Operatic Vengeance

Vagina Junction, What's Your Function? - Manon at LA Opera

According to the Futurama episode “I Dated A Robot”, all civilization is just an effort to impress the opposite sex. Yes, fire was discovered, the Great Pyramids were built, the light bulb was invented, all in the neverending quest for poon. Not the Parthenon, though, or the Pythagorean Theorem, or any of that good Greek stuff that forms the cornerstone of Western civilization, since all that stuff was invented by the Greeks of old…you know the ones I mean. Anyway, I guess there’s no reason why Massenet’s opera Manon (and the novel that it’s based on) should be any different, but I wish LA Opera’s production of it had been a little more subtle about it. As it is, however, the whole thing is should just be called “The Quest for Vag” or, more accurately, “The Quest for Anna Netrebko’s Vag.”

The best way I can describe the plot is this: it’s La Traviata, only all the characters are assholes. Well, kind of. It’s the same basic thing, only it starts earlier on—we see the girl’s transformation into a courtesan—and since all the characters are assholes, they tend to behave in opposite ways from the characters in La Traviata. Instead of DesGrieux’s father trying to convince Manon to give up his son for his son’s sake, he just has DesGrieux kidnapped (at least I think that’s what happened; a lot of cuts were made, so things were kind of odd and sudden.). Instead of Manon sacrificing her love for DesGrieux for his own good, she basically dumps him for a rich guy and then, after hearing that he’s become a priest, she heads straight for the abbey and dives headlong into his crotch. Instead of trying to win Manon back, DesGrieux goes all pussified and heads for the priesthood. I could go on. Basically, because everyone is an asshole, I didn’t care about any of them at all.

Massenet’s music is very nice; it’s more complex than he’s probably given credit for. Listening to the excerpts in the pre-performance lecture, I was excited to hear it. Unfortunately, Placido Domingo conducts with very little subtlety, so most of what the lecturer had told us to listen for was no longer there because it was being drowned out by louder instruments. The St. Sulpice duet wasn’t particularly erotic or ecstatic (the lecturer had made it sound practically X-rated), and the love theme wasn’t all that, well, lovely.

As a completely random aside, I want my own Leitmotif. And I want it to sound like the theme song from Sanford and Son.

Lack of a light touch marred just about everything though. That’s no surprise really, since the production was directed by Vincent Paterson, who used to choreograph for Madonna and Michael Jackson. The setting was nonsensically updated to the 1950s, which made the whole joining the priesthood and being sent to a convent for liking pleasure parts a little far-fetched (the pole-dancing was anachronistic as well, but in the other direction of time.). There was the usual tweaking of the supertitles to match the updated setting, but it didn’t really matter anyway, since Netrebko’s French (and sometimes Villazon’s) was so mushy that I couldn’t understand any of her spoken dialogue and only a tiny bit of her singing. The street scene was quite pretty, with the floaty pastel dresses, and some of the scenes were just blandly inoffensive (albeit stolen from a production of Don Carlo, in the case of the St. Sulpice scene), but others were garish, Moulin Rouge-with-a-Marilyn-Monroe-wig disasters. Particularly awful was the Casino Transylvania set, which should’ve been called “Casino Giantess’s Vagina”, since the back wall was a huge painted pair of red high heels, with the stupid stripper pole between them (not to mention a lit-up Eiffel Tower poking up as well). Yeah, yeah, yeah, phallic symbols, blah, blah. I think whoever designed the production were going for a Hollywood glamour type thing, right down to the ridiculous sunset over dark, silhouetted hills at the end, but it just didn’t work. In fact, since I was in the upper balcony, I could see all the fluorescent tape on the stage floor, mistook them for lights put there intentionally to look like city lights seen from far away, and thought “Aha! I knew being dead was the same as living in Phoenix!”

One trend at LA Opera that I’d really like to see done away with if the lame-ass pantomiming during the overture. In La Traviata last year, they did the “You stole my suitcase, therefore I must blow you” thing at the beginning, and in Manon, they wheeled Netrebko out on a reproduction of a train compartment and showed her putting on lipstick and then baring her leg to the thigh for no reason. It looked like maybe she was tweezing her leg hairs, which is a very inefficient method of depilation. But yeah, loss of innocence, etc.

