Music and Context - Mark Alburger

The success of any musical or opera is dependent on the excellence of its score and the dramatic framework in which it is placed. These basic notions were again very clear in recent performances of Kurt Weill's Happy End and John Adams's Nixon in China, respectively given on June 23 and 26, at Live Oak Theatre, Berkeley (Goat Hall Productions), and the War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco (SF Opera).

While Bilbao Song, The Sailors' Tango, Mandalay Song, and Surabaya Johnny are classic Weill numbers -- the musical, with words by Bertolt Brecht and book by Elizabeth Hauptman, is less well-known. The songs, which more than justify the revival of this worthy work, are at the same time made more vivid by being placed in their dramatic context. And dramatic this production was, with standout performances by Michelle Jasso (Hallelujah Lil), Zoltan DiBartolo (Beerhall Bill), and Alexis Lane Jensen (The Fly) in this story of crusaders and criminals that in some ways feels like The Threepenny Opera II, predating Frank Loesser's Guys and Dolls.

From the arresting opening Hosannah Rockefeller!, director Harriet March Page brought flair and pacing to an engaging production that featured a carnival of carnal talent including Jose Hernandez (The Governor), Nikola Printz (Mammy), Carl Lucania (The Reverend), Maria Mikheyenko (The professor), Crystal Philippi (Baby Face), and Thalia Beradozzi (The Barmaid). The mission-side of reality was well-represented by Rachel Warner (Major Stone), Don Hardwick (Hannibal Jackson), Kate Mathews (Sister Mary), Maggie Tenenbaum (Sister Jane / Mrs. Pigeon), Ignacio Zulueta (Ben Ownes / Mr. Pigeon), and John Paul Olsen (The Cop) -- in soulful consort with spirited pianist Skye Atman.

If the costumes and set were a little rustic... well, it suited the situation.

Similarly, the opulence of the San Francisco Opera's production was eminently appropriate for the Adams Nixon, with a comic and surrealistic libretto by Alice Goodman.

While it seems incredible that this amazing post-minimal score -- arguably the Berkeley composer's most excellent opera -- should not have been presented in San Francisco until now, this was a production that was worth the wait. Setting the tone was conductor Lawrence Renes polish and presence in the overture, against beautiful, crafty, and heroic visions of Air Force One touching down on the Chinese scene. Chen-Ye Yuan's Chou En-lai, Brian Mulligan's Richard Nixon, and Simon O'Neill's Mao Tse-Tung enriched the legacies of these important roles, the standard having been set quite high already by Sanford Sylvan, James Maddalena, and John Duykers in the 1987 Houston premiere. Similarly, Maria Kanyova (Pat Nixon), Patrick Carfizzi (Henry Kissinger), and Hye Jung Lee (Madame Mao Tse-tung) brought honored the traditions established by Carolann Page, Thomas Hammons, and Trudy Ellen Craney. Both Madame Maos in particularly provided the over-the-top disjunct coloratura climax required for the visceral end of Act II, here stunningly staged with Madame standing upon a pile of dead bodies.

The comic minimalist-stuttering of Nixon's News aria, the delirious chordal-choral divertissements of the Cheers! chorus, the reality-bending Red Detachment, the saxophone-synthesizer inflected score with allusions to everything from Asian pop to zeitgeist Wagner, the dreamy transformation of Adams's own The Chairman Dances concert piece into the subdued context of Act III...

Context? Did we say context? Yes -- to have known this music since the 80's and at last seen it staged locally... what a joy. Aside from a few silly dance moves, here, as with the Weill, the dramatic denouemonts maximalized the music, while at the same time the sounds remained the primary solace.

Lively Dead State / Mark Alburger

Years ago when visiting Bruges, Belgium, I didn't get any sense that the locals were fretting over the characterization of their fair city as Bruges-la-Morte (The Dead City of Bruges), the title of Georges Rodenbach's 1892 novel. If there are any lingering 116-year-old resentments, they can be laid to rest in the San Francisco Opera's lively presentation of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Die Tote Stadt (The Dead City), based on the Rodenbach.

Concert and film composer Korngold and his 1920 smash-success opera both fell out of favor in the intervening years, but are on a course of revival, and this co-production -- first given in 2004 at Vienna and Salzburg and presented now from September 13 through October 24 at the War Memorial -- makes a persuasive case.

The music is wonderful: a colorful post-Puccinian, Straussian score tinged with New Viennese danger (though the composer and his co-librettist, music-critic father were clearly not of the Arnold Schoenberg / Alban Berg camp). Not that the initial story or stage action seem promissing.

