The Death of Imagination

It's been a minute since I took in an opera. But thanks to e.'s ridiculous travel schedule, I got the opportunity to see Verdi's Luisa Miller for the first time courtesy of bunj. As we were parting, he seemed genuinely touched that I'd joined him, as if anything short of infirmity would have kept me away in the absence of prior plans.

It's an odd little gem. The plot is apparently adapted very loosely from Schiller, which makes me curious about the source material, since it's pure melodrama, with more twists than the Timmelsjoch Hochalpenstrasse. Despite that, it does mostly focus on ordinary people who make some extraordinarily bad choices.

The number one bad choice is Rodolfo, son of the local count and complete meathead. Luisa's father sizes him up accurately as a playboy who hasn't thought through the consequences of a romance with a commoner but she is undeterred. This leads to a ludicrous scene where, when cornered by his father, the young heir first demands to be led off in chains along with his beloved, then threatens to stab her through the heart, and finally remembers the plan he voiced only minutes earlier to use his knowledge of his father's Dark Secret to blackmail him.

That is one of the oddest facets to the opera: It's a love story, but between father and daughter. As bunj pithily observed, "Rodolfo isn't the protagonist, he's the antagonist." It never seems to occur to him how the power differential between him and the object of his affection can only lead to her destruction. There are shades of Rigoletto here, but whereas the Duke doesn't care for Gilda beyond a one-nighter, Rodolfo is fatally infatuated with Luisa. And her father, rather than being a brash loudmouth, only wants to grow old peacefully with her married off to a good man.

Another odd feature is the sex imbalance in the cast. Besides Luisa, there are only two other female singing roles: the Countess who Rudolfo's father has promised him to and a gal pal of Luisa's. The latter has a bit part, and the former not much more than that. It takes some finessing to get Luisa and Countess together for a duet, but the men never leave the stage and it soon morphs into a weird a cappella ensemble. By contrast, there are four strong roles for men and only one of them is a tenor. When's the last time you heard a duet for two basses?

One of these basses was Newcomer Solomon Howard, who sang Wurm, the ostensible villain of the piece. He couldn't quite hold his own next to Quinn Kelsey, but his voice shows promise and I liked his physicality. Kelsey is probably the best actor in the bunch--a vital choice, since as Miller he runs the widest gamut of emotions. Van Horn was solid as the Count. As for Calleja, he's got beautiful tone and flawless diction (being the only native speaker of Italian in the cast), but he's more from the stand-and-sing school. Fortunately, that works when playing a hapless pretty boy like Rodolfo.

I remembered liking Krassimira Stoyanova when I last saw her, but I don't recall her tone being so warbly. She also looks old for the part, which was particularly noticeable from where we were seated, but fortunately can still sound young enough to sell Luisa's youthful poor decisions. Alisa Kolosova sang the Countess and made the most of the only role allowed to really have any fun on stage; rather than feeling sorry for he for being jilted, you're happy she escapes marrying into a family of deplorables.

Apart from the oddities previously mentioned, it's a good early Verdi score, though light on the choral bits. I was seated closer than I've ever been before, but also farther to the side. (Eighth row right on the outermost aisle.) It's nice for a change to feel the music as much as hear it and relax in the knowledge that it can easily drown out most incidental noises. (The Upper Balcony is an exercise ignoring distractions.)

I've heard the production team are still way into playing around with their new set machinery, but the production decisions didn't seem much stranger than before. Chief among these was a huge free-hanging canvas which dominated the right half of the stage, moving along a track and changing to express different settings. There's some quirky use of silhouetted supernumeries in the court scenes, notably in the hunt scene where they walk by with an increasingly less-identifiable series of animal corpses. But the lighting was good overall and I liked the use of a simple rounded set which, with minimal alterations, suggested a village, a wood, a courtyard, and a church. I was actually surprised they had to lower the curtain for a set change in the second act.