It felt like this production was really all about objectifying Anna Netrebko; arguably Manon is about objectifying Manon, but there wasn’t a stripper pole in Prévost’s novel. It was like they’d held a contest to see how many people could think of something for her to rub her crotch on. In Act II, DesGrieux was reading a letter he’d written to his father about her, and Manon grabbed the letter and put it on her crotch, forcing DesGrieux to read it at fuzzy clam level. Great, Manon, how is he supposed to send it to his father when it’s covered in your cooter juice? Anyway, of course that perv Mark Swed mentioned that part in his review, and the audience was practically giddy over it. The guy in front of me (who had gotten there at the beginning of the second act) laughed way too loud and bounced in his seat. During the pole dances (Netrebko’s and the dancer’s), all the men around me had their binoculars glued to their eyes. Really, fellas, you can get better for much less than the price of an opera ticket down on Sunset. Apparently, Manon also tried to give DesGrieux a handjob through his priest’s cassock in the St. Sulpice scene, but I missed that part somehow. Hmm…maybe that “Love Theme” should really be called “Sex Theme”.

The biographical notes for Netrebko declared her a “miracle” as a singer and an actress, and unless “miracle” is being thrown around the way that “awesome” is (“A hot dog?! It’s a miracle!”), she’s not. She’s very pretty, true, and she’s young and thin, and she can sing pretty well and act in a way that’s gotten Scarlett Johansson plenty of work, but that’s about it. It’s her beauty that gets everyone in such a lather over her. If she were plain, she’d just be another soprano. But I could write a manifesto about the rimjobs given to the attractive, so I’ll stop. Her voice is surprisingly dark, and it really only sounds pretty in a very specific part of her range. The highs tend to be quite shrill, when they’re not being completely blown. During the climactic high note during Act III, Scene 1, she was totally flat and basically invented a non-existent note. It was painful. Bafflingly, she held it and held it, maybe hoping that someone would go back in time, add “Zuh?” to the Do-Re-Mi scale, and magically make it the right note. Too bad, Miss Netrebko. The laws of time and space be a harsh mistress. The singers were also miked to catch the spoken dialogue, but it seemed like Netrebko’s was on the entire time; she was much louder than usual, louder than all the other singers, and her voice had the flat,dimensionless quality that microphones can give to operatic voice.

I’m beginning to think that the magical duo of Netrebko and Villazon is pure invention, a magical beast that runs on hype. Everyone thinks they’re the best romantic duo since Batman and Robin just because they’re told to think so. Yeah, I guess they work well together; they must, considering how many bodily fluids they exchange over the course of an evening, but they don’t sound particularly good together, and neither of them have incredibly special voices. Villazon sounds a lot like Placido Domingo, only it’s the bad aspects of Domingo’s voice—the nasality, the choked-off high notes. There’s no softness to Villazon’s voice, and in my opinion, very little character or beauty; it’s not pleasant for me to listen too. It seemed like he was singing at the back of his throat a lot, so he sounded like the vocal love-child of Placido Domingo, a sheep, and Kermit the Frog. Since he wasn’t singing “It’s Not Easy Being Granada” in a musical production of Babe, it wasn’t so great. He’s a good actor and tends to be more involved than Netrebko, but he was reverting back to his Gianni Schicchi-era comic capering in the first act. Someone needs to tell opera singers and directors that youth != goof. It can, sure, but would a young girl really find a spaz with eyebrows that you’d have to use Agent Orange to thin hot? I don’t think so. In the gambling scene, Villazon was supposed to look all James Bondesque in his white dinner jacket, but it was more Johnny English than Bond. Overall, he did a better job than Netrebko, but he still couldn’t succeed in making me care about his character.

The supporting cast was pretty strong vocally. David Pittsinger sounded strong and fatherly as DesGrieux’s father, but it was hard to get a good read on him as a character. I couldn’t tell if he was concerned or if he was a dick. Kudos to Pittsinger for finally being able to rock his bald head onstage instead of having to wear a wig. (Good lord, did I just use “rock” in that way? I wasn’t being serious, I swear!) Ryland Davies was at first comical and then kind of slimily fiendish as the Alcindoro-like Guillot. I’m not sure if parts were cut out again, because it seemed like Manon had been involved with Guillot, as well as de Bretigny. Also, I wasn’t paying much attention. Hyung Yun’s voice appeals to me for some reason, but his acting as Lescaut made him the engineer of the Obvious Train. Dale Travis didn’t make deBretigny’s fawning lines quite swoony enough, and from far away, he looked like the old guy from the original Battlestar Galactica stuck in an old puce suit. Unfortunately, deBretigny didn’t re-enact the best.death.scene.ever at the end.

