth mother climbs on top of the plane and begins walking above him. Lepage manages to put the audience completely in Jeremy's head and give us his feelings of longing, love and sadness for his two mothers.

A lot of skill was required to make that scene work - to make us able for a moment to accept we were at 40,000 feet watching Jeremy through his little oval window; make us able to morph into being inside Jeremy's head. The plane set had been introduced much earlier and played with: we first saw the inside; then it became an airport bus. This is a pattern in the play: in each act there is one piece of set that is changed in a fluid, transformative way that made the sets central to the production rather than just a prop.

I don't need every theatrical production I attend to provide a new interpretation or employ new narrative techniques. But when something as startlingly innovative as Lipsynch comes along, it's an enormous rush.

I know Lepage through his direction of opera (Bluebeard's Castle, Erwartung, The Damnation of Faust), where he uses dazzling high-tech tricks to add emotional wallop to the production. From seeing his operas, I expected zowie special effects. But Lipsynch isn't like that at all. It uses a lot of new effects, but I wasn't immediately aware of many of them as special effects.

For example - All the dialog was miked, but the sound system was good so you didn't really realize it was miked. The importance of the miking was that the actors could talk quietly - naturally - so there was none of the staginess of a typical live play. I don't have any problem with staginess, but the naturalness (you might even say TVishness) created a totally different theater experience, and very interesting.

Another example of an effective but understated effect: When Lupe, who at 15 was forced into the prostitution, appears in a scanty costume, she stands before a bank of fluorescent light bulbs, making it painful to look at her: a really good way to ensure that a story about exploitation is not itself exploitative.

Lipsynch is simply a new type of play. The intimacy of the quiet, understated dialog is part of it. The structure is another: there isn't the usual narrative arc, but nine separate portraits of characters whose connections aren't always immediately apparent. The play was written by the actors, and it is self-consciously a collaborative effort, showing a plethora of visions. I had the sense that everything I saw or heard was deliberate and important, but there was no single crux to it all. The main themes are communication and artifice. For part of the play, the two themes are used to produce a sort of autocommentary: theater exposing the mechanics of theater. It is also about all the different ways that humans communicate and the things about communication that hold them back. It is also about sexual abuse and exploitation.

The structure of the plot concerns two women who were abused and exploited. Lupe starts and ends the play and all the other characters radiate out from her, but the other story of sexual exploitation is in some ways even more central (and seems to be the story that created the title).

The play uses a real recording done in a BBC studio of a woman named Sarah who was interviewed about being a prostitute, and the actors lipsynch the lines. While Lupe was unable to express herself because of language and age barriers, Sarah is extremeley eloquent but eerily detached and clinical, as if she is unable to feel what has happened to her. The BBC interviewer sounds totally unsympathetic, as if she was asking about a shopping excursion rather than childhood abuse and a life of horror on the streets. Later in the plot, the way Sarah is treated is brutal but nonchalant. We never even find out how her story winds up (just as noone knows what happened to the voice in the interview): our society doesn't treat female sex workers as our equals.

Sarah is the character who sticks with me the most. While narratively she's a side story, memorializing her experience seemed to me to be the central import of the play. It was after I saw the play that I learned that Sarah's lines were lipsynched and that we had heard her real voice. The production had playfully tricked us on a few occasions, making us think we were seeing one thing and then showing us it was really something else. The lipsynched scene was like a scarlet letter, an exposed but unseen nugget of real, raw humanity.

The play has some goofy moments (very enjoyable), and I think such moments are virtually a requirement of a long piece of theater. When I saw Kenneth Branagh with his Renaissance Theater group doing Henry IV Part 1, Henry IV Part 2 and Henry V all in one day, his direction called for some pretty outrageous stunts by Henry V to wake us up and keep us alert. Branagh had the invasion of France done by WWII-era tanks and a huge banner that said "Fuck the French!", along with bright, loud explosions. Lepage has a dead man farting and a few other jokes, but it accomplishes the same thing. The nine hours were an enjoyable, sometimes intense, sometimes funny odyssey.

Note: This play has been a work in progress for a couple of years. The production I saw was at the Toronto 2009 Luminato Festival.

