The poster for The Musical Tempest
Dear Friends,
About two weeks ago now I wrote about a remarkable play we saw on July 9th, Paco Jose Madden’s The 5th Musketeer. Since then we have gone to 6 more performances here in DC. My regret is that we didn’t go to more. We picked 7, and last night we sat next to a couple who told us they had gone to 10. Jim said he didn’t know how we could have fitted so many in as on the 3 weekends we went to 3 operas and wandered about Lorin Maazel’s vast property one of the Saturdays in Rappahannock, Virginia (the Castleton Festival, Turn of the Screw, Rape of Lucretia, Beggars’ Opera), but maybe next year we’ll manage it.
This is intended a record of what we saw. A couple of nights after we saw The 5th Musketeer, we came back to the same set of condemned buildings and went into the next door, up a stairwell and found ourselves in a small theater where 3 people were playing lively Irish folksongs. They were the accompaniment to John Morogiello’s Irish Authors Held Hostage. This consisted of a series of skits, some mildly funny, others really hilarious. Morogiello mocks public hysteria over terrorists as well as make fun of the way terrorists are presented (or present themselves) and offer a review or history of Irish literature, which to some extent stands up to scrutiny. It begins with Lady Gregory and most writers’ Irishness may be disputed because they lived most of their lives elsewhere. Very clever. My favorite skit was the send-up of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: just brilliant.
Of course Oscar Wilde was included; so too Emily Bronte, why not?
We had our first disappointment at the next event. This was held three doors down in a place that is still a bar or pub (you can get food) with two stages. One is small and we have been to it before: we watched a one woman series of monologues (3), She moved through the fair by Polly McIntyre. Now a lot in these sorts of entertainments is dependent on the insight of the character’s discourse: MacIntyre may be a good actress, but her ideas about women (pre-feminist Jim called them), life (she presented one sketch where the wanted male projected was horrible and she didn’t seem to realize this), and wit left a lot to be desired. To be fair, by the end you realized how all three of her woman just wanted a real friend (like Sarah Fielding’s David Simple in search of a true friend?), and she ended poignantly, but that was not enough to make up for the acquiescence in brutality and lies and twisted repressions that went before.
By contrast over this weekend I watched via a DVD and MP2, 4 of the monologues from Alan Bennet’s famous Talking Heads, three by Patricia Routledge and one by Maggie Smith. Smith in Bed Among Lentils is so outstanding I don’t know where to begin to praise what she shows us. The ex-alchoholic (alas) wife of a dense Vicar tells us of her life’s story. The one happiness she ever knew was when she was made love to by Mr Ramesh in a room behind his grocery store. Susan is her name, a tragedy of a life. (I recommend Albert Hunt, “Bed among the Lentils” in British TV drama in the 1980s, ed. George W. Brandt.)
The three by Routledge are not as moving and don’t go quite as deeply into the psyche, but they are extraordinary studies in what happens to a woman who represses herself and lives alone. As many single women end up doing. In the first, A Woman of No Importance, she had a job and gets sick (to the death); in the second, A Lady of Letters, she writes poison pen letters out of desperate loneliness and stupidity, and ends in prison, and in third, Miss Fozzard finds her feet, she is spending her life caring for a brother who cares nothing for her and ends paid by a podiatrist who has a foot fetish 🙂 Such films of women’s lives have a great deal to say to other women. There are monologues for men, but revealingly, I have the impression only Bennett acted them, as other men would be unwilling so to expose truths about men’s lives or aspects of their own personalities.
We had hoped Polly McIntyre’s would have been something of this, but they never came even slightly near.
But then three nights later or so Carla Hubner’s In-Series Theatre had three “Cabaret Carousels” of which we managed to see one at the Source Theatre — which we’ve been to before, a comfortable place in a gentrifying area of DC.
Suggesting the mood aspired to
The music chosen was both moving and cheering — from Broadway shows mostly and also modern art songs of the popular sort, well done, from the Threepenny Opera and Sondheim, to Camelot and One Touch of Venus, to genuine cabaret songs, George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Frierich Hollaender. . I met a couple of old acquaintances we sometimes used to see on Monday nights when we went to a local garage theatre to hear a devoted company read dramatically aloud (and sometimes come near to staging and acting out fully) non commercially viable but excellent plays.
Carle Hubner is impresario for the In-series is so inspiriting. An ex-concert pianist (we’ve heard her play), she quit her job in a university about 20 years ago because she would not kowtow to wasting her existence in stupidity, and she began productions and has kept them up for 20 years, on a shoestring. She can network it’s clear. She’s done 7 Mozarts: the music is realigned to modern stories and characters analogous to the originals. A Carmen from Jose’s point of view. She also does modern popular Spanish shows.