LA Opera really made a point of pushing the sexual aspects (mostly of their own invention) of Manon, right down to the rehearsal video on their website called “Sex and the Opera”. I guess sex does get asses in seats, but is sex really that engrossing of a subject for an opera? All the focus on sex and humping inanimate objects made the title of the essay in the program—“The Eternal Feminine: Massenet’s Manon”—a little disturbing to me. There’s definitely nothing wrong with a woman enjoying sex, and she shouldn’t be branded as a whore for doing so, but there’s a difference between liking sex and banging old guys for money. The way the opera was directed, it seemed like Manon became nothing but a singing vagina with a taste for fancy clothes, not a real person with feelings and thoughts. The final scene made her slightly more human, but at that point, it was already too late. So yes, the hall was full, but did the audience come away with anything beyond “That Anna Netrebko’s got some sweet ass, doesn’t she?”? I don’t think so.

ETA: The audience was the worst I've ever seen. I think most of them weren't regulars and been lured by the promise of onstage crotch-rubbing. The ushers are partly to blame for the fiasco, because they're fucking retards. There are plaques right on the doors to the auditorium "No Late Seating", and yet as soon as there's an applause break (after an aria or something), the doors open and a bunch of people come tromping in and fumble around in the dark trying to find their seats. It was so distracting that I could barely pay attention to the beginning of the second act. People try to blame their lateness on the LA traffic, but really they're just assholes. It's a weekend, why not come a few hours early, get some dinner at the Music Center and make a day of it? Don't think that you're going to be able to leave your house in West LA a half-hour before curtain and expect to make it to the Music Center ontime. No one is that stupid, so I'll just have to put it down to self-centeredness. I don't know why the ushers don't make them wait outside until the intermission like they're supposed to; I mean, it's not like the patrons can ask for their money back (well, they can, but they won't get it.). On top of all the latecomers, the people around us were just being total dicks. Someone was whispering constantly, which I blame on our cellphone society that makes people think that they have to talk all the fucking time. Someone else kept unwrapping food. It's not a movie theater; it's an operahouse. You can't bring a supply of snack food to eat during the performance, and you can't just get up and go to the bathroom whenever you want. Gah! The people who sit next to us always bring a little boy with them, which is just stupid, and the kid was hacking up a lung and bubbling his snot through the whole thing. I was about to have a coronary, I was so pissed off. One of these days, I'm just going to completely lose my shit and start screaming at people.

Labels: los angeles, Manon, netrebko, villazon

posted by Astrafiammante @ 11:59 PM 0 Comments

O nuit kind of divine... Roméo et Juliette at Los Angeles Opera

If Charles Gounod were alive today, I think he would either be a filmmaker or a soundtrack composer. There is something quite cinematic about his operas and his music; I get a feeling of shallowness in it—there is certainly often beauty in the music, but there aren’t any other ideas at play, and the music can often become bombastic or too sugary. Gounod’s main aim, it seems, was to accompany the action onstage as best he could musically, and that is all. Certainly there are times in Roméo et Juliette when the music tells us things that the words are not, but there is very little layering or subtlety behind it. Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette is very similar to Thomas’s Hamlet in that it can be incredible if performed by the right kind of singing actors who can bring the necessary Shakespearean nuance to the characters while singing the sometimes facile music. Simon Keenlyside, for example, can overcome the silliness of Thomas’s Hamlet-with-the-happy-ending, because he seems to keep Shakespeare’s Hamlet in mind even as he sings an out-of-place drinking song in the opera. This is music not necessarily to enlighten or transform, and it is certainly entertaining and even beautiful when performed by the right singers and the right musicians, but the responsibility for taking the performance to that next level rests almost entirely on the singers’ acting abilities.

Rolando Villazon and Anna Netrebko are both capable actors, and more than capable singers, but only Villazon seemed to have any sense of the Shakespearean version of his character. Though he looks like the unholy spawn of Rowan Atkinson and a particularly hirsute bullfrog, onstage, he is a slim, active Roméo, with curly, black hair and wide, expressive dark eyes. His Roméo was impulsive in every way, as quick to embrace Frère Laurent or Mercutio as he was to strike Tybalt for calling him a coward. Vocally, he sounded like a young Placido Domingo, with better French but without that bright, trumpet-like edge to the voice. His high notes seemed easy and were often pleasant to the ear, but at other times, it seemed as if there were a door in his throat that was closed, only allowing the sound to seep around and under it. My main objection with his performance was how he sang “Va, répose en paix”. I have only ever seen one other Roméo, Roberto Alagna, and Alagna sang that piece more as a lullaby or a serenade, very softly and sweetly, with an ethereally floating last note that seemed to dissipate into the air like fading perfume. Villazon chose to sing the piece more as a standard aria, more loudly and stridently than I thought was necessary.