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Watchmen (Review)

...Not a review, though. Strangely enough I don't have anything much to say except: it's fabulous! All around great entertainment: great music, great characters, great plot. I plan to go back and see it on an IMAX screen as soon as I can.

I had heard that the plot was hard to follow and that you need to have read the graphic novel, but I hadn't read the graphic novel and I had no trouble following it. Also, don'tbe put off by the length: I found it engrossing all the way through.

Just like Hancock, this film got poor reviews. (On Rotten Tomatoes, Hancock got 39%; Watchmen got 64%.) It's hard to understand how two such good movies could get so panned by the press. It may be that critics don't "get" superhero movies: they think they should be shlock, and can't handle complexity. Unless, of course, one of the stars ODs before release.

(If I had guts I'd have written about the social implications of Dr. Manhattan's genitals.)

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Tale of Two Divas

What are the synonyms for opposite? ...antipodal, antithetical, contrary, counter, counterpole, diametrically opposed, different, differing, dissimilar, diverse, polar, unalike, unsimilar. None quite captures the range of difference between two sopranos I saw last weekend.

First, Diva1. The Metropolitan Opera's production of Thais was all about a diva at the height of her career. Renee Fleming's voice is incredible. She's young and slender and fit. The Met PR machine has made Fleming into an opera supersuperstar: last year they made her the host of their Met HD program and featured her in Met ads; this year she was the centerpiece of the opening gala; and finally the Met hyped this production to the hilt, making it clear to the world that it reserves Thais for the greats. (They last mounted it 30 years ago with Beverly Sills in the leading role.) They hired a couture designer to make a series of magnificent gowns for Fleming, and they created magnificent blond wigs for her - normally a handsome woman, in Thais she is glamorous and beautiful. The direction was all about her. They cut a few corners in the plot to keep the attention firmly on the diva. They even threw in a few extra flourishes: at one point she raced up a flight of stairs, struck a pose, belted out a couple of high Cs and raced back down; in the final death scene, instead of being in the narrow convent bed that the plot calls for she is inexplicably ensconced on a throne raised above the stage.

To put all this in context, companies that attempt to mount Thais have a lot to live up to. As Lawrence Gilman wrote in a review of a 1939 production, "[Thais] has never lived again with the kindling veracity that Miss [Mary] Garden gave her [in a 1907 production]. But what would you? There has been only one Mary, and there never will be another. On that November night in 1907 when she first appeared upon a New York stage, lithe, slender, dazzling, indescribably vital and magnetic, as she entered, with long and sweeping strides, the presence of the adoring crowd, flinging her roses among them and greeting rapturously her waiting lover, she transformed the papier-mâché figure of Massenet and his librettist into a creation that will always haunt the minds of those who were present to observe it. This was one of the great entrances in the history of the stage. And this was Thais, authentic in grace, fascination, and reality. Since then Thais has walked among us, but she has never wholly come to life."

In the Met performance, La Fleming did not disappoint. Her voice is magnificent, particularly in the middle range, and most of all when she is half-swallowing the notes. Her character's religious conversion brought tears to the eyes of this cynical old atheist.

I could have skipped the parts that most sopranos apparently can't sing. Fleming has a lovely voice, but the high notes are not as special as the middle ones. It is supposed to be very difficult for sopranos to emit the harsh laughter called for in the score, but the harsh laughter didn't sound good and it added little to the plot. Maybe it just seemed out of place in the diva showcase revue that this opera has become.

That was Diva1. In my opera adventures last weekend, Diva2 was so bad that I won't even say who she was or where I saw her. I'll tell you that it wasn't in Toronto. Diva2 was young, but seemed to have been trained in the 1930s: she had a warble that could vibrate tarnish off a spoon. I don't know that any amount of proper training could have made her voice appealing. I described it as a "whistle"; my companion thought a better word was "strained". Her volume was a problem. Plus, she didn't hit all the notes. She braved it out in the title role of Traviata, and I would have admired her chutzpah if I didn't suspect that she doesn't realize how truly, truly awful she is.