I had concerns I'd be too tired to really enjoy the show but it's a short opera--we were out by 10 p.m.--and I'd managed to get a rare full night's sleep. It also avoided some of the usual pitfalls of Italian opera. The first act love duet that always puts me to sleep? It was short and bouncy and for a change the lovers actually knew each other and weren't just meeting for the first time. It also helps immeasurably having someone at your side with the sensibility to laugh and cry at the same parts.

More reading! On Saturday, I started on another Woodrell novel, Give me a kiss; I finished it Monday night. (And that's with Sunday being mostly a lost day due to my stumbling home at 4 a.m.)

It's a very much a transitional novel from the period where he was reinventing himself as an Ozarkian author. The subtitle is even "A Country Noir". The protagonist is a Mary Sue: a rural writer whose work is pigeonholed as "genre" but who still hopes to break into the world of respectable fiction. He returns to his hometown on an errand from his parents where he gets caught up in his brother's get-rich scheme.

There's a lot of wish-fulfillment in these pages: His brother's girlfriend has an impossibly gorgeous and precocious virgin(!) daughter who just happens to fall head over heels for him. The scheme brings our man the notoriety he's been chasing, with profiles in Esquire and cash advances for his next novel.

The writing, too, made me cringe at times. There's a surfeit of clichés (some of them cornpone enough to be dad jokes) and a lot of folksy asides on Ozark history and customs. Worst of all, it's littered with gratuitous references to the first-person narrator's past-life regression therapy. I guess Woodrell was trying to give voice to his atavistic hillbilly side, the sense of connexion to place that drew him back to where he grew up, but all it does is grate and distract.

It feels like a lot of this is padding to compensate for the thinness of the plot, which could be adequately explained in a sentence. There are more violent scenes than in other Woodrell novels but they have less impact; that pervasive sense of dread, the omnipresent feeling that something awful could happen at any moment that I get from his later novels just isn't there yet.

All in all, the novel is mainly interesting for the insight into where he came from, both as a writer and as a person. It's a snapshot of him going home to cultivate an authentic voice. Most of the biographical details check out, so I feel fairly comfortable assuming that most of the narrator's musings coincide with Woodrell's own take on things (at least circa the early 90s).

Still, it's not a terrible novel, so if this is the nadir of his œuvre, I'm pretty square with the notion of becoming a Woodrell completist. I've already read his trio of early noir works (set in the more marketable boondocks of Louisiana) and he hasn't published anything new in six years, so that leaves me just two historical novels: The maid's version (which I own already) and Woe to live on, the basis for the film Ride with the Devil (which I watched long enough ago now that it probably won't colour my reading of it too much).

Nuphy called Don Quichotte "the season's weakest link" and perhaps that's what it will turn out to be. After all, it was by all accounts an impressive Lucia and I can personally attest that we had a solid Rheingold. I'd take a mediocre version of either of those over a top-rate Massenet most days and I'm so dang excited about finally seeing Les Troyens in a week that I'm giving it a gentleman's B no matter what. But if it is the weakest, then that will be testimony to what a strong season we'll have had.

Lyric's staging is a happy family. The main weakness is the opera itself, primarily the score: barely two hours of music and only one standout melody. I was implicitly warned about how bored Nuphs expected to be at dinner when I warned him against a second margarita with, "You don't want to fall asleep during the first act," to which he responded, "Oh yes I do!" But he didn't after all. At intermission, he confessed that part of the difficulty the previous time was the lack of supertitles, which is a significant issue with an opera which relies as much on its text as this one does.

(Speaking of text, there were title cards before each act featuring English translations of quotes from Cervantes' great work. Which is a lovely idea, except some dildo lazily laid them out in Papyrus. Are you fucking kidding me?)



Where was I? Oh, right--weak score, good libretto. Fittingly, we had solid but not outstanding singers with terrific diction. Clémentine Margaine, our Dulcinée, is actually French so she had better be en pointe, but our Italian male leads sounded kosher, too. They were also perfectly cast, Furlanetto with the stick legs and a slightly shaky past-prime timbre that made for a convincing Quichotte and Alaimo with natural bulk and comic energy. Together they made the final act more touching than I was prepared for from such a trifling treatment of a weighty work. Margaine had the right amount of languor, both physically and vocally, and the supporting case managed to uphold a standard without anyone standing out.

