Wolf Trap, Castleton: Sweeney Todd, 7 Deadly Sins, L’enfant et les sortileges

Otto Dix, The Seven Deadly Sins (done in the same year that Weill wrote his Seven Deadly Sins)

Dear friends and readers,

How hot was it? Hitherto I’ve reserved “super-hot” for temperatures of say 100 to 105; yesterday we were told the heat index hit an astonishing 125F. I know the temperature was a mere 107. I just run out of words. I’ve never experienced air quite this hot before. While at the conference I met a young man (say early 30s), German-American, friendly, who lives in Cairo, Egypt. You go where you can get a job; he works for a research institute. It is regularly 130 F; many people don’t have air-conditioning. He does and walks from air-conditioned building to air-conditioned building. People walk around with plastic bottles of water: dehydration is a danger.

We did brave this intense heat twice in two days.

On Friday evening we went to Wolf Trap for a second time this summer. We again had a picnic out under a tree (it was after 6:30 so we were simmering at 100) and saw this powerful Sondheim musical for a 6th time. We are having quite a weekend. It is a remarkable musical-opera using 19th century legends (Sweeney comes from the Regency period), motifs, character types from Victorian novels (something very Dickensian about it).

Michael Anthony McGee as Sweeney and Margaret Gawrysiak as Mrs Loveitt

How apposite it seems today — of course this is Sondheim’s presence. His lyrics resonate good. It was well sung and acted. Kim Witman (the director) opted for relatively few and symbolic props; plain costumes, with the orchestra on the stage behind the action which occurred on slabs. Perhaps the individuals were not able to project enough: the simple fundamental gestures should have been in an intimate theater and the players were working so hard against the odds to reach the huge audience going back and back and back in this open air theater.

It did make me remember the film we saw 3 Xmases ago now (tempus fugit) and realize how well the movie did several sequences: the lull about the seaside by parodic vacation family montages at beaches. There was nothing like that here:

Johnny Depp as Sweeney and Helena Bonham Carter as Mrs Loveitt

Nor the high violence (more possible for a movie).

The most powerful we’ve ever seen was the first we saw where I’ll never forget Donna Lillard Migliaccio as Mrs Loveitt; Eric schaeffer directed and produced. It ended with that bitter bitter song of Sweeney’s and the stage went dark. Chilling.

Modern audiences are willing to tolerate a madden murderous transported man and his crazed raped beggar wife as the hero and heroine of a tragedy (19th Victorians would not and they complained when Trollope chose less say a forger, Lady Mason, his protagonist in Orley Farm). The secondary hero is a roving sailor, a nobody with nothing (no money, no connections) – certainly “not a gentleman.” The villain is the judge. Like many of Sondheim’s operas, one could not call it feminist, but unlike so many works by men, it was not anti-feminist. Mrs Loveitt is the figure here: large, heavy, businesswoman, she used to put pussycats in her pies and she works to keep Todd from knowing the beggar woman is his wife — everyone else but the sailor knows but then he’s mad. She is as central as the crazed figures, mad herself.

Izzy’s written a better informed account of the production: Wolf Trap Sweeney Todd. I agree the acting was effective. I did not know that “the heat was so bad in fact they were worried about the sound system and the microphones malfunctioning because of the singers sweating so much, and that everyone was supplied with Gatorade (the bottles were visible under the red chairs that were set up for the scene changes) and wore cold gel packs.” Izzy gave “them credit; they made it absorbing enough that eventually I stopped noticing the heat (the sun going down helped too though). In fact, the audience gave the show a huge standing ovation.”

Wolf Trap is still a marvelous kind of place. We were there three years ago with two cherished friends to see Boheme in Brooklyn.

Wolf Trap open air theater at night

I wonder to myself what was the early history of this place. How it came to take the form it does — the open air cheap seating at the back, the picnic grounds for all and for free, is a relic of former times. (Like Castleton though [see below] there are now enclosed tents for coteries and people willing to pay a lot.) The building looks like Glimmerglas (which does not have the open seating at the back for little money) so I expect they emerged in the same era.

