Circa Theatre Presents:
Roger Hall’s JACK AND THE BEANSTALK – The Pantomime
Songs by Paul Jenden and Michael Nicholas Williams
Musical Direction by Michael Nicholas Williams
Directed by Susan Wilson
Cast: Hilda Hardup (Jack’s mother)/Aunty Pam – Gavin Rutherford
Jack – Barnaby Olson
Betsy the Cow/Goosey the Goose – Bronwyn Turei
Butcher Bob/Immigration Officer – Andrew Laing
Mrs Virus/Gertie Grabber – Emma Kinane
Claude Back/Postman – Jonathan Morgan
Smiley Virus – Jessica Old
The Giant – Himself
Freedom Campers – The Cast
Production: Ian Harman (set design), Jennifer Lal (lighting)
Sheila Horton (costumes), Leigh Evans (musical staging)
Circa Theatre, Wellington
Tuesday 22nd November, 2016
(running until December 20th)
Pantomime is surely one of the most life-enhancing experiences theatre can offer, and Circa Theatre’s current Jack and the Beanstalk production ticks all the boxes that matter in the genre – it wasn’t long after the show’s beginning before the harshest, most vocal critics in the audience were soon caught up in it all, making manifest their involvement in the tale’s twists and turns, to the added delight, I might say, of their rather less demonstrative, though still appreciative, older companions.
Though Roger Hall’s script had some occasional over-worn moments, it was enlivened by the unflagging energy and interactive spark of the characters, buoyed up by frequent topical references to circumstances in the “real world”, some of which of course made the stage goings-on seem eminently sane by comparison! Indigenous touches like the chorus’s opening song making references to early-morning tuis and moreporks gradually became politicised by Jack’s Mother, Hilda Hardup (Gavin Rutherford’s a superbly-sustained portrayal throughout) in her following song about the depressed state of village life – “miserable and sad”, mercilessly tagging the family’s location as “Lesterville, until recently Wade-Browntown”.
Sensibilities of all ages were further tickled by the uneasy thrill of occasional seismic “noises-off” emanating from different regions, and explanations related to the same, an audience favourite being “Gerry Brownlee suffering from a nasty bout of liquefaction” (I actually became fearful for the well-being of the person sitting next to me over THAT one!). And almost, but not quite, in the league of a “strip-o-gram” was NZ Post’s outlandish “go-go-dancer” delivery of a parcel to Mother, whose self-confessed response to social privation was to become an on-line shop-a-holic!
The age-old storytelling theme of poverty and the business of trying to make ends meet has, of course become more of a reality for a good many New Zealanders in recent times – the frequent appearances of “Claude Back” the repossession man (Jonathan Morgan a kind of surreal “trickster”, his aspect and stage movements beautifully Chaplin-esque), the nouveau-riche landlady Mrs Virus, (Emma Kinane, elegantly chirruping her personal wealth-creation agenda) and Butcher Bob, merely wanting his money for sausages (Andrew Laing, adroitly fusing touches of a “mad-butcher” manner with more pressing very real small-business concerns) entertained our sensibilities with their actions, while bringing home to us the plight of their “victims” such as Jack and his Mother, the people whom the capitalist system regards as “losers”.
Speaking of our eponymous hero, Jack embodied all the archetypal fairy-tale qualities of a young, self-effacing, lovable, if somewhat indolent and disorganised lad-about-town – someone upon whom fortune will surely and deservedly come to shine! Here, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow, Barnaby Olson’s artlessly engaging portrayal winning our hearts on all the above fronts, and engaging our sympathies in his quest to secure the affections of his would-be sweetheart, the self-regarding Smiley Virus, with actress Jessica Old’s “bouncing bimbo” selfies-saturated entrance as Smiley almost worthy of a 1930s Hollywood talkies spectacular!
Besides his mother and Smiley, Jack’s other meaningful relationship is with Betsy the Cow, here given a virtuoso performance by Bronwyn Turei which transformed the beast’s normally passive character into a wannabe starlet, desperate for her gifts to be recognised – the cow’s almost erogenous response to being milked by Jack produced great amusement as well as a surprising end-result! Later in the story Turei again made something theatrically distinctive of Betsy’s stratospheric “mirror-image”, Goosey, the Giant’s source of wealth as the producer of the famed Golden Eggs – all most enjoyable!
Throughout the action the energies, the zany characterisations and the outlandish one-liners kept our attentions stoked, with the songs and their stage realisations providing the requisite contrast with the stand-and-deliver pronouncements of the script, Leigh Evans’ on-the-spot choreography and Michael Nicholas Williams’ unflagging musical zest giving the performers’ trajectories surety and purpose. And, corny though some of the pronouncements were, the performers made both context and surprise work to the ideas’ advantage time and time again, as when the glamorous Smiley arrived to give Betsy the Cow a “makeover” in preparation for the Market – (whoops! – “show”!), with the throwaway line, “keeping up with the Cowdashians!”.
Important, too that the local environs were utilised in this process, enabling that all-important phenomenon of a group of people laughing at themselves and registering life’s basic absurdities – the second-half ascent to the Giant’s upper realms simply but most effectively realised , with mists and strange, evocative lighting employed to create a sense of “the heights” – one of the characters summed up the transformation with the words “it’s other worldly! – a bit like Stokes Valley!”
Ultimately, the show’s success depended upon palpable engagement with the audience – and this was achieved throughout most heart-warmingly, and nowhere more so than at the beginning of the second half, when the audience’s children were invited onto the stage for a kind of “rumble”, singing and dancing to the song “It’s a pantomime world”, which went down well on both sides of the footlights.
Elsewhere I enjoyed the creative inspiration, communication skills and technical know-how on show, brought out ahead of impressive spectacle and wow-factor jiggery-pokery, thus requiring we in the audience to be actively engaged rather than passively observing. Still remembering how open-mouthedly magical theatrical performance of any kind was for me as a child, I thought Susan Wilson’s direction of the revamped classic tale similarly and successfully engaged its youthful clientele, and took people such as myself back some of the way to those same realms of delight and wonderment.
New Zealand Opera (in association with Victorian Opera) presents:
SWEENEY TODD – The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
Music and Lyrics by STEPHEN SONDHEIM
Book by HUGH WHEELER (from a play by Christopher Bond)
Cast: Sweeney Todd – Teddy Tahu Rhodes
Mrs Lovett – Antoinette Halloran
Anthony Hope – James Benjamin Rodgers
Johanna – Amelia Berry
Tobias Ragg – Joel Granger
Judge Turpin – Phillip Rhodes
Beadle Bamford – Andrew Glover
Beggar Woman – Helen Medlyn
Adolfo Pirelli – Robert Tucker
Jonas Fogg – James Ioelu
Ensemble: Cameron Barclay, Stuart Coats, Declan Cudd
Barbara Graham, Elisabeth Harris, David Holmes
Morag McDowell, Chris McRae, Catherine Reaburn
Emma Sloman, Imogen Thirlwall
Conductor: Benjamin Northey
Director: Stuart Maunder
Designer: Roger Kirk
Lighting: Philip Lethlean
Audio: Jim Aitkins
Wardrobe: Elizabeth Whiting
Orchestra Wellington
St.James Theatre, Wellington
Friday 30th September, 2016
Stuart Maunder, New Zealand Opera’s chief, and the director of the company’s current production of Stephen Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd”, showing at Wellington’s St.James Theatre, called the show in a welcome message written in the programme “a meaty night out at the opera”. I admit I took fright for an instant, irrespective of my largely carnivorous food preferences history. It was just that I didn’t really fancy watching a series of lurid, blood-letting encounters served up for the edification of a respectable opera-going audience who might, without warning, transmogrify into a baleful mob calling for the entrails of the next unfortunate Christian thrown into the middle of the Circus Maximus.
However, reason prevailed – and suspecting that my reaction was probably due to a somewhat over-developed imagination, I resolved to bravely gird my loins, and “tough” my way through the predicted carnage! While I’m not exactly a veteran of many cutting-edge, “anything goes” theatrical productions in the flesh (so to speak) I had seen sufficient examples on film of no-holds-barred ventures into some pretty visceral stuff to know that some present-day forays into the theatre could be pretty harrowing for audiences – so I resigned myself to be ready for anything!
As it turned out, my protective shields soon began to fall away, as, during the course of the drama, I became increasingly involved and/or empathetic with the intricacies, impulses and foibles of the story’s various characters. It was obvious that this production, with its ready and compelling amalgam of colourful Victorian atmosphere and accompanying operatic volatility and tragic darkness at its heart would bring out so much more than merely the notorious examples of violent blood-letting that the subject of “the Demon Barber of Fleet Street” has become renowned for above all other considerations.
