Oct. 20th, 2009

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I was sitting on the el platform waiting for a southbound train yesterday evening when a young person came over to the other side of the bench and plopped down, straddling it. I had my nose down in a book and watched out of the corner of my eye as they pulled out a piece of posterboard and a bag of markers or coloured pencils and started drawing on it.

"I brough all this other stuff and--wouldn't you know it--I forgot an eraser!" she said to no one in particular. (Only after hearing her voice and glancing over to confirm the presence of breasts was I sure of her sex.) A few feet behind me, a man laughed. I smiled sympathetically but went back to reading. Moments before the train arrived, she looked up again and asked me, "Do you think that horror movies cause people to become more violent or encourage violence in any way?"

I stared at her for a several seconds, trying to suss out what kind of reaction she was going for. Finally, she said, "It's kind of a catch-22." I felt like I couldn't not say anything, so as the train was pulling up I managed to come out with, "I think they give people ideas but I don't think they can make someone violent if they're not prone to violence already." Violence is learned in the home, I wanted to add, thinking of my father's outbursts and the fights I got into with my siblings.

But there wasn't time to add that last bit because of the squeal of the train's brakes. From her expression, I gauged that it wasn't the answer she expected. At that point, she went to one side of the car and I went to another. I couldn't tell if she was still drawing something since I was once again buried in my novel, though I did look up as she got off the train and shot me a friendly smile again.
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I don't know what went wrong. Yes, I stayed up too late on Saturday, but I deliberately didn't sleep in on Sunday and forced myself to bed at a reasonable time. Yes, I went to Big Chicks last night, but I didn't drink any alcohol and was on my way home before 8 p.m. After all that I should've been perfectly well-rested by today, but instead I draggy and stupefied.

So I apologise in advance to the cast and crew of the Lyric for giving them less than a fair shake tonight and ducking out during the second (27 minute!) intermission. If they'd played straight through, then e. and I could've made it, but we couldn't face waiting around another half hour to see one more hour of opera followed by another hour (or more, in my case) in transit before we could sleep.

Let's start with the highlight, which for me was seeing our own [livejournal.com profile] profundojoe whooping it up (downstage centre right, no less!) in a dapper turquoise surcoat during one of the more successful set pieces overall, the carousing scene. We all admired the effect of having Méphistophélès freeze the action at points, which had the added benefit of cutting down on a truly ridiculous number of everyone-off-the-set, everyone-back-on-the-set transitions. (Still too many, but that's 19th century grand opera for you.)

Also good was the Act 3 Finale. René Pape showed what he can do when he puts his lungs into it (though he had trouble producing a menacing chuckle to polish it off) and Ana María Martínez came into her own after a shrill beginning. Piotr Beczala was still there with his crappy French diction (oh how the Poles have fallen!), but on balance it was a good time to leave. As e. pointed out, for us the opera was a romantic comedy that ends happily ever after.

And that is the only way I can enjoy this opera, by forgetting it has anything to do with Goethe's brilliant dramatic work. So why do the librettists have to make it so damn hard by keeping as much of the master's original text as they do? Perhaps it really is Gounod's fault for undermining the character of Marguerite so thoroughly with his scoring. I've always remembered her as particularly ill-served by this adaptation, but somehow I'd forgotten that the character of Faust suffers at least as much of a hatchet job.

In a desperate attempt to keep us all from fading during the middle acts, I challenged [livejournal.com profile] bunj to discover an occult subtext to the romance. He succeeded brilliantly, producing not only a somewhat flawed "everyone's gay" reading but a genius political metaphor with Méphistophélès as International Communism giving the Intelligentsia (Faust) the works of Marx (the box of jewels) with which to seduce the Working Class (Marguerite) away from the Military Complex (Valentin) which has her in its thrall and into producing the Revolution (her baby). I came up with...bupkis. It was all I could do to remain erect and conscious, and at that point I knew I needed to head home.

I regret missing the final trio, and I particularly wanted to hear more of Meachem, who killed with his big aria in Act 2. But, alas, Sir Andrew still hasn't met a bright lyrical score that he couldn't dullen with his slack conducting. And when most of what you have going for you is the score itself and not the one-dimensional yawn of a plot it's supposedly in service of, that's just deadly. So it's bedtime for me and for e., one hopes the launch of a wildly successful career at the Lyric for [livejournal.com profile] profundojoe, and an enjoyable start to the new opera season for all of us.
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