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Castleton grounds

And today Castleton. Loren Mazel owns a huge area of land where he built an opera house, concert hall and runs summer programs of music. This is what the tax system first set up by Reagan has led to. It was in the 1980s that the rich stopped paying proportionate taxes. The huge mansions and luxurious lifestyle that have emerged for the very few is one direct result (the other is stark misery for hundreds of thousands across the US, and the present determination of the Republicans to destroy social security, medicare and medicaid). Mazel was for many years the head of the New York Philharmonic and had a huge salary.

We saw a double bill of two one hour modern operas: Kurt Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins, and Maurice Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortileges, lyrics by Colette. The idea of Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins was worthwhile — a young woman, double self, from an agricultural working class family, goes off to make her fortune in order to return to build them and herself a house, a home. The actors were to perform ballet and sing. The thinking behind Seven Deadly Sins was impeccable: we see the cruelties of the capitalist world; its mindless pursuit of gadgets. Bare and minimal — they had huge US map lit up as their central prop. I find late 20th century operas a relief: not products announcing they are luxury items, often with a reactionary agenda, and at the Met itself an elite entertainment. The problem was the ballet was relatively weak: no traditional steps; they seemed to stroll about for an hour. The music too lacked intense passion or comedy; it sounded just like Weill at times: off-beat, jazzy.

The boy mimed by Nora Graham Smith (sung by Cecelia Hall)

The story of “L’Enfant et les sortileges” (literally: The child and the spells, better as “The Boy and the enchantment”) is a little boy is very bad and he is confined to his room to do his math homework. We are told he had tortured his squirrel and was mean to everyone. He throws a tantrum when his mother leaves him in the room, and destroys toys, books, wall paper, a pendulum. In reaction all the things in his room, including furniture, small animals come alive, threaten him. He is scared, feels guilty, saves a squirrel and is forgiven. It ends on him waking in his mother’s arms and saying sweetly “Mama!” The boy is never seen to do much very bad; the toys never hurt him; he makes no change for real and is rewarded for nothing. This is Colette’s mush, cloying and vacuous.

The best thing about “The boy and the enchantment” was the fantastical costumes; beautiful flamy gowns for Fire; lovely 1890s suits for Chair and Clock. Whimsical, unexpected, dazzling and pleasing.

I assume the ho hum quality of the staging of Seven Deadly Sins (including caricatures of working class people worthy of modern American TV), the innocuous presentation of the evil boy and his non-existent punishment (Where the Wild Things Are is more scary) shows more than a failure of nerve. It’s a desire to please a middle class audience who themselves are not directly under a threat. I am aware when we go to Castleton we often have seen privileged types who act as if all the world lived in the cocoon they seem to. The first time I came I did think of Versailles as I looked out from the man’s porch and saw as far as my eye could look a picturesque landscape.

From other less whimsical productions. The US today has been a forced for Nazi-like fascist militarism so the angry Mickey Mouse figure dressed as a woman (the Nazi movement was macho-male, encouraging violence) makes sense:

And this French one:

The privileged white boy haunted by a cat he tortured

The large barn theater has been rebuilt — probably at great cost, and something there has been lost. The previous building was lovely; a sort of huge square in layers. It had hospitality structured in — rooms for socializing, for eating. There was a choice of hot food, of sandwiches, a sort of garden place for all to eat (alas not all even then there was the separate place roped off for an elite of some sort). Now it looks like your usual dull auditorium with light and expensive refreshments behind a bar. No extra rooms, just the front part (vestibule with chairs and tables) and stage and auditorium. The air conditioning does work much better in limited configured space. But that’s not the only transparent reason for the renovations. The whole experience has been more commercialized: the website is now tasteless, mostly a huge ad. Probably this is the only way it can be supported and continued today.

The trip seemed shorter as we have gotten used to it. I read Vera Brittain’s The Dark Tide and Winston’s Graham’s Bella (about which more in other blogs). The hardest thing was to get into the jaguar to go home; it was like a furnace at 4. It is air-conditioned and soon we were cool. Izzy was glad to see us; she is not up to going to teaism alone. so I thought it best not to try. We had had enough outing. So Jim phoned for Chinese take-out; I drove to pick it up, and we had good talk at our table.

Then the evening: reading and listening to the lovely music (it usually is) on NPR which seems never to fail us, night after night just idyllically beautiful. It has been broadcasting the symphonic music events from Castleton so we haven’t missed out there.

Gentle reader, I must to bed,
Ellen