Chicago Opera Theater
Both eras have passed, and now we’re suffering through the age of the director, as directors seek to impose their worldviews and ideas on classics that are frequently at odds with them. To Jean-Pierre Ponnelle all was revolution, to Patrice Chereau all is Marxism and the unfortunate by-products of capitalism, to David and Christopher Alden all is decadence. To make their points such directors twist the intent of composers and librettists beyond recognition and force singers to perform in ways that flatter neither their voices nor the music.
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Great operas often succeed even with unimaginative or traffic-cop direction, especially if they have great singers. For example, the Metropolitan Opera’s Ring cycle, after many revivals by different hands, is missing a directorial point of view, yet the music overcomes that difficulty. But more problematic operas demand ideas from a director–who can then make or break a production. Frank Galati, for instance, was able to take Gertrude Stein’s seminonsensical libretto for Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of Us All and turn it into a coherent work with genuine characters that audiences could care about.
Director-librettist Carl Ratner came up with a text that ranged from the banal to the ingenious, while conductor-arranger Bradley Vieth boiled the orchestration down to a 13-piece ensemble that played onstage as just another amenity at the Palace Hotel. The sound suffered somewhat from the positioning, but it did allow the players–especially Vieth–to take part in various gags.
The set, which resembled a rusted water tank, was bisected by a steeply inclined staircase the unfortunate performers had to negotiate, often while singing. For the catalog aria, Leporello snapped on a bare lightbulb beneath the stairs to illuminate photos–male and female, apparently clipped from back issues of fashion magazines–plastered to the wall. The chorus sang the wedding scene with all the charm of the prisoners’ chorus from Fidelio.
Fortunately the final production of the season gives one hope. Back in the days when the Lyric avoided contemporary opera on principle, COT picked up the slack, with superb productions done on a shoestring. Shining Brow, the operatic treatment of Frank Lloyd Wright’s tempestuous life by composer Daron Aric Hagen and librettist Paul Muldoon, is a reversion to that fine tradition.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Shining Brow photo by Dan Rest.