I couldn’t help feeling the parallels between Sweeney Todd, the “demon barber”, and one of the most famous of all grand operatic characters, the misshapen jester Rigoletto. Each story has at its heart the darkness of wrong being done and having to be paid for in blood by the main character – Sweeney, the innocent victim of the rapacious desires of a judge who through deportation deprived him of his wife (whom he described as “virtuous”) and daughter; and Rigoletto, the unfortunate victim of his own physical deformity and the unfortunate loss of his wife, (whom he described as “an angel”), and, eventually, his daughter. (There’s actually a posting on the web which takes up this theme and develops it – it can be found on the following link http://dropera.blogspot.co.nz/2014/09/rigoletto-todd-demon-jester-of-mantua.html)
I won’t reiterate the points made by the linked article – but the upshot of Sondheim’s music and librettist Hugh Wheeler’s book is that the original “penny-dreadful” character-creation, Sweeney Todd, is fleshed-out, becoming a man with a “past” who is done a great wrong by society, and is determined to wreak revenge upon those responsible (Sondheim was inspired by Christopher Bond’s eponymous 1970s play, which set the character of Sweeney on the road to a kind of almost heroic status, transcending his former grisly serial-killer populist origins).
Quite frankly I couldn’t imagine the work more effectively realized in broad brush-stroke terms than in the performance we witnessed on opening night here in Wellington – one could perhaps cavil at this and that detail, most of which would anyway be matters of individual taste rather than theatrical and operatic absolutes. I haven’t seen another “Sweeney” live, but looked at several complete performance on you-tube, finding nothing that essentially superseded my memory and appreciation of what I witnessed “live” in the St.James last Friday evening. To me the overall atmosphere, the general plan and specific detailings of the set, the powerfully-focused lighting, the costumes that looked as though they had “grown” on the characters, and the sheer, no-holds-barred identification of each cast member with his or her role made for an overwhelming theatrical experience.
What a gift for a vibrant, energetic chorus this work is! – no mere indiscriminate body of variously-garbed onlookers upon whatever, these people lived their different roles as though their lives depended upon the outcome – often they were the story’s trajectory-makers, recounting and commenting on scenarios and events, almost always with clearly-ennunciated diction, even if some of Sondheim’s contrapuntal efforts resulted in general effect rather than specific detailing. Musical and dramatic force occasionally fused to telling effect, an example being the occasional appearance of the well-known “Dies irae” theme, beloved of Requiem settings by various composers throughout the ages, delivered with chilling, almost apocalyptic focus apposite to the stage action.
I thought one of the chorus’s greatest, and most breathtaking moments came mid-way through the Second Act, when vocalized storytelling power was suddenly and dramatically made flesh as the various members broke ranks and assumed the guises of an asylum’s inmates. The ensemble relished the depictions of chaos before regrouping at the scene’s end to drive the music’s fate-saturated course to the point of combustion with their repeated phrase “city on fire!”, echoing and abetting the various characters’ agitations – all very organically and compellingly advanced, the final reiterations of the “Dies ire” theme in the final chorus suitably cathartic, considering the Shakespearian body-count at the work’s conclusion.
The story-line takes in both dark, life-embittered business and youthful, idealized romance, but, there again, so does Beethoven’s Fidelio – rather than regard the scenes between Sweeney’s daughter, Johanna, and her young lover, Anthony, as lacking in edge, one must welcome their presence as stars determinedly negating the all-enveloping gloom of a night sky. I thought both Amelia Berry and James Benjamin Rodgers a whole-hearted, life-enhancing duo, making the most of their admittedly under-developed opportunities (though both the first appearance and the reprise of their duet “Kiss me!” was a delight, regarding both its singing and the pair’s accompanying interactions!). Each continued that quality of identification displayed in roles I’d previously seen them take, Berry as an attractive and spirited Zerlina in Don Giovanni and Rodgers as a beautifully characterized Goro in Madama Butterfly.
Antitheses of characterization were provided by a different partnership, that of Robert Tucker’s strong and vibrant-cum-sleazy Adfolfo Pirelli, the showman who attempted to blackmail Sweeney with the latter’s secret past, and his young assistant Tobias Ragg, played by Joel Granger, who conveyed with heartfelt ease his character’s almost naive wholeheartedness and loyalty towards his “protector”, the redoubtable Mrs Lovett, Sweeney’s partner in crime. But an extra dimension of character antithesis rolled into one was conveyed most masterfully by Helen Medlyn, whose portrayal as a mysterious, sometimes deranged, occasionally grisette-like, but at moments almost visionary beggar-woman was a kind of tour-de-force of characterization, transcending the almost “Game-of-Thrones” brutality with which she was despatched by the by-then-maniacal Sweeney (which action proved to be his ultimate undoing).
Villainy of interestingly-coloured threads was variously displayed by both Phillip Rhodes’ Judge Turpin, and Andrew Glover’s Beadle Bamford. The judge’s self-flagellation scene (partly confessional, partly self-indulgent airings of his lustful thoughts regarding Johanna, whom he had adopted as his ward after deporting her father to Australia!) I thought an interesting “take” on proverbial Victorian hypocrisy – through no fault of Phillip Rhodes’ I didn’t think it wasn’t entirely convincing, (and those actual whips seemed very “stylized”, almost to a fault!) – though compared with some rather naff fully-clothed equivalent self-flagellations I watched on You Tube which seemed particularly hypocritical, at least this Judge Turpin appeared to be actually punishing his bare flesh – which, I suppose, might have done it for some members of the audience. More importantly, Rhodes’ singing was a joy – characteristically deep, dark and satisfyingly sinister-sounding, and able to adopt more honeyed tones when appropriate.
And I did relish Andrew Glover’s portrayal of the free-wheeling Beadle Bamford, particularly enjoying the contrast between his swaggering First-Act manner and those almost genteel flecks of self-satisfaction he emitted when playing Mrs Lovett’s harmonium and singing a duet with her. Throughout, his calculated interactions with other characters (such as his suggestions to the Judge regarding ways of making the latter appear more attractive to women – “Ladies in their Sensitivities”) most effectively contributed to something of a study of controlled menace, all the more potent in its implications for whatever outcomes might result.
It could be said that one couldn’t have a “Sweeney Todd” without a performer to do the title role justice – but a great Sweeney would be almost nothing without an equally charismatic partner. This was, of course, the pie-shop lady, Mrs Lovett, who knew Sweeney in his previous life, and who told him upon his return from exile her version of what happened to his wife and his daughter. Here, it was the superb Antoinette Halloran, who brought energy, vibrancy, a great singing voice and well-honed acting skills to the role, bringing out all of the character’s charm and humour as well as a toughness and pragmatism necessary for survival in what were, obviously, tough times in a tough environment.
Though different as chalk from cheese to her Sweeney on this occasion, it was, in a sense, a match made in a theatrical heaven, as each character’s particular largesse complemented the other’s, presenting a kind of united front to the world, even if the fatal flaws in their interaction led to their eventual undoing. As Sweeney, Teddy Tahu Rhodes’ imposing figure certainly commanded the stage, his presence as enigmatic as Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, and as deep-browed as Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard. In contrast to Halloran’s flexible instrument, Rhodes’ tones had a rock-steadiness that allowed for little more than a basic variation of emotion, but which was expressive enough to convey grief at the memory of his long-lost wife and child, tender and flexible enough to salute his long-forgotten barber’s tools (“My Friends”) restored to him by the resourceful Mrs Lovett, and characterful enough to be her foil and allow occasional sparks to fly from their intermingling – their quick-fire-rhyming duet, “A Little Priest”, for instance, demonstrating adroit musical reflexes and teamwork, and producing an exhilarating and enjoyable result.
Yes, bucketfuls of blood were indeed spilt, but in almost every case the killings were practically ritualised, indeed, choreographed, sometimes with the music, so as to add a kind of execution-like air to the vengeful Sweeney’s murderous activities. Come-uppances were also the order of the day for most of the major players in the drama, with only the young lovers and the somewhat (by the end) deranged Tobias remaining more-or-less intact regarding life and limb! So the final sequence featured a ghostly parade of victims and perpetrators of violence alike, as the opening music returned and the chorus delivered the “Dies irae” motif amongst the pulsating textures and tones for the last time, with, fittingly, Sweeney and Mrs Lovett giving the audience the show’s final ironic salute just before the superbly-timed blackout.
So, great theatre, supported by brilliant direction from conductor Benjamin Northey, and on-the-spot playing from Orchestra Wellington. Altogether, it made for an experience which I thought would have given the average opera-goer food for thought regarding the divisions often drawn between musical theatre and opera, ones which the musical genius of Stephen Sondheim seemed often in this work to call to question/
(A reminder: final two performances in Wellington at the St.James Theatre tonight (Tuesday) 4th Oct. at 6pm and Wednesday 5th Oct. at 7:30pm)
“Collision”: Opera Scenes 2016
New Zealand School of Music, Victoria University
Musical director: Mark Dorrell; Director: Jon Hunter
Performance tutor: Maaike Christie-Beekman
Memorial Theatre, Victoria University
Sunday 11 September, 2:30 pm (earlier performances on 9 and 10 September)
The school of music’s once annual opera productions have in recent years fallen back to biennial events. In the between years, students create a series of scenes from opera, against a background of elementary sets and a few props that can, with a bit of imagination, be used in various settings.
