The new domesticity

Saturdays are the new Sundays, at least when they're Opera Saturdays. I sleep in, dick around on the computer a bit, have a bite to eat, nap, read a little, and then before I know it I've got to get ready for my hour-plus commute to the West Loop. Today I even have to go a little bit further because Nuphy and I are eating at Wishbone. Seemed appropriate, given that the show is Showboat. We tried to sell our tickets, but it fell through about the same time that the reviews started coming in and they were incandescent. So we'll see.

My reading was "Brokeback Mountain". Nuphy likes the story more than the movie; I'll have to ask him why again, since all-in-all it makes the film look like the most faithful adaptation of a literary work I've seen since Huston's The Dead. But whereas the movie had me on the verge of bawling, all Proulx' prose gave me was a little tightness in my chest. Oh, and I guess a tremendous feeling of outrageous good fortune at being able to set up housekeeping with the man who stole my heart and have everyone in my milieu treat it like the most natural thing imaginable.

Weary an' sick of tryin'

Prior to tonight, there were literally two things I knew about the musical Show Boat:

1. 1. It contains the song "Old Man River".
2. It takes place on a boat.

I didn't even know that it was Rodgers and Hammerstein without the Rodgers. Now I can tell you that it is also the source of the song "Can't Help Lovin' Dat Man", that several scenes are set in Chicago (partly explaining why it was brought here), and that it's about two-thirds of a good musical.

End at the conclusion of Act I and you have a perfectly charming if somewhat corny and one-dimensional love story: those who would destroy the young couple's happiness are dispatched by means of bravado or trickery and everyone toasts their pending departure for the 1893 World's Fair to cement their happiness. But an hour-and-a-half is not good value for money even at 1927 ticket prices, so we have Act II, which has almost as many superfluous musical numbers as it does scenes and concludes with an unsatisfying unconvincing reconciliation.

According to the programme notes, the original production was over four hours in length, and it looks like what was cut was cut from the second half. Unfortunately, this is where the most interesting stuff happens: Mr Right goes bust leaving his simple country bride to fend for herself in a hostile city during a time when only unfortunate women worked. But with just a modicum of fuss, she rises from obscurity to take her place among the brightest stars on the Great White Way, all the while keeping the flame of her pure love alive.

I suppose it's no worse than a lot of opera plots--at least no one burns the wrong baby or dies in a desert on the outskirts of New Orleans--but the scenes in which this plays out are so short and choppy and filled with reprises that Act I, despite being much longer, flies by in comparison. A lot more could be done to contrast the central romance to the varied fates of the other couples, but two drop out at the beginning of the act and the parents' marriage is played strictly for battle-ax jokes.

Paradoxically, these weaknesses might've been less noticeable if the production and performances weren't so top-notch. Nuphy and I both choked up a bit at Morris Robinson's outstanding rendition of "Old Man River". Cap'n Hawks' (Ross Lehman) dramatic summary of the play-within-the-play had much the same effect on us as it did on the audience within the piece. The sets were filled with gorgeously-costumed choristers and astounding dancers (you have never seen more African-American faces on the Lyric stage, not even for Porgy and Bess), all to the accompaniment of that rarest of treats with a modern staging of a Broadway musical: a full orchestra.

Overall, the dialects work was rather good (even if the casts' stage drawls lacked the authentic touch of their broad Chicawguh-ese in Act II), but there was one prominent exception: In the very next sentence after her character makes ostentatious mention of her Massachusetts origins, Cindy Gold's character loudly gives "ten" a pin-pen merged pronunciation; she also regularly assimilates the /t/ in "winter" and "interested", and generally speaks like a Midwesterner trying to sound Southern. The kicker: Her bio credits her with a previous Lyric production--as a dialect coach.

As a side note, Show Boat gets a lot of credit for tackling difficult racial themes--notably miscegenation--but I'm not too sure why. When the revelation that the leading lady of the showboat revue is mixed race leads her to pack her bags, everyone but an ingenue accepts it without a second thought. Later, she selflessly sacrifices herself to give our fair-haired All-American girl her first leg up on the ladder to stardom. And if Zauberflöte comes in for condemnation on account of the line "Weil ein Schwarzer häßlich ist", well, it's hardly more cringe-inducing than making the black domestic Queenie sing "White outside, but black in de heart", is it?

Nevertheless, I left the theatre as one should: elated, humming snatches of the score. But it still hasn't changed my mind about this sad trend of staging musicals at the opera. Several years ago, the Lyric had a commitment to producing contemporary operas, primarily by American composers. Now it's supplementing it warhorses of the Golden Age of grand opera with battleships from the early years of musical theatre. Tell me, if you can, how exactly is a show more than twice as old as I am going to counteract the graying (and dying off) of the opera audience?