The other thing which kept Nuphy awake was the quality of the production. Very traditional, but it had good flow. (Contrast it to Rheingold, where the stage was too busy to the point of losing the focus at times.) Visually, the most striking sequence was during the windmill-tilting scene, where moving props are overlaid with projections which multiply until you begin to feel the madness gripping Quichotte before he charges. (Unfortunately, on the weakest aspect of the set design: a static wooden horse on rollers.)

As expected given the period and subject, there's a lot of marching the chorus on and off to satisfy the requirements of the score. I'm always looking for ways to inject this with some naturalism, but I confess there's not much the stage director can do in this case with as few measures as Massenet gives him. A bit more in the way of instrumental interludes between arias and you'd have a shot at something more naturalistic, but instead it's all about efficiently exiting a hundred or so choristers. The dance numbers--such as they are--suffer from a lack of real choreography and there's a crowd scene where the clapping is so sloppy that I was gripping Nuphy's knee in agony for it to be over. (Hopefully that's an opening-night problem that it's still possible to iron out.)

So a happy family, but not a jubilant one. An a welcomely compact one: we were out by 10 p.m., in plenty of time to catch the express bus home for a change. Our UofC seat mate was trying to flog a half-baked idea about the opera's relationship to early modernity that none of us was buying, but we all felt good-natured enough to hear him out. If I weren't such a lightweight, it would've been a great opportunity for nightcap; instead I had to make sure I got my mood-enhancer in early.

At some point in my reading of Borstal Boy, I attempted to compare it to my memories of the 2002 film adaptation and come to the realisation that I had none. I mean, I dredged up a few vague images and I remember something about a stage play, but I couldn't recall the plot. Or the character arc. Or the characters. Or the actors who played them. So I was pleased to find out from rereading my original entry that I apparently rather enjoyed it. That was over five years ago now, which is about twice as long ago as what it had become compressed to in my mind, so maybe I shouldn't fault myself for forgetting so much.

In retrospect, the movie was spot on in having the central character move away from radicalism rather than toward it. Ebert faulted this in his review, but unfairly so, since that's very much the impression Behan leaves you with. Yes, his young self is defiant until the end, but there's absolutely no indication in the closing chapter that this is the same man who would attempt to assassinate two gardaithe within a year of being released. I also faulted the compression in the film, but Behan sums up his last two years in six pages after having spent 230 on his first year in borstal and 130 on a few months imprisonment before that.

Dramatically, the biggest change is to have the film build up to a violent climax when it's the opposite with the book: the most vicious violence occurs in the first hundred pages whereas the last hundred have none at all. In my review of the film, I mentioned "short shrift" being given to the straight romantic subplot, but that's quite understandable considering that the object is a character that barely merits a walk-on in the book. The homosexuality is, as expected, dealt with rather more cagily in print, and it's hard to tell how much this reflects Behan's own youthful naïveté and how much a grown man's prudence.

It's a smashing read. Behan has a fantastic ear for dialogue and true way with words--poetical and very Oirish without getting too aye-and-begorra. For once an Irish novel with a fair bit of the Irish language in it and all of it correct (ignoring the lack of accents, for which doubtless blame the printer). I am now a treasure trove of mid-20th-century English prison slang, such as "judy", "snout", and "graft china". Wonder when that might come in handy.

So if you want to know where the inspiration for the garish pastels in the costumes of Barbara Gaines' production came from, look no further than here:


I have one of my seat partners, a music prof at UofC, to thank for this observation. He also remarked that this was "the Mozart who gives rise to Rossini, not the Mozart who rise birth to Wagner". That is, the staging was reaching back into the commedia dell'arte tradition of physical comedy rather than looking forward to the 19th-century of grand opera. Which is a fine thing to do, but to pull it off (as your man also pointed out) you need a cast of fine comedians as well as fine singers. And--with the prominent exception of Luca Pisaroni as the Count--that's something we didn't have.