This production employed around sixteen singers, though the photo gallery in the printed programme contained 23 faces which included first-year students and two guest singers who were not individually listed, but contributed to the chorus; many took part in two or three scenes.
The scenes from eleven works were divided between opera proper and various sub-categories that go by a variety of definitions like operetta, comic opera, musicals, musical theatre. The excerpts from heartland opera came first while the various kinds of musical theatre were in the second half.
As a generalized comment, the quality of singing, acting, energy level, and spirit of enthusiasm and enjoyment were very high, and at moments where musical or story quality limped, the dynamism that invested the whole show carried it.
The marvellous discovery scene from Act 3 of The Marriage of Figaro made a hilarious and fast-paced beginning: Marcellina and Bartolo are revealed as Figaro’s real parents, and their portrayals were vocally strong (Katrina Brougham and William King), as was the devil-may-care Figaro of Joseph Haddow.,with Alexandra Gandionco as Susanna.
Donizetti’s Tudor opera Anna Bolena handles the revelation to Henry VIII’s Queen, Anne Boleyn, of her unwilling rival, Jane Seymour. It exposed Shayna Tweed’s (the Queen’s) voice at the start, but it gained strength and individuality alongside Olivia Sheat’s vivid depiction of Seymour, as the latter’s uncomfortable role is exposed.
Britten’s comedy Albert Herring which may not have had a professional production in New Zealand since the 1960s, is not easy to bring comfortably to life; its humour can seem naïve. Before the opening scene, four singers set the spirit of the piece with a ball game, from later in the first act. A village meeting in the first scene decides to replace the annual Queen of the May contest (no girl is seen as virtuous enough) by a King of the May – and the chosen boy is the simple, but virtuous Albert Herring. Several earlier singers consolidated their talents here, plus the Lady Billows of Elyse Hemara, who assumed the role of patroness and village matriarch, in a spirited scene.
The card scene from Carmen and the mutual disclosure of Falstaff’s identical letters to Alice and Meg were further opera excerpts between operetta and musical in the second half. In the card scene, Frasquita and Mercedes (Olivia Sheat and Pasquale Orchard) study their fates in the cards before the light-hearted tone suddenly vanishes with Carmen’s arrival. There was a somewhat nervous vibrato in Sally Haywood’s voice which may coincidentally have matched the revelation of her fate.
Both Sheat and Haywood reappeared in the famous scene from Falstaff in which the two ladies discover Falstaff’s foolish ploy and decide to play along. Elizabeth Harré, who had sung the spoiler’s role of Florence in Albert Herring, took another strong character role as Mistress Quickly. (How I’d have loved it if the Nannetta, Alexandra Gandionco, had sung that magical ‘Sul fil d’un soffio etesio’ in the last scene – Angela Gheorghiu totally undid me with her recording).
The Broadway musicals included the 1975 satire on police corruption, Chicago, with the highlight scene, ‘Cell Block Tango’, for six prison inmates who celebrate their achievements in punishing errant husbands: a hilarious, if alarming scene that was splendidly carried off. All have been mentioned elsewhere, except for Nicole Davey: and all that needs be said is that there was no weakness among the six.
Then Sondheim’s Into the Woods, one of his most successful near-musicals, in which Garth Norman and William King vividly illuminated the two fairy-tale princes to Cinderella and to the Grimm tale, Rapunzel, in the scene, ‘Agony’.
Fiddler on the Roof originated as a Yiddish story from Russia, and its most famous number, ‘Matchmaker, Matchmaker’, again characterized in genuine Broadway style, though only subtly satirizing the practice of arranged marriages; the three daughters: Eleanor McGechie, Emma Cronshaw-Hunt and Karishma Thanawala.
Les Misérables was the only one of the musicals that did not originate in New York (Paris, though its real success came after its English adaptation for the Royal Shakespeare Company in London). It offered yet another kind of love dilemma, ‘In my life’ and ‘A heart full of love’, with Karishma Thanawala (after her Chava in ‘Matchmaker’), here sang Eponine, grief-stricken at giving up Marius (Julian Chu-Tan) to Pasquale Orchard’s Cosette.
Three scenes from The Pirates of Penzance brought the show to a close. They began with ‘When a felon’s not engaged in his employment’, which is near the end, led by the Sergeant (Haddow), and inserted ‘Dry the glistening tear’, from Mabel (Sheat) and the female chorus, which actually opens Act II.
I could understand the reason for departing from the order of the three numbers, to put the most rambunctious at the end: ‘When the foeman bares his steel’. (Though I have to confess my greater love of Offenbach, and in this context the Gendarmes Duet, or ‘Couplets des deux hommes d’armes’ from Geneviève de Brabant). The slightly problematic ‘baring of steel’ march number held no fears for the final ensemble of Mabel, Edith (Elyse Hemara), Sergeant, and choruses of policemen and daughters).
Throughout one admired the often virtuosic performance at the piano by Mark Dorrell, especially in the well-rehearsed table lamp episode, always carefully secondary to the singers, but the more admirable for that. And the production team, the movement tutor (is that short for ‘choreographer’?) Lyne Pringle; and most importantly vocal tutors Margaret Medlyn, Richard Greager, James Clayton, Jenny Wollerman and Lisa Harper-Brown.
One looks forward to a main-stage, full opera production in 2017.
Circa Theatre presents:
Ali Harper in LEGENDARY DIVAS
Ali Harper (soprano)
Michael Nicholas Williams (piano)
Circa Theatre, Wellington
Wednesday, July 27th, 2016
I came away from singer Ali Harper’s and musical director Michael Nicholas Williams’ “Legendary Divas” opening night presentation at Circa Theatre feeling as though I had been seduced in the nicest and yet most whirlwind kind of way – Ali Harper’s all-encompassing stage personality, supported by her own and her pianist Michael Nicholas Williams’ consummate musicality throughout, simply took me over for the duration. To bend a clichéd but appropriate phrase, I could have gone on all night, both drinking in and delighting in as much as “the diva” and her director were prepared to give me. Staggering out afterwards into “the cold night air” was, more than usually on this occasion, a salutary return to a separate reality.
The range and scope of the territory covered by Harper’s and Williams’ performance was, I thought, astonishing – Harper stated in a programme note that her performance was one “honouring all those extraordinary women who have influenced me to do what I do today”. If imitation is indeed the sincerest form of flattery, she certainly fulfilled her goal, paying a deep and rich homage to an array of amazing singers throughout the course of the evening. In a sense it was all art which concealed art, with some occasionally mind-bending, but always spontaneous-sounding juxtapositions of singers and repertoire served up to us as organically as night follows day.
We got introductory gestures of welcome, including some instantly-engaging and physically exhilarating Motown-sound sequences, and some rhetorical teasings regarding the definition of the word “diva”, including a “bel canto-ish”, affectionately-hammed-up “O mio babbino caro” (until the advent of Luciano Pavarotti’s version of “Nessun dorma”, perhaps Puccini’s “greatest hit”!) and then a “can belt-o!” rendition of parts of an Ethel Merman standard! – whew! The subject of what a diva would wear came up, and, along with the question of suitable scenery, was consigned by Harper to the realms of relative unimportance next to “the glittering presence of (I quote) the gorgeous Michael Nicholas Williams” (rapturous applause).
I was delighted that Harper gave none other than Doris Day, an all-time favourite singer of mine, the honour of leading off the starry array, with a beautiful rendition of “It’s Magic”, a song from “Romance on the High Seas”, which was Day’s film debut in 1948. Harper’s winning vocal quality and powerful focusing of each word in a properly heartfelt context allowed the material to soar and transport us most satisfyingly in doing so. Barbara Streisand received similar laudatory treatment with Harper pulling out all her full-on stops in a raunchy performance of “Don’t rain on my Parade”, though, by contrast, another of my favourites, Julie Andrews, to my great regret became the butt of some ageist humour, albeit most skilfully brought off, with some hilarious, Hoffnung-like downwardly-spiralling vocal modulations……..oh, well, one can’t have ALL one’s heroines treated like goddesses, I suppose!