None of these people were paid very much, if anything at all. There are good and decent people here and there.
Perhaps the less said the better about the opera, The Fall of the House of Usher, written and directed by Brent Cirves, music by Mike Johnson. I’m not a musician but I thought the music repetitive and non-melodic, nothing beautiful, just loud, and the singing even to my tin ear was off-tune. And the theatre was non-airconditioned and super-crowded. It was a Friday night, the penultimate night of the Festival. However, when we left half-way through I did feel guilty. The author understood the story and brought in other Poe stories and poems (Annabel Lee) to fill out the time allotted; he had a genuinely humane interpretation, and the singers and actors (all young) were working so hard and meant so well. Jim said he found the presentation and interpretations of the characters through music of real interest.
So perhaps this is a young author and musician to watch for, and they will improve in time.
Saturday night we went to The Tempest: A Musical put on by the Rude Mechanicals, the same group who brought an effective shortened Coriolanus to the Fringe Festival last summer. They shortened Shakespeare play at the same time as they replaced Shakespeare’s songs with Irish drinking and raucous songs and lyrical ballads. The songs did not make much sense with the play, but they did have the revealing effect of bringing home to the watcher just how strange Shakespeare’s play is. What is our attitude supposed to be to this narrow, austere, bitter and punitive man? Who is Caliban? us? why is Ariel, the imaginative, a humiliated slave? How does this cohere with the beautiful isle? Is it an image of existence at the last from a profoundly disillusioned man? A play where he announces his retirement need not abjure all that went before. The songs did carry it, and the last rousing chorus was charity and love sent out to the audience itself.
The theatre was sold out, with people standing and some on make-shift chairs. It’s the other large theatre in the bar set-up where we saw She Moved Through the Fair. I was allowed to take my drink (Scotch and ginger ale) into the theatre, and it was all very comfortable.
And the last night of the festival came up to the first: a superb contemporary appropriation (I believe the new going term) of Aeschylus’s Oresteia. “Dizzy Miss Lizzie’s Roadside Review” the group doing the play is a band which consists of two electric guitars (young men playing), a powerful drummer, and a young woman on the accordion, another on the guitar a couple of powerful female singers. The young women were all dressed parodically sexy and the young men like ragged bohemians, super-southerners. It was a parody on multi-levels, done wit a bravura that was so energetic: the hour and one half contained wild gyrations as part of rock-and-rock, satiric redoings of the three plays by Aeschylus turning the happenings into modern equivalents with some comic undercuts as Orestes complains why is he not just welcomed home, and Clytemnestra tells Electa “watch your mouth.” Great fun and the theatre, a church near Dupont Circle, we’ve been to before, now has comfortable seats too.
Thrice we ate out: Generous George for pizza, a bad local Irish bar, and a fine comfortable Chinese place we’d like to return to again. A couple of times we walked through an area of DC we didn’t know before or a beautiful one (parks, older buildings), and were cheered by the exhilaration of what was going on around us.
We’re not done yet: we have bought ourselves two sets of tickets for operas in HD locally (Barber of Seville and Magic Flute); we go to Wolf Trap twice (again operas, The Return of Ulysses to his Country by Monteverdi and La Boheme). We mean to have picnics both times, and for the last we hope to meet with a friend from one of my lists and his wife.
The DC area (which includes Northern Virginia and Southern Maryland) is not New York City for theater, and it certainly does not come up to London. But it has much to recommend it: small repertoire theatres who are really dedicated to doing innovative entertaining work (quite a number). There’s less of it, but it’s less pretentious and much less expensive. It’s not uncommon for me to discover that a production of the same play in DC was actually better than a similar one going on in NYC at the same time. The NYC one is often filled with people trying to impress, hiring the BIg star and spending hugely on that, staging something they think will make a splash not what is most fitting for their conception. This is not sour grapes; it’s really so.
In June we went to Art-o-matic, a vast building filled with works of art of all sorts, most of which were much superior to what Jim and I once saw at the Whitney (that was completely coterie- and career-driven0, a fun and interesting afternoon with bands playing (far too loud) here and there in the halls. I was tempted to buy one or two landscapes.