This was most noticeable with the character whose name is in the title, Figaro. Adam Plachetka's voice a bit small for the vast interior of the Lyric, leading him to get drowned out by the orchestra a couple of times. He's got the size to bumble about, but he needed to work on timing. Everybody did, which leads one to hope that the final performance will be much more assured than this, only the second in the run. From the sound of it, guest conductor Henrik Nánási will need that much time to get a handle on the orchestra, which wasn't as together as it should've been. Add in some turgid sections and you've got yourself quite a draggy first act.

But things picked up noticeably in the second, thanks in no small part to Pisaroni. Rachel Frenkel acquitted herself nicely with "Voi che sapete", but whether through her stiffness or poor direction, that number didn't come off nearly as well as it could've. (As Cherubino sings, the Countess keeps trying to distract him with playful caresses and teasing gestures. But he ignores her singlemindedly--despite the fact that only minutes before he was literally throwing himself around with distress at not being able to see her!) Gaines' decision to set all of the action on the tremendous bed of the lady of the manor works very well in this scene, but makes less sense later when a gardener(!) marches in and stomps all over it, followed by all and sundry.



I must say, the production grew on me. At first, the huge blonde wood-textured swoop making up the centre of the stage looked to me like nothing so much as a moulded Scandinavian console from the 60s (a resemblance only heightened when a panel in it slides away bizarrely to reveal the peasant chorus). In the next seen, it acquires a touch of transparency and comes to resemblance an elabourate valence instead. The garden in Act Four is almost completely abstract, just sculptures and koi pond, but the lighting makes it magical.

The singers grew on me, too. At first I thought Amanda Majeski's tall willowy Countess was too poorly matched to Christiane Karg's Susanna for their substitution to make sense even in a dimly-lit space, but clever costuming and hair convinced me. Whatever my friends might think, Keith Jameson's Basilio was way too Wilberforce Humphries for my taste and I was glad I didn't have to suffer through his late aria, which ended up on the cutting-room floor alongside Marcellina's. Again, Katharine Goeldner's voice grated less on me then than it did in Act One, but I still wasn't looking forward to the prospect of a deep drink of it.

So, yeah, iron out the problems of timing etc. in both the stage action and the music and you'll have one terrifically fun romp here. (When all's said and done, it's the most indestructible of Da Ponte's libretti.) It's not enough for me to have another look in a couple weeks, but I'd like to hear from those who do.

Poor monshu! Despite how tired I was after entertaining his family Tuesday night, I had every intention of joining up with them again the next evening in Wicker Park for fancy vegan food. Then Wicker Park became Norwood Park and the restaurant became dowdy old Amitabul, which I have strongly meh impressions of from the days when it was still located on Southport. Even at rush hour, the RTA trip planner couldn't find a route which took less than 65 minutes and the taxi fare estimator put the cost around $36. I was so eager not to disappoint anyone that I even checked Uber (which I consider the pimple on Satan's glans of transport companies), but then I came to my senses and begged off.

Of course, by then it was too late for forging alternative plans, so I decided instead to grab some pie to heat up at home while I cleared a title off my NetFlix queue. I try to screen them well, so it's a rare day indeed when I find one so unwatchable that I seriously consider giving up a half hour in, so either I was in a far worse mood than I thought I was or No Way To Treat A Lady is just a special kind of awful. George Segal isn't entirely charmless, but neither is there much apparent reason for Lee Remick to pursue him so single-mindedly. The real puzzle, however, is why too-clever-by-half serial killer Rod Steiger sees him as a worthy opponent for a game of cat-and-mouse when it's basically dumb luck that bears him along. I love Rod Steiger--clearly I must to stick with him as he eats every piece of scenery within arm's length. But he doesn't have enough charisma to save this shambles of a script. (Not surprised Goldman didn't put his name to it.)

But of all this, what had my hand hovering over the remote was the atrocious performance of Eileen Heckart as the most embarrassing caricature of a Jewish mother this side of the Borscht Belt. (In retrospect, the smart thing to do would've been to put on closed captioning and watch her scenes muted.) The whole thing is such a mess of stereotypes (ethnic and otherwise), from Irish cops and priests to mouthy dames and flaming queens, but none of it prepares you from an amazingly ill-conceived confrontation between Segal and a midget confessing to the crimes which is played for laughs only there aren't any--not even from sheer nervous confusion.