The subjective nature of things had me in raptures at Harper’s devastating rendition of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina”, which for me brought back something of the impact I remember made by the original singer Julie Covington’s tones and inflections. True, the singer may well have had either or both Elaine Paige and Madonna in mind – but such was the intensity of the interpretation, this became Harper’s moment more than anybody else’s. By contrast I found the normally affecting “Send in the Clowns” a trifle earthbound here, more world-weary and disillusioned than I wanted it to be, with a harder, less “floated” vocal line that I was expecting – it still worked, but in a tougher, rather more hard-bitten sense of the reality of things, with which I found it more difficult to “connect” – chacun en son gout, as they say………
Entertainments of more diverse kinds came and went, adding to the evening’s variety – Ali Harper’s “la belle dame sans merci” advancement on a hapless front-row male audience member, with a view to “dragging him up onto the performing stage”, worked beautifully, thanks to her persuasive charm as well as to the good-natured response of the gentleman involved, who seemed to gradually ‘‘get into the swing” of what was required to partner such a vibrant performer.
Another was Michael Nicholas Williams’ response to being told by Harper to “entertain the audience” while she went and changed her dress – as divas apparently do – an exercise which brought forth a couple of subsequent admonishments from the singer regarding the pianist’s initial choices of music, until Williams finally called her bluff by launching into THE Rachmaninov Prelude (C-sharp Minor, Op.3 No.2) and playing it with plenty of virtuosity, to boot! The music’s climax was interrupted by the singer’s re-entry in a classic, show-stopping way, wearing a gorgeous, close-fitting red dress and immediately launching into a bracket of songs associated with Shirley Bassey (mostly the title songs from the early James Bond movies, such as “Goldfinger”, all belted out in the best Bassey style!) – tremendous stuff!
Harper touched on the tragic aspects of some of her heroines – figures such as Judy Garland and Edith Piaf, both of whom died at a relatively early age – commenting that many seemed unlucky in love, and that a number also had what she called “image issues”, citing a quote from Janis Joplin (which I can’t remember, but was to do with her getting a rough ride from her schoolmates all throughout her college years, and never really escaping from the hurt). Though not directly referred to, there was conveyed a real sense of another, well-known Joplin quote which applied to a lot of performers and to what they did: – “Onstage I make love to 25,000 people – and then afterwards I go home alone…” Harper’s show didn’t dwell overmuch on the tragic stories, instead largely engaging the “divas” at the height of their singing and performance powers (well, perhaps with the exception of the unfortunate Julie Andrews) and conveying something of the essence of what those women did with their stellar talents.
In all, what Harper and Williams achieved was a veritable tour de force – of entertainment, involvement and enjoyment – a particularly stirring moment was the singer’s invitation for the audience to sing along with her in Carole King’s heartwarming “You’ve got a friend”, after which Harper’s chosen “friend” from the audience was recalled and promptly put in the hot seat once again, this time enjoined to help the rest of us identify the voices of eight well-known women singers – some of the “divas” whose talents and inspirational achievements lifted our own lives several notches upwards and gave voice to our innermost feelings and dreams. Ali Harper throughout the evening “owned” these women with total conviction, bringing to us the personalities through their songs – of the “eight divas” I picked the first two, Dusty Springfield and Peggy Lee, and as well I thought I caught snatches of Tina Turner and Olivia Newton-John – others with wider-ranging antennae would have “picked up” on the rest.
Thought-provoking, also, to have those images at the show’s end, some of whom I hadn’t heard of – Julie London, Etta James, Ruth Etting, and Eva Cassidy – receiving from Harper their deserved moment of glory, along with names which resonated for me, such as Patsy Cline, Ella Fitzgerald, Dinah Washington and Nina Simone. But despite these evocations of greatness, nothing and nobody eclipsed the achievement of Ali Harper, her incredible communicative power, her infectious élan and her magnificent singing. With her illustrious music director, Michael Nicholas Williams at the pianistic helm, she was a force to be reckoned with – in all, I thought “Legendary Divas” a must-see!
See also the following link to Theatreview for other reviews:
The New Zealand Festival 2016 presents:
BRASS POPPIES (Ross Harris – music / Vincent O’Sullivan – libretto)
James Egglestone (William Malone)
Sarah Court (Mrs Malone)
Robert Tucker ( Tommo)
Anna Leese (Mary / Luck)
Jonathan Eyers (Billy)
Madison Nonoa (Joyce)
Wade Kernot (Fred)
Mary Newman-Pound (Lucy)
Andrew Glover (Turk/Patriot)
Benjamin Mitchell, Taniora Rangi Motutere (dancers)
Jonathan Alver (director)
Maaka Pepene (choreographer)
Jon Baxter (AV design)
Jason Morphett (lighting)
Elizabeth Whiting (costuming)
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Stroma New Music Ensemble
Shed 6, Wellington
Thursday 3rd March 2016
Poet Vincent O’Sullivan and composer Ross Harris have collaborated on no less than eleven words-and-music works since 2002, the most recent being the chamber opera “Brass Poppies”. The work received its premiere at Shed 6 in Wellington last week, and after finishing a four-night season has gone on to Auckland’s Mercury Theatre where it will play for two more nights later this week.
Though the opera was actually completed by O’Sullivan and Harris before their previous Festival presentation Requiem for the Fallen, was given in 2014, it effectively complements the latter. Brass Poppies treats the subject of war and its effect upon people in a remarkably intimate and personalized way. While the Requiem was notable for its diversity of means (string quartet, brass and percussion, various taonga puoro, chamber choir and tenor solo), the opera, though no less telling in its impact on the listener, is more “conventionally” written for voices and chamber ensemble.
Harris commented in an interview beforehand that he thought the work had more in common with Stephen Sondheim and Kurt Weill, rather than with “conventional” opera. It seemed to me that there were a few such influences, consciously or otherwise applied – for example the meeting of the young soldier, Billy and the young girl Joyce at the dance I thought reminiscent of the meeting of the young lovers in “West Side Story” – and the all-pervading dance-rhythms which drove the opening scenes so surely and buoyantly seemed also to me to draw from the composer’s involvement with things like Klezmer music. Particularly affecting was Tatiana Lanchtchikova’s accordion-playing, rhythmic pulsings and harmonic flavorings which conjured up a bitter-sweet ambience that flavoured the whole ensemble’s music-making throughout.
O’Sullivan’s libretto, though an anti-war statement, never thumps a tub, or loads the scenario with suffering or horror of a cathartic kind – his words have the lightest of touches, with everything insinuated or suggested at the start, and stated simply and poetically at the end. And Harris’s music does the same, the lyrical lines and dance rhythms keeping the narrative flow on the move, and maintaining forward movement even when, in places, suggesting the gentlest ofpulsatings amid the silences. And so the sense of tragedy is heightened for us, because the lives and circumstances of the four soldiers are so very like ours, easily identifiable with – and yet somehow the monstrousness of what they and their families are drawn into is conveyed, the “snuffing out” of lives on a hitherto unprecedented scale is numbingly registered.
It’s the kind of thing that Wilfred Owen wrote about in his poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth” with the words –
“The pallor of girls, brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.”
Together at the opera’s beginning, the soldiers and their families (represented by the women) are taken away from the ordinariness of their lives and gradually drawn into different worlds, each replete with remembrances of and longings for what was and might be again – at the beginning we heard rhetorical-sounding statements, deeply-felt but already with a hollow ring, such as“This is what we’re fighting for”, and similarly-felt exchanges between the couples “What we told each other we remember”. When parted, the dialogues (via letters) took on the poignancy ofseparation and the mutually-shared hope that “luck” would keep the men company and keep them safe, a spirit characterized by one of the women as a “presence” circulating among the men at Gallipoli.
Such sentiments were, of course, lump-in-the-throat in effect, as were the longings expressed for a “return to what was”‘ on both sides. One husband-and-wife exchange was shared by both singers, one taking over the words of the letter from the other; while another soldier’s letter recalled memories of walking with his girl in orchards filled with apples – he then made reference to walking under a different kind of orchard, those of the stars overhead at Gallpoli. It was all very heartfelt on a deeply personal and individual scale, with hopes, fears, sorrows and resignation gently brought together in a wholly natural way.
A jingoistic note was expressed by a British Empire figure repeating vainglorious cliches of valour and sacrifice, set against verses whose words underlined the cynicism of the “victory” rhetoric, as did the ditty about the Kings “in their counting houses, counting out their money”, making something fairytale-like from out of the turmoil and tragedy. All of this struck such hollow resonances as the soldiers, all having been killed by this time, countered these sentiments by announcingthe grim finality of their position with the words “we’re not likely to change our minds as the grass keeps growing” – and later, commenting on “the deep snows of forgetting”. Emotions ran in parallel, the women in mourning and the shades of the soldiers (sightless to their bereaved partners) in lament for what has been lost, with the women singing of the subsequent evenings as “silent as a shattered gun”. The quiet interlocking of thought and emotion, and the avoidance of overt, visceral grief gives oceans of realm forindividual feeling to well up and flood the spaces, so that we in the audience were overcome with the cruel emptiness of it all, on both sides.