So, taken together with the wondrous worlds opened up to us through DVDs, one can really live (not just exist) here. This week I also watched 4 Ang Lee movies: all showing a director who can tell an adult tale with complex characters and serious adult themes, moving and occasionally entertainingly funny The Wedding Banquet,
The real lover stands to the side
Eat, drink, man, woman, which in Western parlance could be something more like The Three Sisters and Mrs Liang (a comic Chekhov) or A Taiwanese Lear:
The final touching scene between an Elinor Dashwood type daughter and her father — Sunday dinner is now just them
I’ve also watched and read about the remarkable The Ice Storm and Ride to the Devil.
I’ve added more pictures on my walls to those I already had, more favorite landscapes, more stills of moving moments and characters for me from the Austen films (heroines mostly). These are my holds on happiness, I need to make my thoughts of giving over (and death) absurd in my own eyes: after all what have I surrounded myself with these pictures for? made such a room of good or renewable memories. I must keep my mind on the contradictions of my impulses or I could give way to the meaninglessness of what I’m doing beyond itself & outside my own fierce holding onto patterns and routines I enjoy when I’m absorbed in them.
Ellen
P.S. And the books providing me with some sort of peace and contentment right now are Drabble’s Picture in the Carpet and Margaret Oliphant’s Phoebe Junior. The first I’ve written about at Reveries under the Sign of Austen; the second I will do so there soon.
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
From Fran on WWTTA:
“I actually saw Maggie Smith perform twice in London, first in ‘Bed Among The Lentils’ and then later in another piece by Alan Bennett, ‘The Lady in the Van’.
I found the first play and performance much the stronger, a really memorable evening, but one so dominated by Smith’s brilliance and complete control of the audience on stage that I couldn’t for the life of me remember who had starred in the other Talking Heads play which had preceded Lentils that day until I checked: it was Margaret Tyzack in ‘Soldiering On’.
Hers had been a good, solid performance, but it simply paled against what followed. To be absolutely fair, though, I seem to remember thinking Smith also had the better material to work with.
I’ll soon see: I’ve succumbed to temptation and ordered the Complete Talking
Heads on DVD:)
Fran”
Dear Fran,
Thanks for letting me know the complete Talking Heads is available at least on Amazon.uk (not Amazon.com) and in a Region 2 version. I can play Region 2 DVDs.
From those I’ve now seen again (these four), a perusal of a volume of the scripts of 6 of them, it seems to me that in _Bed Among Lentils_ itself Bennett soared beyond his usual level. Not that his usual level is not good, but that except in rare instances of astonishing genius (and even Shakespeare has his more usual passages), a writer will have typical subjects that after a while reveal thin aspects.
I haven’t tried to think out why _Bed_ (to abbreviate it comically) is better than the others; I suspect it has to do with the religious hypocrisy at the center of Susan’s story. Remember how the monologue ends with Susan saying that Geoffrey’s god is a creature of (remarkable) bad taste or has made a world in (remarkable) bad taste. Early on there’s the “cards on the table” question to Geoffrey which he doesn’t answer: does he believe in God at all? I’ve read enough of Bennett’s work and seen a couple more plays (Wind in the Willows, and from Beyond the Fringe, the early ones) to feel or think that religion and satiric religious monologues bring out of him some intense anger at injustice that gives his work stunning depths of feeling and insight. In the _Bed_ monologue this is caught up in one of her closing off-lines: the Bishop told Geoffrey that having an alcoholic wife has given him extra something-or-other which makes him worthy of this promotion because he’s “been there.” The witheringly wry tone with which Smith delivers that “been there” is worth hours and hours of other plays.
It makes me remember suddenly one day when I burst into hard laughs because someone in recounting to me how she suffered over a love affair said “this went on for two whole weeks!” Two whole weeks, do you say? how did [speak with emphasis] you survive?
Ellen
From Nick:
“I am glad that you enjoyed The Tempest and Oresteia
and read all the blogs with great pleasure. And that
you are enjoying the Ang Lee films – which again I
don’t know except for the Ice Storm which I remember
thinking pretty good.”
Journalizing, 2/29/09 at 9:30 am: I thought I’d mention, Jim and I and Izzy went to see and hear a magnificently sung production of Monteverdri’s Return of Ullysses to his Country. It was done in a stylized way commensurate with the Renaissance vision of antiquity and that made for difficulties in the sense of not being that enjoyable for much of the audience. It did make for spectacular masque like scenes with extraordinary costumes. The suitors were done with great bravura and comedy, and some stage business was gotten out of a near-pretend rape of one of Penelope’s companions (she is a major singer). Dominic Armstrong made a perfect Ulysses in looks and singing.
The year is 1640 but it’s of interest to 18thcentury people as this vision continued into the 18th century and the kind of opera it represents is very much what one saw aspired to the later 17th and early 18th century.
