Archives for September 2007

A month has gone by since I last reported on the progress of The Letter, the musical version of Somerset Maugham’s play that Paul Moravec and I are writing for Santa Fe Opera. During that time Paul paid his first visit to Santa Fe, and came back mightily impressed by the company and its staff. “It’s like an American Bayreuth,” he said, referring to the theater in Germany where the operas of Richard Wagner are performed each summer. He was told that The Letter is already the subject of considerable buzz, both in Santa Fe and in New York, and that the company now expects that tickets for the opera’s first performances, which will take place in August of 2009, will be a hot commodity. He also brought back a copy of this season’s souvenir program, in which a full page is devoted to The Letter. Whew!

In other news, five of the six principal roles in The Letter have been cast. For the moment I can’t be any more specific, but I can say that our number-one-with-a-bullet choice for the starring role of Leslie Crosbie–the part played by Bette Davis in the 1940 film version–has signed on with enthusiasm, and that all the other singers lined up by Santa Fe to date look and sound eerily like what Paul and I had in mind going in. With Jonathan Kent in the director’s chair, I’d say we’ve got ourselves a damned impressive roster.

On Thursday Paul and I will be sitting down for the latest of our face-to-face work sessions. He’ll play me the music he’s composed since our last get-together, then we’ll go through it bar by bar, putting words and music through the critical wringer and making changes on the spot as needed. Each time we do this, I find myself freshly amazed–as well as humbled–to think that the two of us should be writing an opera for a major company. It’s sort of like the way I feel about living in New York: I’m used to it, but I still have to pinch myself every once in a while.

Paul has now written the first three scenes of the opera, plus an aria from Scene 6. That’s the one for which I knocked out a dummy lyric back in July. Since then I’ve finished the real thing, a nineteen-line haiku-style pastiche modeled after the translations included in Kenneth Rexroth’s One Hundred Poems from the Japanese. This is the first thing I’ve ever written that can properly be called a poem. It even rhymes!

The singer of the aria in question is a Chinese woman whose lover has been shot to death by the Bette Davis character. (That’s how the opera starts.) I usually write the words first, but this time Paul beat me to the punch, meaning that I had to fit my text to his melodic line syllable by syllable. Here’s how the aria ends:

Hear the chime of the clock:
Midnight.
A land beyond the horizon:
The stars above.

Morning will come again–
But not
My love.

Needless to say, I’m no Keats, but I think the results came out sounding more or less plausible, or at least singable.

* * *

So what does The Letter sound like so far? I don’t want to be too specific about a work that’s still very much in progress, but perhaps it will help if I tell you that I sent Paul a quote from George Bernard Shaw the other day. Shaw started out as a music critic, and the quote is from a piece he wrote abut Verdi’s Il Trovatore:

It has tragic power, poignant melancholy, impetuous vigour, and a sweet and intense pathos that never loses its dignity. It is swift in action, and perfectly homogenous in atmosphere and feeling. It is absolutely void of intellectual interest: the appeal is to the instincts and the senses all through.

To which Paul succinctly replied, “Yeah, that’s about right.” And that, if I may make so bold as to say, is what his music for the first three scenes sounds like. The Letter is in no way an opera for eggheads, even though the two of us are both fairly chrome-domed.

As I’ve said before, we’re trying to write a cross between a verismo opera like Tosca and a film noir like Double Indemnity or Out of the Past. We don’t want The Letter to sound old-fashioned–Paul’s musical language is in no way derivative of Verdi or Puccini–but we do want it to move fast and hit hard. Ida Lupino once directed a movie called Hard, Fast and Beautiful. O.K. by me!

In the immortal words of Raymond Chandler:

She reached a quick arm around my neck and started to pull. So I kissed her. It was either that or slug her.

That’s about right, too.