Describing his words for the libretto as “only the scaffolding for something bigger” O’Sullivan paid tribute to his collaborator’s music, though to this listener’s ears what came across was a tapestried amalgam of words and music, wroughtout of similar impulses. The music, as strongly as did the words, told us who these people were – ordinary people being asked to go and perform in extraordinary situations. So Harris’s music was catchy and recognizable and readily identifiable – period pieces, such as waltzes, marches and other different dance-forms, the music of the people, so to speak. The rhythmic verve of the dance was physical in its impact, and its sudden changes of metre both ironic and volatile in its effect. I thought I heard those Klezmer touches on various occasions, the genre’s intrinsic bitter-sweet ambiences here very much to the point.
Director Jonathan Alver’s staging of the work made creative theatrical use of the ostensibly unpromising Shed 6 venue. I hadn’t heard any live music there previously, so my first reaction to encountering what seemed to be such “barn-of-a-place” surroundings was of dismay – fortunately, these concerns weren’t realized in performance. The clarity of both vocal and instrumental lines was, I thought,exemplary, though the surtitles played their part in clarifying lines throughout the more concerted singing passages. Balance between singers and instrumentalists seemed well-nigh perfect, with conductor and players being visible “on stage” throughout, over to one side rather than down in a pit of any kind – part of the work’s choreography of movement.
The production wasn’t “in the round” as the Requiem of two years ago had been in Wellington Cathedral – this was more conventionally staged, with singers and dancers appearing on a stage via entrances diagonally placed between column-like walls on which were projected various scenes and scenarios. In this way the singers and dancers seemed to come in from the midst of whatever scheme was projected onto the surfaces of the columns, and in places return to them via their exits, which I thought worked beautifully as an idea – no more poignantly than when the soldiers took their leave of their women through exits framed by contemporary photographs of freshly-enlisted men in uniform marching down Lambton Quay in Wellington. Besides the four couples and the Turkish figure / British patriot character, there were also two sprite-like dancers whose movements expressed both gentleness and strength, delicacy and vigour, the latter sometimes combatative and warlike. Costumes were simple – khaki uniforms for the men, period dresses for the women, as expected. After the soldiers were each killed they remained as “presences” on stage, haunting their women, though not being able to communicate – very simple and powerful.
This was very much an ensemble opera, though with a number of stand-out vocal moments for individual voices. The conversations among the characters were as significant as were the individual soliloquies, each acting as a foil for the other, though the solo sequences tended to “carry” the more profound utterances. The couples interacted with admirable ease and fluency, each with a particular character, from the tremulousness of the two youngsters, Joyce (Madison Nonoa) and Billy (Jonathan Eyres), to the no-nonsense working-class codes and understandings used by Fred (Wade Kernot) and Lucy (Mary Newman-Pound). Australian tenor James Egglestone as Captain William Malone relished his occasional stentorian moments, though most memorable was his tender interaction with his wife (Sara Court), particularly during the reading of a letter home, the husband taking over from the wife halfway through with the reading– it was all a perfectly-tailored piece of give-and-take.
Robert Tucker (as Tommo) beautifully put across his letter/song which recalled memories of the apple orchard where he courted Mary (Anna Leese), and making the most of his declaration of surprise and resignation at looking upwards at a different kind of orchard at Anzac Cove – the night sky. As for Anna Leese, her strong-willed Mary, vigorous and feisty, “morphed” this character at one point in the story with Lady Luck, a female personification of good fortune, taking it upon herself to circulate among the Allied soldiers, singing about the “mantel of luck”, in between wordless chantings, everything beautifully and lyrically sounded. Again, one got the sense of the impact made on individuals, with Mary’s description of an excursion up to Brooklyn an almost Janus-faced aspect of her “Luck” persona by association – things that ordinary men and women would think of and hold onto in extraordinary situations, and expressed in a naturalistic context. FInally, Andrew Glover made the most of his cameo-like opportunities as the ghost-like Turkish soldier and the British patriot, enigmatic figures at opposite spectrum-ends.
Every instrumental sound was vividly realized by the Stroma Ensemble under Hamish McKeich’s direction – the musical realizations played their part in enhancing the production’s consistently underplayed yet powerful inner resonances. It’s one whose message will continue to resound, and repay revisiting.
The Gondoliers by Arthur Sullivan and William Gilbert
Musical director: Hugh McMillan; stage director: Wayne Morris; producer: Stuart Gordon
Lead singers: William McElwee, Orene Tiai, Laura Loach, Charlotte Gartrell, John Goddard, Malinda Di Leva, Georgia Jamieson Emms, Mark Bobb, Chris Whelan,
The Opera House
Saturday 19 September, 7:30 pm
G&S goes on and on. Hard to think of another composer whose music in a certain genre has acquired such a single-minded following from so many, and of those, one suspects, some don’t particularly enjoy any other kind of opera or musical theatre, or even any other kind of classical music. Offenbach has no comparable cult status in France; nor Lehár or Kálmán in Austria; nor any one composer of zarzuela in Spain. Though in all cases, the relevant numbers of operettas is considerably larger than the usual
canon of G&S.
The G&S repertoire is rather small after all. Out of the total of fourteen operettas on which the two men collaborated, only about eight can be regarded as being in the standard repertory. Compare with the far greater number from each of the many prominent operetta composers of France, Austria, Germany. The number of extant zarzuelas is reputed to exceed 1000.
The Gondoliers, which was the last successful collaboration between composer and librettist, was well chosen for its contemporary New Zealand relevance. It deals with one unusual issue – the novelty of the introduction of the limited liability law – but also normal social issues of class, the nobility, honours, republicanism, the question of equality – everything but the flag; perhaps the flag controversy can be seen hovering just below the balustrade. As important for the success of the piece, apart from the full ration of splendid tunes, was the conventionally contrived plot involving misalliances, a missing heir to a Ruritanian throne, which is temporarily shared, giving Gilbert’s legal background rein for mockery; by shifting the setting for gentle satire of English royal and parliamentary institutions to Venice and an obscure, mythical central European state, they avoided censorship dangers.
The interpretation, staging and design were presumably the collaborative work of producer Stuart Gordon and stage director Wayne Morris.
After the overture that offered assurance that the players, mostly from Orchestra Wellington, would support the singers pretty professionally, the chorus confirmed a well-coached ensemble. And the chorus remained a delight throughout the evening, even taking account of moments later on when the voices of men and women of the chorus parted company. Under musical director Hugh McMillan, balances between orchestra, chorus and soloists were conspicuously comfortable, and the pace and expressive character remained lively and sensitive.
The stage revealed an expansive grand canal with stylized buildings, hinting rather shyly at Venice, rising from it. Some of the solo singing at the beginning showed a little uneasiness; but William McElwee and Orene Tiai as gondoliers Marco and Giuseppe, grew steadily into their roles… as did the two maidens, Gianetta and Tessa (Laura Loach and Charlotte Gartrell) to whom they would shortly be betrothed. The four sometimes operated better as a quartet than separately, for example in the ‘Then one of us will be a queen’.
The entry of the visiting Spanish Duke and Duchess (John Goddard and Malinda Di Leva) with their lovely daughter Casilda (Georgia Jamieson Emms) soon embedded the story in serious improbability, and this was a strength that enlivened the performance in the true spirit of absurdity; Goddard’s early vocal unevenness settled after a little while.
The farcical element helped obscure weaknesses in the singing by the less experienced singers; on the other hand none of the nonsense obscured the fact that there were excellent performances, by Emms, and by McElwee and Tiai, who found themselves sharing the job of temporary monarch. The important role of the Grand Inquisitor, Don Alhambra, was splendidly carried by Chris Whelan, without excessive overacting, displayed brilliantly in his ‘I stole the prince … no possible doubt whatever’, which reveals the crux of the problem that dominates the drama.
The denouement sees the temporary dual-king(s) deposed, to their great relief, and the heir to the Baratarian throne, is revealed as Luiz, tenor Mark Bobb, a recent arrival in New Zealand. One of the most vivid figures on the stage, he sang excellently with a fast, disciplined vibrato. In the first act he had acted as ducal orchestra, displaying finesse on the side-drum to herald the Duke’s arrival. He and Emms – lovers, unaware of how things will evolve – sang a charming duet, ‘There was a time’.
The stage scene at Act II is the interior of the royal Barataria palace, quite an imposing affair with grand staircase set to a curious perspective. Giuseppe’s amusing solo about the troubles of a king, up-dated, had the edge on Marco’s ‘Take a pair of sparkling eyes’, pretty as that was.