Unlike the Met performance, Diva2's production was on the cheap. It was billed as opera in concert but at the last minute they threw in surtitles, put a couch on the stage and tried to act it out, the result being the crappiest production in operatic history. I'm a big fan of opera in concert as it lets you concentrate differently; this production I saw last Sunday was truly the worst of all worlds. The orchestra was on the stage with a chorus standing behind, and the principal singers tried to act out the story in the couple of feet at the front of the stage. Apparently nobody had coordinated costumes: at one point Diva2 was dressed in a plain sweater and skirt while the singer playing her maid was all dolled up in a cocktail dress with high heels. When I'm at opera and something's off, I try to concentrate on something else. But there really was nothing redeeming about this performance: the fellow singing Giorgio had an upper-range caterwaul that was the worst noise ever emitted in a professional performance; there was an out-of-tune violin during the first half; one of the tenors in the chorus was singing to a different tempo; and so it went.

As often happens these days, when the pathetic horror finally came to end people immediately screamed "Brava" and gave it a standing ovation. The local paper, ever supportive of the arts, said that Diva2 had a "commanding vibrato" and called it an "impressive show." (On the other hand, they once reviewed Swiss Chalet and said it had excellent service and outstanding ambience.)

Both performances left me unsatisfied. The second was so bad that it gives a bad name to the art form. But the first wasn't quite right either. I'm all for great tour de force performances - I was enchanted with Renee Fleming in this year's Met opening gala, in which she sang excerpts from three operas that highlilghted her great talent. But when you mount an entire opera the production shouldn't be so much a star vehicle, no matter how great the star. For example, I don't like it when the audience continually interrupts an opera to applaud individual performances, and that's because to me an opera is a play with extra dimensions. Can you imagine applauding the actor playing Hamlet after each soliloquy? Treating it as a concert of songs is just wrong, and takes away much of the emotional punch. The same is true of making the entire production a frame for a star.

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Is Barbara Willis Sweete Destroying the Met HD Program?

Barbara Willis Sweete, Transmission Director for the Met HD program, has repeatedly bungled the transmission of Met operas. I have already written about last season's disastrous filming of Tristan und Isolde. This year's Damnation of Faust is another disaster.

Berlioz's Faust is an odd, episodic opera - really poor structurally, but with wonderful music. The Met brought in Robert Lepage to design the production and he made the opera work. It was full of wows - well, at least we presume they were wows, as Sweete did all she could to destroy the effects Lepage worked so hard to produce.

Lepage made great use of ropes (with harnesses hidden under clothing). At one point a row of soldiers march up the gridwork on stage, mime dying, and are lowered into the laps of women below, only to revive, march up the wall again, and repeat. It was a moving and jaw-dropping effect - I think. We mostly saw close-ups.

Sweete and the rest of the videography team over-use close-ups. Singers tend to sweat, and a giant screen filled with a close-up of their face is not always a pleasant image. There is also much too much camera movement, zooming in, panning, pulling back, changing cameras. It is all very distracting, and very little of it is effective. It's as if Sweete is trying to compete with Lepage in artiness... but the videography should aim to enhance the production, not compete with it.

We are now in the third season of the Metropolitan Opera's Met HD series. I don't recall the first season having these video problems. In particular, I recall thinking during Il Trittico that the film experience was like hovering above the fifth row - better than the best seat in the house. That's what the transmission director should aim for.

The experience of opera is about a state of concentration that opera makes possible. The orchestration, singing, plot, iconography, set, costumes, lighting and personalities all hit the senses of the audience is a way that is unique to opera. To achieve the optimum concentration, I like to attend operas in an unstressed, well-rested frame of mind; I don't drink alchohol beforehand; and I eat a light, low-carb meal followed by an espresso. When fully engaged I can attain that wonderful state, even in cinema transmissions... But not when filtered through distracting faux-arty video direction.

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Opera Kitchener a Smashing Success

Back in the bad old days (up to 15 years ago?), the Canadian Opera Company was not always a first class company. Even when they had good principals, sometimes the secondary singers caused a lot of wincing. A lot of hard work brought the quality up, and John Bradshaw sealed the deal.