“Only an idiot would ask Wolfie to work on that stuff–twelve foot snakes, magic flutes.”
Peter Shaffer, Amadeus

As promised, today’s Wall Street Journal drama column is devoted to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s touring productions of King Lear and The Seagull, now playing in Brooklyn, plus a report on the Theatre de la Jeune Leune production of Don Juan Giovanni, now playing at Cambridge’s American Repertory Theatre:

Ian McKellen and the Royal Shakespeare Company have been barnstorming around the world all summer, performing “King Lear” and Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull” as staged by Trevor Nunn, the man who brought us “Cats.” This month they’re in Brooklyn, and I saw both shows on consecutive nights earlier this week. One is good, the other near perfect–and I was surprised by which was which.
The buzz on “Lear” is true: The 68-year-old Mr. McKellen doffs his knickers in the storm scene, offering the audience a fully frontal view of his gray anatomy. The gratuitous gesture is all of a piece with the rest of this exciting but ill-sorted production, which wobbles between grand-manner melodrama (Lear’s Fool is hanged onstage just before the intermission) and scabby touches of directorial cuteness (a doddering Lear reads his first speech from a handful of three-by-five cards). I’m still trying to figure out the costumes, which looked like they’d been designed for the Siberia Light Opera Company’s production of “The Merry Widow.”
As Lear, Mr. McKellen is mannered and ranting until the storm scene, when he finds the center of the role and thereafter becomes compelling….
“The Seagull,” played by the same cast on the same unit set in a new English-language version prepared by Mr. Nunn in collaboration with the ensemble, is as consistent in tone as “Lear” is uncertain. Here everything is grippingly, unostentatiously right. Tone is everything in Chekhov’s sad comedies, peopled as they are by unfulfilled men and women whose melancholy plight is all the more affecting because it is so funny. In Mr. Nunn’s production, “The Seagull” is played decisively for laughs, and that’s the right call: If you take care of the comedy in Chekhov, the pathos will take care of itself. …
I saw Minneapolis’ Theatre de la Jeune Lune for the first time last fall and was entranced by its zany transformation of Molière’s “The Miser.” Now Dominique Serrand and Steven Epp are collaborating with the American Repertory Theatre on a pair of shows in which “Don Giovanni” and “The Marriage of Figaro” are similarly rethought and reworked….
Like Mr. Nunn’s “Lear,” “Don Juan Giovanni” is not above gratuitous shock effects–I saw no particular reason, for instance, why the Don’s manservant needed to relieve himself onstage–and I’m not sure how much sense the show will make to viewers unfamiliar with the original opera. But if you know your way around Mozart’s version, my guess is that you’ll be enthralled by what “Don Juan Giovanni” has to say about that most disturbing of masterpieces, and by the terrific flair with which it is said.

No free link, so buy a paper, or go here to subscribe to the Online Journal, which will allow you to read my column–and all the rest of the Journal‘s excellent arts coverage–on the spot. (If you’re already a subscriber, the column is here.)

I read a story in the Chicago Reader the other day (thanks for introducing me to this publication, OGIC!) that inspired me to write a “Sightings” column for tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal about the question of whether the long-established custom of presenting theatrical previews–the pre-opening performances to which critics are not admitted–might be getting out of hand.
To find out more, pick up a copy of the Saturday Journal and turn to the “Weekend Journal” section. I’m there. (Starting on Saturday, subscribers to the Online Journal can read my column by going here.)

“Who is there that, in logical words, can express the effect that music has on us? A kind of inarticulate unfathomable speech, which leads us to the edge of the Infinite, and lets us for moments gaze into that!”
Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History

• Maud points to Richard Grayson’s great account of Junot Díaz’s reading in NYC last week. (Especially interesting to me were Díaz’s concluding remarks about the compassion necessary to write characters unlike yourself.)
• Best American [Literary Baka Baka] news: An excerpt from DFW’s 5,000-word introduction to Best American Essays 2007, and advance word on the table of contents for this year’s Best American Short Stories, guest-edited by Stephen King, and the stories making the “100 other” notables list. (Warm congrats to Christopher Rowe and Matt Cheney for their inclusion.) Both anthologies are due out in October. (First link via Paper Cuts.)
• I am entranced by the idea of this bacon candy bar.

