24 January 2007
It’s less than a week since I last reported in to you all, but a whole lot of stuff has gone down since then in my little world, let me tell you. We’ve worked through the whole piece by now - no great accomplishment, as it’s only about an hour and forty minutes long! Happily, the overall shape of the show feels right, although there are still plenty of question marks lingering along the way (by no means a bad thing). For the last hour of today’s rehearsal, we started again from the beginning of the show, working on Musica’s opening scena. It immediately veered off in a new direction, much influenced by the cast’s collective viewing, late last week, of the film “I Shot Andy Warhol”. The (anti) heroine of the film is Valerie Solanas, an unstable, disgruntled, relatively peripheral figure in the Warhol scene who…well, the title tells the story. The film depicts pretty accurately the locations, atmosphere and principal players in this by now legendary microcosm which is such an important influence on our “Orfeo” production. It answered some questions for the cast, was a good excuse for me to throw a party to show off my glamorous flat, and some serious bonding occurred.
This afternoon, Amy Freston’s Musica began to take on some of the tough, street-wise flavor of Lilli Taylor’s portrayal of Valerie Solanas, and, even better, the ambivalence of this pseudo-artist caught between her disdain for the glittering success of the Warhol crowd and her desperate desire to be a part of it all. That ambivalence is what this production is about, in a nutshell: the Janus-like nature of Art in general, and Opera in particular, an art form which, on one hand, can go to the darkest, most disturbing and subversive places and, on the other hand, is expensive to produce and dependant on the support of rich patrons.
Tomorrow night, by the way, I’m hosting another party for the cast (time for some more bonding). Our wonderfully creative and supportive Italian language coach, Rosalba Lo Duca, has promised to cook risotto and we’re going to watch “Last Days”, Gus Van Sant’s poetic and moving evocation of the final week or so in the life of Kurt Cobain. In this dreamy, fragmented film, the tormented rock star wanders through the woods surrounding his home, alienated from his success, avoiding the demands made on him by his band and his handlers, finally dying from a drug overdose. This film has loomed large as an influence on me and my designers in our preparation of this production, and Paul Nilon, who has already watched it, has factored it into his performance. Working with Paul, meanwhile, continues to be inspiring, bracing, rewarding. Most of Act Five consists of a monologue in which Orfeo, mourning his inability to bring Euridice back with him to the land of the living, spirals through a seemingly endless cycle of regret, yearning and rage, like a broken record. It presents as formidable a challenge as “Possente spirito”, but in an entirely different way. While the earlier scene epitomizes Opera as Sports Event, the ultimate elaborate display of vocal technique beloved of canary fanciers, Orfeo’s final scena is a still-to-this-day-unsurpassed example of the potential for words and music to create powerfully expressive theatre. It is devastating in its spareness, its stripped-down distillation of existential Angst. I want Paul to deliver it sitting motionless in a chair, without the crutch of movement to ease the expressive burden. He says it feels like something out of a Samuel Beckett play, a singing mouth illuminated in a spotlight on an otherwise pitch-black stage. He struggles with it in the rehearsal room and undoubtedly agonizes about it at home. When I joked that sitting motionless in a chair is, at least, easy on his sprained ankle, he shot me a look which would stop even the mouth of Dr. Miller in the middle of one of his amusing rehearsal room stories.
(Paul Nilon as Orfeo. Photo by Brian Slater)
Initially, I thought that our six-week long rehearsal period was somewhat excessive for such a short piece. I certainly feel differently now – we’re going to need every precious moment of it! One reason for this is the extraordinary amount of time it takes to get this piece organized musically. On every page of the score, there are countless decisions to be made, endless interpretive possibilities which need to be sorted out based on subtleties of dramaturgy. This opera does not take care of itself, but needs constant nurturing and nudging. Happily, we are blessed with the right team to get the job done. Our conductor, Christopher Moulds, knows just how to play the tricky game of letting the singers explore a scene and begin to find their way into it before proceeding to layer in his own ideas about how to support and enhance their work, using the expressive tools available to early Seventeenth Century operatic performers. His sensitivity, intelligence and laid-back attitude are essential ingredients in the creative atmosphere of our rehearsal room. He is seconded by Rob Howarth, who appears to have a bottomless wealth of knowledge about this style of music, and Annette Saunders, who can, miraculously, make a modern piano suggest the range of colors of a baroque band.
The challenge of bringing The First Great Opera Ever Written to life is partly due, I think, to the fact that it has one foot in a past musical style and one in a more forward-looking one. The stylistic journey which Monteverdi makes as he moves from the first two acts, with its Arcadian nymphs and shepherds, to the later acts in the underworld, is enormous. By the time he reaches the juicy scene between Pluto and Persephone in Act Four his writing is as psychologically sophisticated as anything in “Poppea”. I’ve had a great time developing that scene with Andrew Foster Williams and Ann Taylor, whose depiction of two people stuck for all eternity in a nightmare of a marriage is one of the lynchpins of this show. In our production, they are the hosts of the Edward Albee-esque party during which the events are played out over one long, gloriously gruesome night. If all goes according to play, it should be one helluva party.
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