A man ("Paul" -- changed from "Hugues" in the Rodenbach -- is it a co-incidence that Erich's father's pseudonym was "Paul Schott"?) pining for his dead wife for how long? Get over it! A woman, beautiful of voice and visage (Emily Mcgee as Marietta) appears, who is the living image of the departed (Mcgee doubling as Marie), and he fails intially to go for her? In the words of one of the Pink Panther movies: "What, are you blind?" "Yes!"

The set (original production by Willy Decker) and singing save this early scene (Act I, actually), with a simple set of stark chairs on a violently raked stage, under a looming white ceiling, backed by black graffiti-stewn walls and graced with a giant reproduction of John Singer Sargent's Portrait of Miss Elsie Palmer (1890, the first of numerous manifestations of this painting throughout the evening). To this, add the shining sonics of Torsten Kirl (Paul), Mcgee, and Lucas Meachem (as Paul's friend Frank), and there was not much to complain about, aside from the languid pace.

But then the action and fever perk up in Acts II and III, to really match the always high level of the music. From a series of strange, moving blue rooftops, to alarming catterwonky shifts of the Sword-of-Damocles ceiling -- the visuals matched the continuing, imaginative, unfolding surprises of the sounds and story line.

Among the most amazing visual moments was among the most effect portrayals of a staged dream state that has been seen: an exact double of the dreaming Paul and his room unfold upstage, and a team of ghost-white actors is presaged by the appearance of balloons one-by-one suddenly appearing upstage.

This was true German-style, surreal decadence that the Germans do so well. Yet as depraved and sensual-sexual as it all was, somehow it almost all kept within the realms of good taste (well, maybe the crucified maid Brigitta [Katherine Tier] scene was a bit over the top). The shocking strangulation of Marietta with the locks of the dead Marie connected with the recent John Steinbeck Mice and Men SF Community Music Center production, and the "turns out it was all just a dream, after all" conclusion made for a still-ominous denouement.

As the Gary Snyder character (Japhy Ryder) in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums said, "Comparisons are odious." But this was opera on the big stage that was arresting and ultimately, in retrospect, engaging from beginning to end, with staging that was astounding (without being pandering) yet somehow essential and spare. There is seeming nothing that Conductor Donald Runnicles and Costume Supervisor Kristi Johnson cannot do in bringing a show fully into its splendor, and a good time was had by all in this uncommonly living City of the Dead.

Roll Dem Bones / Mark Alburger

Opera is always a gamble, and the more players, the more risk.

So it is no surprise that The Bonesetter's Daughter, a new roll of the operatic die by composer Stewart Wallace and librettist Amy Tan, commissioned and presented by San Francisco Opera (September 13 through October 3 at the War Memorial) is somewhat of a crap shoot -- an uneven work of high-rolling musical-theatrical fireworks and less-than-engaging table time.

Certainly it is a committed production. From the opening cavalcade of orchestral effects, graced by sona oboes (not trumpets, as erroneously designated in the program), everything is in place to astound. Wallace's score is appealing throughout, showing plenty of Western chutzpah in evoking matters Eastern in a world where the likes of Tan Dun and Chen Yi find their natural voices) -- this is perhaps not surprising, given the composer's previous success in Harvey Milk, where he demonstrated, as here, remarkable "suction-cup ears" (a recent characterization in the New York Times of peer Howard Shore's LA Opera endeavor, The Fly).

With flying Chinese acrobats (suspended on cables from the flies), stunning sets by Walt Spangler, winning vocal contributions by such artists as Zheng Cao (as Ruth Young Kamen), Ning Liang (LuLing Liu Young), Quian Yi (Precious Antie), James Maddalena (Art Kamen), and Hao Jiang Tian (Chang the Coffinmaker) there is much to enjoy.

But the story remains problematic. The opening "Fountain Court Chinese Restaurant, San Francisco, February 1997," while graced with wonderful projections (Leigh Haas) and costumes (Han Feng), veers (as does the whole show) between banality and pomposity. The seeming attempts to transform the ordinary into the archetypal and noble -- as so well achieved in, say, John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men -- seems to elude the creators here.

The great climax of this story, where the villian Chang (who, as can be the case, has some of the greatest music and scenes here) gets his comeuppance, turns out to be a castration and descent into the pit. Hmm, we all showed up in our fancy clothes for this?

The last scene "A Hospital Room, San Francisco, 1997" (coming after the flashbacks "Immortal Heart, a small village on the outskirts of Beijing, late 1930's" and "Hong Kong Habor, 1940's") seems a tedious hit-us-over-the-head, with its protracted spelling out of reconcilliation. We got it, already.

Still, there was enough to take in and marvel that it was a pleasure to attend this, the most ballyhooed San Francisco Opera event of the season. Congrats to General Manager David Gockley, Director and Choreographer Chen Shi-Zheng, Conductor Steven Sloane, the assembled company of artists, and of course to creators Wallace and Tan. May we have more such talked-about evenings of new music drama!