The prelude lecture included a rehearsal pianist playing with the performers singing small select pieces so that the lecturer could make her points.
WE did a picnic with wine before hand. It was done at the Barns at Wolf Trap, a lovely building in a beautiful setting.
E.M.
From Steven on Trollope-l:
“Ellen,
Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in patria is a wonderful opera. What an interesting
range of things you are seeing this summer; the two Britten operas, Beggar’s
Opera, and now Monteverdi. Not bad for the “off” season!
Steven’
Journalizing 2/3/09: We went to another opera last night: we are getting opera’d out. This one was a tape of one of the Met presentations over the year; Isobel and Jim enjoyed it.
I am gathering I’m not keen on Rossini: it was the Barber of Seville and superbly well done I could see. But Rossini has apparently not a poignant or soft and tender bone in his musical body.
Ah! This movie house is one of those that has continuous commercials before and after “feature” showing and I stayed outside on a bench trying to avoid the obnoxiousness. They didn’t do that during the year. Two more operas to go and then we are done. Whew.”
From Nick:
“You certainly have been having an opera season!
I find actually going to the opera quite an intense
experience so we space ours well out – and then
there is the cost which is high here. But we are
listening to the Proms now and then – I haven’t written
about them because I find it hard if not impossible
to say anything cogent or interesting about music.”
In response to Steven and Nick,
It’s been just by chance we have gone outside the usual routine of Mozart and 19th to early 20th century operas. Jim suggested the choice of Britten favored Maazell’s strengths as a conductor. We have also gone to quite a number of operas, somewhat more than usual – but not outside of what we sometimes do in a vacation cycle. Opera costs, but Jim, my husband, loves them (he listens to someone called Charlie Handle on ipod a lot) and apparently so does Isabel. This summer too since we decided not to go away, the three day trips to mid-Virginia were a big help and now these two evenings at Wolf Trap. Much cheaper than renting a house and then on top of it all the plays and operas and concerts we usually buy across a week. We do eat in most of the time and that helps — though in the UK we often did succumb to a pub lunch in the countryside. Part of the joys of England.
HD movies in a local theater will also get out to these more often now. Two nights ago we saw a Barber of Seville. It was a a cut-rate rerun, $12.50 a piece, perhaps that’s why the movie theatre thought it could get away with ruining the experience by sandwiching the film between these horrible ads, previews, &c&).
I really loathe these continual feeds in movie houses. After a bout of one I’m so nervous and grated upon, I need ten minutes to calm down. I’m beginning to go just to theaters which don’t have them. It’s hard to break in at just the right moment. If they had them during the year with the opera, I’d not go.
So, to sum up, we’ve been lucky. For myself I love a serious play and good movie best of all, and I like better Broadway musicals very very much (Sondheim for example), they are easier for me to take. Operas are very intense and as I’ve suggested I am profoundly irritated and offended by reactionary and misogynistic plots and characters, and very alive to it too 🙂
Sorry for the disorganized scatter-shot approach, I’m typing as I think away, like I’m talking aloud on the Net,
Ellen
One last:
Jim loves the proms too; when we lived in The UK he’d listen on the radio; when we’ve been there in August, he buys tickets. I don’t know if he’s been there on the last night. He can discuss music — as can Isabel. Not me. I have a hard time holding a tune; I’m rhythmic and can dance and even well and love dancing anywhere (I like square dancing and all sorts of figures in which people move in and out, fun to me), but I haven’t an ear. I have a very hard time speaking another language with “correct” sounds. I had the hardest time learning to understand spoken French even a bit, and now I’ve probably nearly lost that ability though I can read it fluently.
Ellen
Izzy’s concluding comments from her blog:
“This week has been more music combined with the classics. First up for the weekend was The Tempest, semi-abbreviated, with a few Irish songs thrown in. It was done by a group that had done a really good abbreviated Coriolanus the previous year, and the theater was crowded. But the Coriolanus had a clear theme and purpose, and that’s hard to manage with The Tempest these days, with the themes and ideas so dated. The songs were enjoyable, but didn’t seem to contribute much to the plot. It was a pleasant time, but incohesive. After the show we went to a restaurant where the food was lousily cooked and the less said about the service, the better.
Sunday night we went uptown to a place near Dupont Circle, to see a modern musical revue of the Oresteia. Not really a serious take on it, but modern music and a modern interpretation of the saga made for something far more better, if occasionally a little loud. Also it was late enough in the evening we could eat at home beforehand.
That was a wrap for our Fringe experience this year, but this evening we go to Wolftrap Barns to see an opera about Ulysses.