Anna Netrebko was less successful as Juliette. She seemed to have no concept of the character of Juliette, and her interpretation seemed pieced together from other operatic characters she has played. Juliette’s first appearance at the ball was more like our first glimpse of Violetta in La Traviata, with Netrebko resplendent in a white confection of a gown that made it look as if she had stepped into a gigantic wedding cake. Her “Juliette’s Waltz” was coy and flirtatious, rather than girlish, as she wove her way among a line of suitors. It was more like Musetta’s Waltz than Juliette’s. When Frère Laurent gave her the potion to simulate death, Netrebko began throwing herself around the stage and writhing around on the floor in an inappropriate repetition of her performance of Lucia di Lammermoor last season. Most importantly, she never seemed like a 14 year-old girl, and that didn’t fit with the character of Juliette or Juliet or even with the libretto. She appeared too comfortable at the ball, too worldly on her wedding night with Roméo. Netrebko’s voice also added to the maturity of her Juliette. Everything she did was technically perfect, but it seemed that there was a veil drawn over her voice that kept it from really breaking through into any lightness, youth, or uniqueness. During the wedding night scene, she sounded almost like a mezzo.

Villazon and Netrebko interacted well, although he is a much less self-conscious actor than she. One reviewer said that there was a lack of chemistry because Netrebko is too full of herself, but I think the problem actually is that she’s not a natural actress and is following the stage direction so closely that everything she does seems calculated and contrived. Though their voices are similar—both are fairly dark and lack a true cutting edge—it didn’t seem that their voices blended very well. Other parts of their anatomy seemed to blend better, much to the delight of all the perverts in the audience.

The rest of the cast was fine. Suzanna Guzman fulfilled her role as comic relief as the Nurse; she always does well in roles where character is more important than vocal beauty. Simone Alberghini yelled his way through the role of Capulet (and it must have been uncomfortable to play the father of the woman he is dating in real life). Reinhard Hagen was an imposing but kind Frère Laurent, and Anna Maria Panzarella sang her aria as Stephano well. Marc Barrard’s Mercutio got through his Queen Mab aria with an astonishing lack of charisma, and without the sprightly, golden spark and wit that Simon Keenlyside brings to the part and that Shakespeare intended the character to have.

The staging was one of the more impressive that I’ve seen at LA Opera. At first I thought it would be silly, since it look kind of like a Victorian train station, all metal stairs and balustrades and railings. These pieces moved around to form different scenes, and other props were added to suggest Juliette’s bedroom, Frère Laurent’s cell, a ballroom, Juliette’s tomb, or the garden. The only faults with the sets were that they were moved during the muscial interludes, which could get kind of noisy, and they seemed to absorb a lot of the sound. The Dorothy Chandler Pavilion is already inhospitable enough to opera without having a set that doesn’t bounce the sound back out to the audience.

Some other refreshing changes were that all the costumes appeared to be from the same period, in this case rather Dickensian, Victorian costumes, and that the production was refreshingly free of the ridiculous Peggy Hickey choreography we saw in Aïda. West Side Story style was kept to an extreme minimum, and the fights looked like actual violence instead of just messy pirouetting. The only hint of silly choreography was when Roméo was singing “Ange adorable” to Juliette, and their movements were mimed by three other couples in the background. One other low point was the bizarre choice to add a subplot with Lady Capulet and Tybalt. In the ballroom scene, Tybalt kisses Lady Capulet’s hand and appears to flirt with her, before Capulet drags her off, scolding her. After Tybalt dies, Lady Capulet weeps dramatically over his corpse until Capulet violently pushes her away. It seemed that the director was hinting that Lady Capulet and Tybalt were having an affair, and that just didn’t make any sense and has no basis either in the libretto or in Shakespeare.

Even though the douchebag behind me ruined the whole thing for me by saying before the opera started that Roméo and Juliette both die *rolls eyes*, I would say that Roméo et Juliette is my second-favorite performance of the LA Opera season so far, coming only after Bohème. And if Roberto Alagna hadn't been in Bohème, Roméo et Juliette would have been my hands-down favorite of the year. I especially liked Gounod’s love music; it’s very sensual without being saccharine as he sometimes can be. The only parts I didn’t care for were the waltzes, which seemed over-the-top and out-of-place in the context of the play, but since this production was updated to an era where waltzing was popular, it didn’t seem quite so anachronistic. Though now I wonder what a Romeo and Juliet opera would be like set to Elizabethan-style lute music. With Andreas Scholl as Romeo. Or Simon Keenlyside as Romeo and Andreas Scholl as Juliet. Nevermind.

Labels: los angeles, netrebko, romeo, villazon

posted by Astrafiammante @ 9:45 PM 0 Comments