Today the dog is having her teeth cleaned. She is a tiny thing, and we’ve been quaking all week about having her put under anesthesia. I tend to bring up dogs like I myself was raised — matted but coddled — and days like this I wish I were a better, more regular steward.
Last night she received a walk, a bath, treats and a half-hour of her favorite game, Bungalow Ball, and this morning we — Mr. Tingle, me and the dog — rolled into the animal hospital parking lot at an early hour. We were brought to an examination room for weigh-in (4.4 pounds) and a pre-cleaning consultation with the vet. In the past this has always been a perfunctory little exchange that concludes in a flourish of waiver-signing. Not this morning. A vet we’ve never met before came springing into the room and embarked on what has to have been the longest lecture ever given on the topic of canine dental hygiene. Forty minutes! As my husband said later, “I knew we were in trouble as soon as he drew the diagram of the wolf jaw.”
The lecture was in the grand sermon style, expertly alternating between sounding the notes of terror (abscesses! fractures!) and comfort (x-rays! newest monitoring technology!). Overall it seemed less educational than designed to make us feel kindly disposed toward whatever bill we’re presented with later today.
Comparing notes on the ride home, Mr. Tingle said the experience had reminded him of sitting in a Baptist church. For me it had been like the scene in Jane Eyre where young Jane is lectured by Mr. Brocklehurst, the superintendent of Lowood, on the importance of reading Psalms. At one point, the vet was telling us about the holiest of holy dogs, a golden retriever who waits in the hallway each evening for its owner to brush and floss its teeth, and all I could think of was this exchange:

“And the Psalms? I hope you like them?”
“No, sir.”
“No? oh shocking! I have a little boy, younger than you, who knows six Psalms by heart: and when you ask him which he would rather have, a ginger-bread nut to eat, or a verse of a Psalm to learn he says: ‘Oh! The verse of a Psalm! angels sing Psalms;’ says he, ‘I wish to be a little angel here below;’ he then gets two nuts in recompense for his infant piety.”
“Psalms are not interesting,” I remarked.

I’m pretty much over the travel-exacerbated cold that laid me low for the past few days. Alas, it didn’t help that I had to go all the way to Brooklyn on Tuesday and Wednesday to see the Royal Shakespeare Company perform King Lear and The Seagull at BAM Harvey Theater. Needless to say, I normally find art therapeutic, but not when it requires me to get out at night, and especially not when I have to see a three-and-a-half-hour-long Shakespeare play in Brooklyn, no matter how good the production may (or may not) be. A middle-aged critic needs his sleep, and I didn’t get enough on Tuesday.
Be that as it may, I feel somewhat like myself again, and except for a pair of same-day runouts to Baltimore and New Jersey, I don’t have any more travel planned for the next four weeks. It’s nice to be home again, especially since I have mail to open.
Just to whet your appetite, here are some of the items that arrived during my recent absences from New York that I’m looking forward to consuming at the earliest possible opportunity:
• Sky Blue, the new album from the Maria Schneider Orchestra
• Poodie James, a novel by jazzblogger Doug Ramsey
• Simone Dinnerstein’s much-ballyhooed recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations
• A.D. Nuttall’s Why Does Tragedy Give Pleasure?
• Intention, the latest CD from the Amanda Monaco 4
• Joan Mitchell: Works on Paper 1956-1992, an important new catalogue
• Louis Armstrong: Live in ’59, one of last year’s entries in the Jazz Icons DVD series
• An advance copy from Telarc of Yolanda Kondonassis’ Salzedo’s Harp: Music of Carlos Salzedo
I also have the happy but nonetheless demanding duty of selecting the perfect spot in which to hang the latest addition to the Teachout Museum, a handsome abstract serigraph by Darby Bannard called Sicilian Magician.
As usual, watch this space for details.
And now, if you’ll pardon me, I have a drama column to write….