The problem was that back when the COC wasn't always so hot, it still had the pretensions of a great company. The audience was dominated by society folks in their tuxes and furs, and that somehow made the whole thing a bit pathetic. I knew more than one wealthy businessman whose favorite opera was La Boheme - which (not coincidentally) was produced at the COC with three intermissions, resulting in a great upswing in liquor sales in the lobby.

Five or ten years ago opera was briefly trendy and the young trendoids started showing up at the COC. Although the quality of the operas was much better little else had changed: like Old Society the trendoids dressed up and they liked to tipple. The new twist was that they walked out in droves during the first act. From my cheap subscriber seat on the aisle of the back row I felt the wind of their flooding past, half an hour into a production. Apparently it was enough to have showed up in $200 seats; they didn't have to sit through the whole thing.

Opera Kitchener, which mounted its first production last Saturday, is not having a society problem or a trendiness problem. The best seats cost about 25 bucks and the audience seems to be there for all the right reasons. Opera Kitchener is operating on the slenderest of shoestrings (it doesn't yet have a board or charitable status, or any donors) but it is exhibiting all the best of a promising young company.

Saturday's Marriage of Figaro was delightful. The orchestra was small but fine. The singers were all very good. There was one great performance, which stole the show: Karen Bojti in the role of the Marcellina. It was a small production and the direction enhanced that: the performers directly engaged the audience, at one point even stepping out into the seats. We laughed - loudly - over and over. It was high quality, it was charming, and it was wonderfully entertaining. I'd say that Opera Kitchener founders (and currently the whote enchilada) Emilio and Jennifer Fina are doing this just right. Center-in-the-Square has 2,000 seats, and they sold nearly half, so their fledgling outing must be deemed a success. The pity is that they only sold 200 subscriptions for the season. I hope they can do as well for the rest of the season. This is a company that deserves an audience.

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The White Hotel (Review)

I first read DM Thomas’s novel The White Hotel when it was published in the early 80s. I loved it but found it extremely disturbing. It ranked in my mind with Deliverance, 1984 and Jude the Obscure as books that had upset me so much I could never read them a second time.

This week, after 27 years, I read it again. My second reading was profoundly different from the first. It was still rewarding and disturbing. I cried pretty steadily for the last hour of reading and a while after. But the world has changed so much in 27 years that it’s a different book.

The White Hotel (don’t read on if you don’t want to know what happens) is about several things, but is based in Freud’s article Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he posits that humans are motivated by the life instinct (creativity, harmony, sexual connection, reproduction, and self-preservation) and the death instinct (destruction, repetition, aggression, compulsion, and self-destruction) – by sex and death.

In the novel, the historical Freud is helping a young woman who has debilitating pain that doctors think is psychosomatic. As part of her treatment she writes Freud a poem, followed by a narrative explaining the events in the poem, in which she describes a passionate tryst she has in a hotel in the Alps (which she calls the White Hotel) with a man she identifies as Freud’s son. She has never met Freud’s son. In this fantasy, while the lovers have sex other guests are killed in all sorts of horrific ways. Bodies fall outside their window.

The poem is meant to be shocking: it’s obscene, erotic, sometimes gross, and jarringly personal in the way she keeps referring to her lover as “your son”. When I read the book in 1981, the sex section at the beginning of the story balanced the shocking death scene at the end. However, in the intervening 27 years our measure of what is sexually shocking has changed markedly. Now the sex can’t provide that ballast, and the brutal violence at the end of the book doesn’t fit as well – it might almost, to a first-time reader, feel a little tacked-on.

The story could be read as a novelization (and hence sort of proof) of Freud’s theory of sex and death as the two great motivating forces. It's also a repudiation of Freud, as in the story Freud has let the young woman read his papers, and then she creates a fantasy (or a free association) that perfectly proves his theory. But also, in the novel the character Freud believes in clairvoyance, by which he means the ability to read minds and see into the future. (I don’t know if the real Freud believed this, but he probably did, given Thomas's scholarship.) Given that Freud believes that, all his explanations for his patients’ problems are turned on their heads, because he was treating mainly young Jewish women 30 years before the Holocaust, which would profoundly affect all of them: if they had any clairvoyance at all, it surely would explain their hysteria.