Still, I didn't regret my choice. I regretted it even less when the Old Man stumbled in at 11 p.m. with a tale of woe of waiting nearly two hours in the unseasonable coolness to catch a cab back from the burbs. The whole business wore him out to the point where he spent most of the next day sleeping. I'll make it up to him tomorrow by riding the rails out to the Blue Line terminus and plunging into the maelstrom of Comic-Com with him. Then it's a day of recovery before the clean-up day for the out-of-towners.

My NetFlix discs arrived with blinding speed. Like if I hadn't been out all yesterday evening (and into the night) gallivanting about, I would've been able to watch the first episode of Jack Taylor. I'm glad I chose to gallivant, because it was shite. Almost none of the changes from the book made any sense to me. Like of course you knew the main character would be less of an asshole than he is in the novels, but what's with making the rocker chick singer into a garda...who's a blues singer on the side? Really? And was there like an EU grant for shoehorning Kosovo into the plot? Because Jesus God.

All in all, I would've been better off just reading the next novel in the series, which I got for cheap used along Elie Wiesel and something called Losing my Espanish by Herman Carrillo. There was much more I wanted to buy but I kept swatting my hand every time I reached for something by yet another White guy (particularly another dead White guy). Unfortunately, that's almost all there was in the foreign-language section. It's particularly annoying to find newer authors I'd love to read more of (like Jelinek or Barbery) in translation but not in the original. But that's what potluck nets you.

The city I grew up in had but one art cinema. Happily, it happened to be located close to where I lived. I have vivid memories of inviting several friends to see a Mike Leigh film there for my 18th birthday and having to "translate" much of the Cockney dialogue for one of them. But I remember the movies I didn't almost as well as the ones I did. When I got a circular, I would read through the synopsis of every single film even though, at best, I saw maybe one in twenty.

One which particularly lodged in my brain was Tenue de soirée ("Evening dress"; shown here under the title "Menage"), a little French film starring the then-unknown-to-me actor Gérard Depardieu. I wasn't out to myself yet, but I was moving in that direction, and the homo romance at the centre of it intrigued me. The description I remember is too detailed to have come from a single-paragraph blurb, so I must've read a review of it in the local paper as well.

It's hard to imagine what kind of effect the movie would've had on me had I actually seen it. It would've been my first full frontal nudity, my first simulated gay sex. Depardieu's Bob might've become fantasy fuel in the same way as Rod Steiger's Komarovsky. (I saw Doctor Zhivago for the first time the year after.) I certainly would've imbibed some bizarre ideas about gay relationships while having almost every stereotype of French artsiness and lubricity completely confirmed.

Seeing it nearly thirty years later is a markedly different experience. Titillating, not groundbreaking. I'm jaded enough to note how little the sex scenes show rather than how much. The rampant misogyny and rapey notions of what constitutes romance and seduction simply make me shake my head. Et je comprends en fait un peu du français. Modest though its charms, I have to admit that I had no idea where it was going and my interest in finding out never wavered.

Last month, when I was casting about for movies to NetFlix, I tossed on couple of the better-looking dramas concerning Henry VIII and his wives. Then, a few days back, when I was feeling in need of some inspiration for the final push on Wolf Hall, I pushed Anne of the Thousand Days to the top of the queue. A sumptuous Technicolor costume drama starring Geneviève Bujold and Richard Burton? How could I go wrong!

I couldn't. Burton may have hated the film, but I loved him in it. Even when he was being hateful. Yeah, the acting can be a bit declamatory at times, but some of the dialogue is bracingly lewd and entertaining and the scenes with Bujold are touching. Her Anne is more sympathetic than Mantel's version without being as insufferably virtuous as Donizetti's heroine.