The action proceeds with an energetic Spanish dance and then the Grand Inquisitor’s (Chris Whelan) classic show-stopper, ‘There lived a king’, showing how equality and republicanism are quite absurd. These moments are usually furnished with localised political lyrics, this time by the singer himself, which I have permission to reproduce here. The singing was accompanied by a series of pertinent illustrations of many of the leading comic figures involved in the following narrative.
In southern oceans far away A strange perversion once took sway The people wanted greater say And MMP resulted
It meant that none could rule alone Without some partners on the throne And compromise would be the tone At least that was the theory.
Soon parties formed in every hue Of red and blue and yellow too So every wretched fellow knew Their interests were cared for.
But parties needed ways to share The power so that all seemed fair So to the top of every tree Promoted everybody
Now it is clear and plain to see That ranking colleagues equally Will put an end to rivalry, Promoting everybody.
Soon ministers were everywhere With rank and perks in equal share But trade and finance ranked the same As arts and social housing
Like Judith Collins some were bad Or Gerry Brownlee slightly mad Though voter faith did gently sag The PM seemed delighted.
The coalition held its course. Dave Seymore was a trifling force And Peter Dunne was a resource Among the minor minions.
So party leaders you might meet In twos and threes in every street, Professing with no little heat Their various opinions.
Now that’s a sight you couldn’t beat Two party spokesmen in each street, Professing with no little heat Their various opinions.
The end can easily be guessed, When skill no longer is the test Soon personality was best For getting voter traction
The voters favoured charm and wit And ranked good hair above true grit Soon one emerged that seemed to fit In Southland and Kaitaia
The voters turned to one who seemed Averse to baubles though he preened Through spluttering indignant schemes, Was Winston made kingmaker.
In short whoever you may be To this conclusion you’ll agree When everyone is somebodee, Soon no one’s anybody.
Now that’s as plain as plain can be, To this conclusion we agree: When everyone is somebodee, Soon no one’s anybody.
And there were various references to current political scandals scattered through the score, for example the ennoblement of The Duke of Plaza-Toro dotcom.
While the build-up to the denouement goes along nicely, as the former nurse is finally persuaded to tell the court that neither of the joint-temporary kings is the heir, no imperishable musical hits are to be found in the last scenes, apart from a reprise of the big dance scene.
The costumes were elaborate, the sets ingenious and appropriate, and the direction generally lively and credible, paying some attention to the traditions of 1880s comic opera, and today’s tendency sometimes to do violence to the original conception and to impose our own interpretation. There was nothing at which one could take offence in this.
It had been see already in Lower Hutt, Kapiti and Whanganui, so that any teething troubles would have been sorted out and word spread of its virtues. Thus there was a good audience at the Opera House.
Circa Theatre presents:
DEAD TRAGIC
by Michael Nicholas Williams
Cast: Emma Kinane / Jon Pheloung
Lyndee-Jane Rutherford / Darren Young
Michael Nicholas Williams
Musical Director: Michael Nicholas Williams
Lighting Designer: Glenn Ashworth
Costume Designer: Maryanne Cathro
Set Design: Barnaby Kinane Williams
Circa Theatre, Wellington
Saturday, 22nd November, 2014
That old wizard of stage and screen, Noel Coward, was right when he famously quipped, “….how extraordinarily POTENT cheap music is……” – that is, if the response of the “half-century-onwards” hearts that were pumping and pulsating throughout Circa Theatre’s startlingly in-your-face “Dead Tragic” collection of truly-and-tragically-dreadful 1970s songs was anything to go by.
In fact that opening sentence gives you an idea of some of the convolutions of the lyrics which my particular generation swallowed, hook, line and sinker with the syrupy tunes, while on its collective knees to the blandishments of the pop industry and to commercial radio – here were some of the most coruscating examples of the genre, come back to haunt us, just when we thought it was safe to let our guards down and peer backwards through the generational mists.
Thankfully, we are compartmentalised beings! – and so while it was, in a sense, out-and-out, long-overdue cultural death by nostalgia for some of our more superannuated neuron-clusters, other, more robust parts of us came through the experience, phoenix-like, cleansed and strengthened, ready to face a brighter and fresher generation of “the same but different” – if my teenaged son’s current “You-tube” manifestations are anything to go by.
But at Circa, after I’d squared up to the actual confrontations with these realities, and subsequently took stock of the outcomes, I found myself echoing the aforementioned, redoubtable Sir Noel in my musings – “What treasures! – what hot-wire experiences! – what visceral juices set a-bubbling! – what delight, and what laughter!” – and, finally and surprisingly – “What days they were!”
As that iconic Kiwi, Fred Dagg, might have expostulated (though not to be confused with home-brew, or some other such thing) – “Talk about potent, Trev!” – some of these songs carried their potency with the pin-pointedness of a truth serum. Despite the inevitable lampooning, some of the original associations evoked were specifically time-and-place, rather like when people are able to remember where they were when hearing the news of The Beatles breakup, or the deaths of Jimmy Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Evis Presley or John Lennon.
So, these thoughts were all leapfrogging in my head as I sat in the midst of an obviously delighted Circa audience, while song followed song and joy and delight followed surprise and excitement! Here were five on-stage performers, four whose business was singing and acting (Emma Kinane, Jon Pheloung, Lyndee-Jane Rutherford and Darren Young) and a musical director (Michael Nicholas Williams), a power at the keyboard, an extra voice when needed, both solo and in the ensemble – here was so much for the entertainment of so many presented by so few!
But what powerhouses they all were! – right from the opening “Delilah” delivered by Jon Pheloung with libido-laden bodily pulsations and vocalizations impressive on both aural and visual counts, backed to the hilt with impressively harmonized chorus reprises from the supporting trio, and flailing figurations in thirds from the “backing group”, we were properly confronted with the world of “truly, madly, deeply” – and ultimately, “tragic and deadly”.
To go through each song would stretch my emotional repercharge to breaking-point and exhaust my poor stock of superlatives in no time at all! – naturally enough, there were places where all of my needles “peaked”, though I can’t remember a single item that didn’t work on its own terms. Part of the fun was in the performers’ adroit juxtapositioning of the “straight” with the “parody”, the heartfelt with the satirical – the mix was never predictable in its bias or degree of intensity, making for edge-of-seat expectation both prior to and during some of the numbers.
Some numbers suffered out-and-out lampooning, to everybody’s utter delight – “Seasons in the Sun”, which, admittedly, could have been played “straight” to risible effect, was here subjected to a most deservedly deconstructivist treatment, Darren Young revelling in the comic opportunities for a “deathbed farewell farce” complete with the obligatory sign from heaven in the form of a cross.
Though the songs were all American, with some of the realizations there seemed more than a touch of the home-grown haunting the presentation aspect in places – both “Nobody’s Child” and “Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town” featured Lyndee-Jane Rutherford’s engagingly “ordinary Kiwi sheila” in the limelight, accustomed or otherwise, in the former making the most of her five minutes of plaintive fame, cross-eyed with concentrated focus, while in the latter valiantly doing without any fairy godmother in preparation for her desperately-planned bouts of adulterous acquiescence, with some excruciatingly uncomfortable bodily hair removal procedures.
A nice touch at half-time was the pushing-over towards centre-stage of the giant record-player-arm, whose head had doubled as a coffin at some stage or other (and would do so again!), signifying that “Side One” had been completed! – set designer Barnaby Kinane-Williams deserved a pat on the back for that particular inspiration! Then Emma Kinane and Darren Young got the “flip side” away to a marvellously schmaltzy piece of quasi-ethnicity with “Running Bear” (was I hearing things, or did the audience’s toe-tapping reach hitherto undisturbed levels of intensity during this catchy number?) – whatever the case, it all impressively morphed into Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”, our amusement tempered with real appreciation of the group’s part-singing harmonizing, and the imaginative staging, with the ghostly, disembodied faces.
As with all classy entertainments, there were terraced intensities – even more deconstructionist that “Seasons in the Sun” was the ensemble’s response to “Darling Jane”, a song whose scenario and lyrics were surely the stuff of legends, epitomizing as they did the most mindless banalities known to Tin Pan Alley – this was Musical Director Michael Nicholas Williams’s one real chance to shine in a starring vocal role, an opportunity nicely scuppered by the storm-tossed palm fronds manipulated by Emma Kinane and Lyndee-Jane Rutherford, mercilessly flailing the stage’s upper reaches, a space inhabited also by Williams’s head!
Against these objects of “harmless merriment” were the spectrum’s opposite-end songs, ones which, despite their understandable contextual capacity to amuse, couldn’t help but also impinge with a good deal of their original pathos, the most outstanding being “In the Ghetto”, which, for all its well-worn rhetoric remains a powerful and disturbing social statement – perhaps only “The Green Green Grass of Home” matched it for raw emotional power, however well-worn the terrain. This all-encompassing aspect of the show served only to remind us that things are because of their diametric opposites – and the definitions thus provided are of their own inverse value.