At the end of the story our heroine is killed, along with thousands of others, by German troops at Babi Yar. Thomas was criticized for lifting some of the description of the massacre directly from the text of a survivor (although he credits him on the copyright page), but I thought it was appropriate. Certain things are so horrific that they shouldn’t be fictionalized. Thomas’ handling of this portion of the book is extraordinarily sensitive.

The book has a coda in which all the characters (Jewish or not) are in heaven, which takes the form of Palestine. I don’t see how the book could exist without this coda. It’s like Thomas is taking the reader by the hand and leading us to the end of the experience, helping us cope, reminding us that although many died, life continued.

In one sense, things feel a little over-explained in the book: explanations are a bit too pat. I think Thomas was trying to write for a wide audience that wouldn’t necessarily be able to fill in gaps. But I also feel after my second reading that I need to read it many more times. I don’t understand the purpose of the various perspectives (different narrators and the disturbing second case in “your son”) or the reason the plot unfolds as it does, or why our heroine spends so much time on trains.

Not that you need to understand any of the mechanics of the novel to feel the emotional impact. In an ironic twist, the book leaves me thinking about Freud’s rival Jung. The novel has added to our collective unconscious this image of a large, stately hotel in the mountains, a place we might unexpectedly find ourselves while on a journey somewhere else. If it hadn’t been for the coda I might have thought of the White Hotel as heaven, but instead I see it as our inner life (maybe the id). The lulling sound and motion of a train might hypnotize us into a visit to the White Hotel, deep in our psyche, where every character is an aspect of ourselves and events show us – well, that’s the mystery.

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Smartypants Writes a Book

A while back I heard two journalists on CBC radio talking about book reviews. They said a book review should inform the reader whether the book is worth its purchase price. From the perspective of the reader, this is totally the wrong approach. When I crack the Saturday paper and open the sections full of non-news articles, I am interested in information second, writing first. I'm not reading Consumer Reports looking for appliance suggestions. I'm sprawled on the couch in a pool of sunshine goofing off.

I read the New York Review of Books to learn things. A typical NYR article will take three books on the same topic and talk about the topic with reference to the perspectives of the three authors. They may mention strengths and weaknesses of the books in passing. They may not.

One of the best Saturday book reviews I ever read was a few months ago in the Globe & Mail books section. Some hapless NYU psychology prof had written a book about the evolution of the human brain, and the Globe reviewer didn't like it. I mean, he really didn't like it. And apparently the headline writer agreed. The review was called "Smartypants writes a book." It ripped the book to shreds, but it wasn't that I enjoyed so much as the fact that the review was outrageous, free, original - and really good writing. (Even had the review been favorable, chances are slim that I would ever have read the book.)

That was the glory of the old Joanne Kates restaurant reviews. She evoked the esthetic experience, and whether the food was good or bad, reading her was always delicious.

Writing is delightful when it's honest. That's the secret of David Sedaris, I think. He once wrote that his favorite place to eat in his adopted home town of Paris, France is a tourist food court - which is wonderful not because it's an outrageous statement, but because it's honest and courageous and suggests something meaningful... about living in a foreign culture, and feeling alone and in need of comfort, and about having secret preferences.

Back in her heyday, before she became nasty and bitter, Maureen Dowd could turn a phrase like nobody else. Her most famous line is, of course, "the triumph of feminism would last a nanosecond while the backlash lasted 40 years." But my favorite, from 2002, is "I've downed enough Pringles to shingle Versailles." That's journalism as poetry.

Too much investigative journalism is full of meaningless detail. You know the style - every page has a couple of digressions like, "The meeting was to be held in Williamsboro. Williamsboro, a picturesque town of 40,000, was established in 1788 by Methodist refugees from the west coast of Scotland. Its main industry is rhutabaga waxing." And then Williamsboro is never mentioned again. Every inconsequential character is introduced with a paragraph or two describing their parents, their spouse, their education and their job. This endless irrelevant detail seems designed to prove that the writer investigated everything thoroughly, as well as to pad out the piece. It ends up boring the reader.