In fact, I was taken aback by how wanton she's portrayed in the opening sequence, where she admits to not being a virgin while propositioning Percy. And even moreso that, despite that, she's allowed to be the model of fidelity in her marriage to Henry afterwards. The film is an interesting collision of both the end of the Hayes Code and the twilight of the traditional costume drama, so everyone's wearing amazing embroidery while talking freely about adultery and incest.

Among the supporting cast, Torontonian John Colicos (a familiar face from the bad tv of my childhood) stands out as the oily lawyer Cromwell, as do Anthony Quayle as Wolsey and Irene Papas as Katherine. I'm sure errors of fact are legion (even with my rough understanding of the timeline, I caught some hiccoughs in the chronology) but there are worse ways to spend a couple hours on a cold winter's evening.

Ages ago now, Nuphy and I went to see la Gran Scena at the Athenaeum in Lakeview. Vera Galupe-Borszkh, alter ego of the group's founder Ira Siff, was the first person ever to attempt to explain the plot of Il Trovatore to me. "Even eef you understant Trovatore," she warned, "you don't understand Trovatore. Nobody understants Trovatore!" That line got a big laugh, and I love to repeat it, but I acknowledge that it's not actually true. As our seatmate pointed out Saturday evening, the plot does make sense--provided you accept the ludicrous central conceit of a woman so maddened by grief she would cosign the wrong infant to the flames.

More importantly, however ridiculous the plot, the emotions are true and Verdi supports them 100% with his incredibly tuneful score. (I remember at one point in Act 2 thinking that, in many a lesser opera, Azucena's second aria would be a standout. Here it hardly leaves an impression, coming soon after the famous Anvil Chorus and right before Il balen del suo sorriso.) The action also moves along at a good clip, rendering my worries about being able to stay awake after my restless nights a bit silly.

Part of the reason for that is the production, which makes use of a revolving stage in order to expedite the many scene changes. Since this was my second time seeing Edwards' stage scenery, I was less bowled over by it and could focus on the parts I found wanting. For starters, why is it so ugly? The buildings are all Brutalist concrete slabs with minimal ornamentation, the ground is blasted rock and dust, and upstage right is dominated by a forest of charred poles. I kind of liked that, actually, since it recalls the death of Azucena's mother and the pall it casts over the entire proceedings, but even Nuphy was at a loss to explain the huge crucifix in the middle--nor why all the costumes are Regency. (Leftovers from another production? Lyric has to cut corners somewhere, I guess.)

The barrenness of it all also complicates McVicar's job as director. Leonora's first scene with her maid has the two of them running inexplicably around their featureless box--it's hard to add stage business with no props but neither can you let the performers remain static. But the next scene is even odder, with di Luna standing outside a wall which suddenly turns out not to be a wall at all before arranging himself into puzzling configurations with Leonora and Manrico. The men don't do a convincing job of trying to get into a fight, and she does an even less convincing job of trying to separate them.

But all this faded under the brilliance of Verdi's composition as conducted by Asher Fisch and sung by a cast adequate to the challenge. Caruso is supposed to have said that all you need for a successful Trovatore is the four greatest singers in the world. Obviously we didn't have those, but there wasn't a bad voice in the bunch. Sure, the mezzo and the soprano didn't have the sweetest voices I'd ever heard, but when it comes to Azucena, that can be passed off as characterisation, and for our Leonora, I'm just glad she could hit all the notes without getting screechy. Our old standby Silvestrelli sang Ferrando and Ryan Centre alumnus Kelsey was the Count, so there was no risk of being overwhelmed by the orchestra even when it was blasting away. Most impressive, however, was our Manrico, Yonghoon Lee. His acting may be stiff (something which worked better when he played Don Jose four seasons back than it does now), but cuts a striking figure and his voice is impeccable.

It was fortunate that Nuphy had his opera glasses because the chorus was even more toothsome than usual. He'd heard about the beef working the anvils on stage and was not disappointed. I was most impressed by the convent scene (even if it was somewhat incompetently blocked--how is it that only gypsies have flintlocks?). Forming the backdrop to the interior is a chainlink fence several stories high and the supernumeraries hanging off of it hold their poses for the duration of the scene. That's more impressive to me than wielding a big hammer, no matter how shiny you are.