So, it was with grateful appreciation for the talents of those onstage performers, in tandem with Glenn Ashworth’s lighting, Maryanne Cathro’s consumes and Barnaby Kinane Williams’ set designs that we put our hands together and our feet repeatedly on the floor at the show’s end, satisfied with our lot, and enjoying the reactivation of all those ghostly resonances of times past, come back to tell us how important they actually are.
Dong Fei - dancer | Gao Ping - piano | Wu Na - Qin | Evan Li - photographer
The Confucius Institute, Victoria University, Wellington, presents:
High Mountain Flowing Water (Gao Shan Liu Shui)
An ancient Chinese tale with guqin, piano and Kunqu opera
Music-drama settings of poetry ancient and modern
Gao Ping – piano
Dong Fei – actor/singer/dancer
Wu Na – guqin (qin)
Director: Sara Brodie
Visual design: Jon He
Text arrangement: Luo Hui
Production curated by Jack Body
Massey Concert Hall, Wellington
Wednesday, 22nd October, 2014
Encounters with exotic art-forms and performance-styles which are unfamiliar can have profound consequences – one thinks, for instance of the effect upon the composer Claude Debussy of the Paris International Exhibition of 1889 with its displays of art and music from places like Java, in particular the sounds made by the gamelan orchestra. Earlier the prints of Japanese artists such as Hokusai had reached Europe and inspired a whole generation of French and English painters to emulate the characteristics of Japanese art, an influence that extended to the art-nouveau movement of the early twentieth century. It was the sheer novelty and force of an encounter with a new tradition which both delighted creative people and caused simultaneous havoc with Euro-centrist sensibilities – and the process dealt a long-overdue body-blow to the hegemony of those over-familiar western traditions, a revitalization whose effects are still felt in artists’ work everywhere today.
Of course, even in the here-and-now one doesn’t have to be a creative artist to be shaken up by encounters with other cultures and their art-forms. In fact, such occasions can return the humblest of beholders to the tremulous realms of formative experience, no matter how seasoned or experienced a “normal” event-goer she or he might be. So it was with me at the Massey University Concert Hall on this particular evening, sitting amid the steeply-raked rows in darkness as if suspended mid-air, watching and listening to the work of the three on-stage performers, presenting an ancient Chinese tale “High Mountain Flowing Water”. The chiaroscuro of darkness and light powerfully focused my attentions upon the performers, and transformed my sensibilities at certain moments into those of a child’s, enabling the full force of delight and wonderment to flood through my opened doors and windows and set me awash with that precious excitement of reimagined reality, cut adrift from all expectation save for the unexpected.
For this was something quite out of the ordinary – a retelling of an ancient legend concerning a musician and a woodcutter, and what passes between them via the musician’s playing of the guqin (or, simply “qin”), an ancient Chinese 7-string zither-like instrument. It’s really an exploration of transference of understanding and empathy, using acts of music-making and -listening as metaphors for the process. Taking part in this theatrical retelling of a musical friendship, which the accompanying program note called “the shared spirit of understanding” was pianist Gao Ping, whose music is well-known to New Zealand audiences, having for a while been resident in this country, alongside Wu Na, an acknowledged “young master” of the qin, on which she was performing for the first time in New Zealand with this production.
With these two musicians was an actor/dancer/singer Dong Fei, an exponent of Chinese Kunqu opera, and who specializes in the traditional “Nan Dan” kind of operatic roles – those in which a male actor performs female characters. A sometimes collaborator with Wu Na in productions in China, he too was making his New Zealand debut with this presentation. His fully theatrical and exquisitely-appointed role, that of characterizing through speech, song and movement the full force of rapport between the cultured musician and the simple, intuitive woodcutter, made a profound impact of contrast with the austere, relatively neutral figures of both musicians, who spoke almost entirely through the sounds of their instruments.
The production was directed by Sara Brodie, whose stage-work I had encountered a matter of days previously in an entirely different theatrical context, that of “Don Giovanni” at Wellington’s St.James Theatre. “High Mountain Flowing Water” was certainly a different world, more in scale with works I had seen her direct in similarly confined places (Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at the Victoria University Memorial Theatre, and “Kreutzer Sonata” at Bats’ Theatre, for example), but still removed in a sense of style, gesture, language, music and overall ambience. Of course, the very human emotions displayed by the characters in the Chinese story had something of that universality with which one could readily connect, even if certain of the nuances remained, to an extent, behind a mask. As with learning a new language, literal meaning goes only so far – deeper currents of expression take longer to explore and even longer to understand.
What mattered most was that I was, along with others I spoke to afterwards, entranced by what I saw and heard. I’ve already mentioned the hypnotic effect of the lighting, which used simplicity and suggestiveness to direct our attention towards the significant places at which the drama unfolded, note by note, gesture by gesture, movement by movement, and silence by silence. From the very beginning a sense of ritual was all-pervading – a performer (Gao Ping) entering and making the motions of washing hands, after which came the sounding of a soft bell as a kind of summons or invocation, as much a sense of an unseen presence as anything else. Gao Ping the sat at the piano and played Ravel-like figurations which led beautifully into the first section of the work, Landscape, featuring three poems whose words described the scene and introduced its main players.
The English words of the poems were projected onto a screen as Gao Ping played – delicate and evocative at first, the music occasionally stepped outside its ritualistic mode, plunging for a short time into agitation and anxiety before recovering its poise and introducing a costumed figure turning around in the darkness as if free-falling in space, then transfixing us with his “Xiao Dan” (young female) falsetto voice, singing the poem’s words, which firstly describe the ambient world of the music-making and -listening rituals performed by the two friends – “Beyond the bamboo, the plane trees are dry….” the vocalizing haunting, with sharp timbres and a wide vibrato. This was Dong Fei, whose appearance was the stuff of dreams, a kind of exotic angel come down to earth, his arms fluttering like wings with the movements augmented by wondrously long sleeves, to almost hallucinatory effect.
Dong Fei spoke in his normal voice the words of the second poem (I confess, for me not as interestingly as with his “Xiao Dan” tones!), which characterized the stillness of the outside world and the tremulousness of the rapport between the seven strings of the gaqin, and the readiness of the ears and the heart of the player to explore the timeless quality of music-making – “The heart quiets the sound – in it, no difference between now and then….”. With the entry of the qin-player Wu Na, the dramatis personae lineup was completed – the words of the poem filled out the symbolism – “The qin player sits, resembling the qin: the listener the strings….” We sensed a moment of readiness, and it came with the first notes of the qin, making us even more aware of the concentrated focus of the player and the stillness of both singer/dancer and pianist/listener, as the instrument played its spacious, meditative music.
And so the stage was set for the extraordinary unfolding, via music from both qin and piano, and music with poetry from the singer/dancer, conveying the story – firstly the communion of playing and listening – “Not until today do I hear music….”, followed by the realization of the musician that his quintessential artistic partner has died – “My heart gone, without a trace / Tears pour down like rain….”, and most affectingly, the wordless (but still graphic) breaking of the qin and its strings, a gesture of existentialist despair, which an epilogue attempts to interpret in a more cosmic context of continuation.
My notes, scribbled in the dark, the phrases criss-crossed and overscored, tell me only of fragments of impressions along the way of this journey, frustrating to now try and decipher. What I remember are things like the gentle dance-like music from the qin in the “Not until today do I hear music” sequence, an ancient melody Liu Shui (Flowing Water) supposedly composed by the actual musician of the legend, Bo Ya himself. As a counterpoint to this the singer either turned dancer or vice versa, alternating the haunting “Xiao Dan” singing tones with sinuous movements sillhouetted against a screen. Gao Ping at the piano then joined with Wu Na’s conjuring of exquisite delicacies from her instrument, the intermingling sounds expressing that “famous first encounter” between musician and woodcutter.
I remember, too, the pianist doing different kinds of timbal adjustment to his instrument’s sounds, such as “dampening” his bass notes in conjunction with those of the qin, the tones resonating as much as initially sounding at first, but then changing character, as each instrument’s player allowed excitability to creep into the dialogue, exuberance growing from the communication in the most organic way. A more consciously symbolic act was that of dancer Dong Fei slowly, almost ceremonially “unwrapping” his body from a kind of winding sheet, beginning his circling peregrinations on one side of the stage and crossing to the other side, leaving behind a tremulously-quivering vertical wall of unwound fabric, a poised, beautifully-controlled sequence!