IAM”
Journalizing, 5/06/09: Last night after coming home from watching the young woman I have been mentoring this summer give her final presentation for her independent BA (BIS, Bachelor of Independent Studies), I had to rush off to see Mozart’s Magic Flute at a nearby movie-theater. There was a repeat of two of the HD operas from this past year for $12.50 each and we had bought tickets to this one.
Well, it was just terrible, awful, stupid. The Met had gotten a Broadway producer or director to do the opera. Julie Taymor, she who brought us The Lion King. It was savagely cut. Jim says the cuts made no sense. Then the characters were got up in absurd artificial outfits which seemed like something out of science fiction crossed by memories of ghastly circuses. The woman had no understanding whatsoever of the text in front of her.
Mozart wrote an opera on behalf of reason, and he meant as a Mason to write it against irrational fantasies like religion. It’s true like many another joiner of a new group, he feel into new authoritarianism, and the opera is misogynistic. Well the woman erased the latter completely. But she missed what he meant to put in: an adherence to quiet duty, to seeking contentment through custom, an extremely conservative retreat into traditions like marriage. It’s really Mansfield Park put into an opera, or the ideals and norms which help you to steady yourself while you struggle and endure.
My daughter, aged 25, said when she read and studied the opera in college, she found it absurd. Perhaps that is the modern response to it, and on top of that Taymor made it as stupid as The Lion King. If so, we have before us why so many do not like or understand MP and can’t understand what the 18th century enlightenment is based on fundamentally (when it goes beyond overturning tyrannies and superstition, its two enemies).
I’m like Catherine, and love Mansfield Park. Indeed it has not totally left my mind since I read it the first time when I was 15.
The opera was also done at high decibels and was so noisy and intrusive. The surtitles were absurd too, Jim said they had nothing to do with the words of Mozart’s text. Coarse utterances had replaced what had been there.
There is a beautiful movie of the Magic Flute which I recommend. Bergman’s. Now there is another movie which made me burst into tears, of happiness, and joy when silly Tamino and Pamina find one another out of the dark again, and cling tight.
Ellen
Dear all,
We did have a treat Saturday evening. WE went to Wolf Trap where in the big house (there’s a small one) we heard and saw La Boheme. Beautifully movingly done by a group of young operas singers. They were dressed in modern semi-slum Brooklyn style clothes and at the back there was a suggestive slowly changing (over the course of the opera) montage of Williamsburg Brooklyn today. I cried at the final scene 🙂
They did make the opera relevant, very contemporary (and it no longer seemed at all the celebration of wealth and status and luxury and faux glamor it often does, something I dislike), with all its liens into 19th century romanticism. The audience loved it — as who cannot the music. I found myself wondering what Anthony Trollope would have thought: alas, probably overtly shocked though the humanity would have caught him. He would have stressed how money deformed these relationships.
The use of a repertory company made the opera richer for we had seen these young people in very different roles in _The Return of Ulsysses_, but not so typologically different: the same young man played Giove and Marcello, Rodolpho was Iro (a glutton), a comic role because the same voice was wanted and the singer is chubby, Marcella had been Fortuna, and Mimi Love.
Summer treats not over: today we go to the Philips collection in DC.
E.M.
‘Hi Ellen,
I only recently saw the movie “Rent,” based on the Broadway show, but it, too, updated La Boheme to contemporary New York — with what I thought were mixed results. I never believed the characters were really on the edge. Would you say that’s true of Puccini’s opera, also?
I admire how much you lead a life of the mind — finding not only the time but also the energy to keep doing so.
Bob”
I try to make my motto on my new blog my reality insofar as my strength will permit: “It is well to have as many holds on happiness as possible” (that’s said by Henry Tilney in Austen’s Northanger Abbey).
I would say that the way _La Boheme_ is usually done, yes, we don’t believe these young people are on the edge. But the way this was acted, costumed, contextualized (a montage of photos from Williamsburg), the feeling was they were in trouble.
The program notes stressed today’s dismal job market.
I don’t think it was so applauded for these politics, but rather that it felt so much in touch with common realities. The problem with operas is they often don’t, a result of their origins and who supports them most.
I’ve not seen _Rent_ as yet; my younger daughter, Izzy, and I go to the movies together faithfully each week so I can hope to see it.
“Ellen,
With regard to the Met Opera’s current Julie Taymor production of Mozart’s Magic Flute you were describing, believe me-no offence taken! I think it not only completely wrong in conception, but dark and often merely ugly to behold. I long for the beautiful old production with the glorious decor by Marc Chagall.
But alas, this is Progress.
Steven”