I write opera reviews on this blog with a lot of trepidation. I don't have any musical training so I'm not equipped to write a real review. But I'm interested in how the experience of an opera affects the audience and what the opera means, so I write about that. I like to think that as I soldier away at my opera reviews, I'm getting better, but the process has given me a lot of respect for the art and skill of literary journalism.

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Salome (review)

The Metropolitan Opera's production of Salome, shown in cinemas under the Met HD program, had - for the most part - great singing and orchestration. And yet it didn't work. It failed on casting, lighting, direction, costumes, set design and above all, film direction. The result was a performance that lacked emotional punch. And emotional punch is what Salome is all about.

The story goes like this: Princess Salome lives in Judea at the time of Christ. Her mother the Queen is a famous decadent. Her mother's current husband, Salome's stepfather, lusts after Salome. One night during a party Salome wanders outside and discovers the pit where the prophet John the Baptist is being held a prisoner. She has him brought up and falls in love with him, but he is repelled by her. She has him returned to his pit. Salome's stepfather comes by and asks Salome to do an erotic dance for him. She says she will, but only if he swears to give her anything she asks. He agrees, and she strips for him. She then demands the head of John the Baptist. Horrified, he finally has to agree, and the last 20 minutes of the opera is Salome with the severed head - she kisses it, sings to it, and generally descends into full-blown madness, until her stepfather orders her killed.

Dramatically, the opera has two major scenes: Salome's dance and Salome's time with the head. They take about the same amount of time. Both leave the audience uneasy. It's creepy to watch a daughter dance erotically for her father, and watching an opera singer get naked seems voyeuristic and inappropriate. At the same time, the dance and the music of the dance is beautiful. The combination of attraction and repellence create a dissonance in the watcher and before we recover from it, we're hit with the gross, shocking appearance of the severed head and are then drawn into a long, insane scene of Salome with the head. It's brilliant emotional manipulation. The opera is one act and barely an hour and a half long, but it's a draining experience to sit through.

Or it should be. In this year's Met production, Salome is played by Karita Mattila, who is pushing 50 and looks like an older, heavier version of Nurse Ratched. In addition, Juha Uusitalo, who plays John the Baptist, is very fat; when Salome sang "I love your body" people around me laughed nervously as if they weren't sure if it was a joke. Salome's white dress emphasized the thickness of Mattila's waist and there was something wrong with the halter top: she kept trying to adjust it while she was singing. The camera work was relentlessly close-up, emphasizing every flaw and negating any poignancy that the set might have provided. The lighting had one setting (bright) and gave the production a cheapo, made-for-TV quality.

The striptease was just plain awful. Any choreography in it was reminiscent of a really low class strip club, and Matilla did two lap dances during it. It made me wince, and I don't think that's the reaction that composer Richard Strauss was looking for.

The set wasn't all bad, but it didn't make any sense. It looked like a 1970s disco with a glass floor and spiral staircases, but the libretto makes it clear they're supposed to be outside the palace ("Let's go inside" and "The wind is chill" and so on).

Mattila and Uusitalo have wonderful voices. The Salome role has a huge range and Mattila was perfection moving from soaring romantic vocals to harsh ugly sounds and avante garde bleakness. Uusitalo was especially effective when singing in the pit, and the echoy, off-stage effect worked surprisingly well in the cinema.

The reason I felt compelled to write about this performance (since I only review about one in fifty operas I see) is that the badness of the production helped clarify for me what a successful production would do. Salome needs to develop from vulnerable to damaged to beyond repair. The events in the opera unfold in real time, so we need to see how someone could lose their mind in an hour and a half. In the beginning the young girl is teetering between the decadent power of her parents and the innocent goodness that causes her to love a holy man. Stripping for her stepfather breaks something in Salome, but her essential goodness causes her descent to decadence to drive her mad.

This opera, like most operas, is all about scoring emotional hits - it's visceral, archetypal. The opera deals with innocence vs experience and spiritual longing vs forbidden lust. It raises the possibility of redemption: in the middle of a decadent party, Salome stumbles on a man of great holiness. It's about breaking taboos: along with incest, the most shocking aspect of the opera is that Christ's prophet is murdered. (Even Salome's stepfather is horrified by that.)

All the aspects of the production must work together so that the music and story and visuals all move the audience to understand something about human possibility and the range of our own souls. Done properly, we will all feel that we are Salome, losing our innocence but, in a way, finding redemption in being unable to remain sane without our natural goodness. Like all great tragic opera, Salome should be a cathartic experience.

The casting of an older woman as Salome was a disaster not because Matilla couldn't appear believable as an object of lust, but because she couldn't bring us, the audience, into the journey from innocence to depravity.

War and Peace (review of COC production)

Tolstoy spent six years writing the novel War and Peace, followed by ten years releasing revised editions. Prokofiev spent 12 years writing the opera based on the novel. Both the novel and the opera were shaped by political repression. Tolstoy wanted to set the novel in the 1825 Decembrist uprising against the czars, but would not have been able to publish in the Romanov era (he wrote the novel in the 1860s) and so changed the setting several times, finally settling on Napoleon's invasion of Russia in the early years of the 19th century. Prokofiev was commissioned to write an opera based on War and Peace by the Soviet Committee on Arts Affairs, and then he was dogged by them for 17 years to make it suit their ideological requirements. Started in 1941 - a couple of months before the German invasion of Russia - it was originally to be a patriotic call to arms. After the war the committee added other purposes: a glorification of peasants, denunciation of decadent Russian royalty, and paean to the motherland. The committee nitpicked over individual notes. They wanted less conversation and characterization, and more declamation on patriotic themes. One argument over three measures (a few seconds of music) lasted three weeks. Prokofiev initially put up a fight, but increasingly ill health and political pressure caused him to give in. It wasn't just the committee that picked at Prokofiev's masterpiece. When he tried to mount the opera the conductors who took it on required numerous modifications. Such were the presures of the Stalinist era that an unsuccessful opening could doom a career, and one conductor threatened to call in sick on opening night if certain changes weren't made. The sublimely beautiful death scene of Prince Andrei, backed by an offstage chorus providing music that evokes his feverish state, was thus almost cut because someone thought the audience would find the use of nonsense words unintentionally funny. The current COC production of War and Peace is a reprise of the recent English National Opera production, and it works. The casting of the main characters couldn't have been better. Russell Braun is the ideal Prince Andrei. His lyric baritone, sensitive phrasing and strong good looks make him an ideal doomed romantic lead. His death scene was everything that opera should be; in the language of Tolstoy's "What is Art", Braun's performance caused an "emotional infection to spontaneously occur in the listener." Elena Semenova as Natasha and Mikhail Agafonov as Pierre were also perfect. But for me, the chorus stole the show. Not in the initial epigraph - while they sang it well, that piece of music just doesn't work for me. The dissonance in the music and the overuse of percussion ends up sounding like a tinny broadcast to my ears. But after that, War and Peace has sublime choral music, especially for the men, and it couldn't have been performed more perfectly. The orchestra, under guest conductor Johannes Debus, sounded better than I've heard it since, well, Bradshaw. Here's hoping Debus will join us on a permanent basis. In case he does, here's how he pronounces his name (I attended a symposium he was at on Saturday): Yoh-HAHN-us DAY-boose. The strength of the ENO production is in the second half, which depicts war. The backdrops and costumes were so evocative in the second half that I was simultaneously on the edge of my seat and on the edge of tears. When Pierre is rescued from his French captors the Russian partisans rise from the snow banks in white capes and slit the throats of the French. I felt I was "there" in a way I seldom do in movies. It helps to have read the book, as the opera is more a montage of scenes than a reproduction of the plot. Prokofiev and librettist Mira Mendelson do a better job capturing the war part of the book than the peace (peace, in this sense, means romance). This might be explained by the limitations of reproducing a 1,400-page novel and the distortions caused by numerous rewrites, but it might also have been due to the difference in circumstances between Tolstoy and Prokofiev when each worked on their version. Tolstoy wrote the novel while living in comfort on his estate, marrying the love of his life and then raising his family. In the first years that he worked on the opera, Prokofiev was also starting a new and lasting relationship (with librettist Mira Mendelson), but they were evacuees, moving from city to city while the German invasion grew, worrying over his children who stayed behind in Moscow. ###