The instrumental combination really showed its range and mettle over the sequence “The One Who Knows My Name”, which described and delineated the growing joy and exuberance of both player and listener at their musical communion. With Dong Fei using his haunting “Xiao Dan” voice to recite the “Nothing, not this body, nor even the clouds” verses, the instrumentalists embarked on an extraordinarily varied exchange, beginning with soft, sitar-like slides from the qin and answering resonances from the piano, playing a measure behind (like a living echo – very effective!), then developing from these sounds a “walking” motif, underscored by more “doctored” bass notes from the piano. Slowly, the rhythms grew in strength and confidence, Wu Na’s playing becoming fiercely exultant, and Giao Ping’s response mirroring the fierce joy of the mood.
How dramatic and impulse-arresting a moment it was when everything stopped! – the piano sounded a few resonant notes, and the qin spoke in a disembodied kind of voice, with the use of a metallic stick applied to the strings, itself a kind of symbolic act of severing the human touch from the music-making. Dong Fei’s ordinary voice actually needed a bit more projection, here, more “quiet” emphasis, perhaps more gestural support for the hushed tones – but the projected on-screen words helped tell the story and convey the tragedy of the musician’s shock and despair – “My heart gone, without a trace – Tears pour down like rain…” – as did the desperate, grating sounds made by the metal on the strings of the instrument.
Portentous and agitated piano sounds summoned the dancer, moving like a disembodied spirit through the air, feet seemingly transformed into wings! The movements suggested to me a kind of injured bird coming to earth, accompanied by disoriented, aimless musical sounds, moving those long sleeves firstly as great feathered extensions, then as quivering, protective shields, displaying pitiful tremolandi of grief, all of which was caught and bound up in a frenzied whirling, as the music shouted and screamed aggressively, the instruments struck and beaten rather than played. This was the breaking of the qin, the silencing of the voice, the end of the perfect union, leaving only darkness.
Had we in the audience been left with nothing more at that point, our spirits would have taken some time to recover – however, from out of the gloom came the qin’s soft notes, echoing fragments of memory, reviving the fallen dancer/singer, who listened to the gently resounding qin notes and then, in a kind of Sprechgesang consisting almost entirely of glissandi, uttered the words of the final poem: – “Dressed in green silk, plucking in vain, I let my sorrow flow….” – the qin player continued to quietly “sound” the instrument strings as the singer’s “Xiao Dan” voice continued to the end – “….Never think that, after High Mountain Flowing Water, all bosom friends must part…” The darkness slowly enfolded the qin player, and, eventually, the music – here was closure, enough to cover and soothe the rawness of the life-wounds, both real and imagined.
It seemed to me that the spaces, the lighting, the screening of text translations, the placement of figures and of instruments, and the various movements were all used to work to the presentation’s best advantage. The overall pacing and ambience of the story drew us unerringly into a world wrought of both delicate sensibility and powerful emotion. I for one felt “captured” by what I saw and heard, right through to the story’s concluding silences.
I hope these poor, uninformed words can convey something to the reader of the unique character of my experience of “High Mountain Flowing Water”, as well as express my appreciation of the efforts of director Sara Brodie and the incredible “trio” of performers, Wu Na, Gao Ping and Dong Fei, who worked with her to produce something so distinctive and special.
Orpheus Choir of Wellington presents
DREAMS LIE DEEPER
A concert dedicated to the Pike River Miners
Ross HARRIS – If Blood Be the Price
Dave DOBBYN – This Love
James McCARTHY – 17 Days
Dave Dobbyn (vocals and guitar)
Katherine McIndoe (soprano)
Orpheus Choir of Wellington
Wellington Young Voices
Lyrica Choir, Kelburn School
Wellington Brass Band
Christopher Clark (conductor for Harris)
Mark W.Dorrell (conductor for Dobbyn and McCarthy)
Michael Fowler Centre, Wellington
Saturday, 10th May, 2014
I’m normally accustomed to encountering seemly, well-regulated conversational tones and discreet movements of habitually circumspect classical concertgoers at Michael Fowler Centre concerts. However, I was aware straightaway of something different and palpable in the air when entering the doors of the same venue on Saturday evening to attend the Orpheus Choir’s concert “Dreams lie Deeper”.
Here were vibrant swirlings of people thronging the foyer, staircases and mezzanine floor of the erstwhile concert venue, people whose dress and demeanour proclaimed their expectation of being witness to something which suggested promises of glamour and glitter – so, was I in the right place, or had I perhaps gotten my dates or the venue confused?
Amidst a sea of unfamiliar faces I caught sight of somebody I recognized, behind an official-looking table – “Ah, Peter!” he cheerfully hailed – “I was told to expect you…” – this was encouraging! – “and I have here a ticket for you!” I took it gratefully, not REALLY expecting a kind of instant stylistic makeover, transforming my outer persona, but at least feeling that this talismanic touchstone had transferred a kind of “imprimatur” onto my presence – I was now one of the chosen, as it were……
As if I hadn’t been taken aback sufficiently at this stage, I caught my breath upon entering the auditorium – I haven’t been to a “pop” concert since my teenaged years (a gradually receding memory….) – but I fancied I recollected enough of those ambiences to glean that I was in for a different kind of concert experience to that which I’ve become accustomed. It was then that the thought “Will I be up to this task?” suddenly struck me!
It was all very theatrical – the choir was already seated on-stage, their figures outlined in the half-light and no more – the atmosphere was attenuated by what seemed like a kind of “nightclub haze”, though it obviously wasn’t cigarette smoke! Occasionally a billowing of freshly-conjured mist (probably dry-ice) would well up, thermal wonderland style (though not as aromatic!), catching the play of the spotlights and intensifying the mystery and ritualistic aspect of it all.
In the aisles were technical-looking people with what looked like television cameras and microphones on the ends of long poles. Some filming was going on already – it seemed as though people were being interviewed. A glance at my programme told me what was happening – that this concert, or at least part of it, was being filmed for television as well as being recorded by radio. So it was, in effect, a kind of media event.
I guessed the subject matter of the music we were to hear was largely what had compelled attention – the two New Zealand works scheduled were each inspired by a specific event involving mining activity. Ross Harris’s work consisted of settings to music of words written by poet Vincent O’Sullivan, dealing with the Waihi Miners’ Strike of 1912, during which a miner, Fred Evans, was clubbed to death by government vigilantes for allegedly shooting at a policeman during a demonstration – New Zealand’s first serious casualty of an industrial dispute.
Following this came Dave Dobbyn’s song “This Love”, written to commemorate the deaths of 29 miners in the 2010 Pike River mining disaster, on the West Coast. The singer wrote both words and music, and a supporting choral part was devised by the choir’s music director, Mark W.Dorrell.
The third item of the evening’s program was the work of an English composer, James McCarthy. Entitled “17 Days”, the work explored the events and associated emotions of people involved surrounding the collapse of a mine in northern Chile, also in 2010. Unlike what happened at Pike River the Chilean miners were rescued, word coming to the surface on the 17th day after the collapse that the men were still alive.
Wellington City Councillor Ray Ahipene-Mercer began proceedings by speaking to the audience, briefly telling us of his Welsh mining ancestry, and of his family’s involvement in mining in this country on the West Coast. The latter part of his karakia was expressed in Maori, both welcoming people from different part of the country to the concert, and farewelling the spirits of the dead, invoking the “mauri-ora” the “breath of life”, to come forth and give life to the gathering and the performances.
Ross Harris’s work came first, consisting of settings of words written by his long-time collaborator Vincent O’Sullivan. In seven separate sections, the work is inscribed “In memoriam: Fred Evans”, though none of the sections actually describes the events of the killing. In one of the songs, a brash, over-bright waltz with the title ‘Here’s a Toast!”, the brutal methods of the gangs formed by the anti-strike forces are compared with the methods of both Tsarist Russia and the British ruling class in dealing with protest or insurrection – so we have “Massey’s Cossacks” (the name of the New Zealand Prime Minister of the day), as well as a reference to the “Tory batons”, weapons associated with the murder of the unfortunate Fred Evans.
It seems to me that Ross Harris has deliberately gone for a more direct and unequivocal approach with this music – the tunes have an immediate and relatively unvarnished impact, matching Vincent O’Sullivan’s words in their relative economy and no-nonsense manner of expression – they could be called Workers’ Songs, in that they forcefully conveyed the Socialist ideologies of the miners and their unions, in sometimes brutal conflict with the established consortium of business interests supported by the Government of the time.
Vincent O’Sullivan used the strike’s best-known slogan in the work’s final setting, called “The Words on the Banner” – I actually remember these words from a photograph of the strikers which was displayed of the front cover of a book “THe Red and the Black” written in 1the 1970s about the strike – on a banner one could clearly read the words: “If blood be the price of your cursed wealth, Good God, we have bought it fair!” The directness of the writing of words and music was brought out with considerable impact by singers and instrumentalists under Christopher Clark’s focused direction.
Though the technical apparatus and technicians were a “presence” of sorts throughout these opening parts of the concert, they didn’t swing fully into action until Dave Dobbyn walked onto the stage to introduce his song “This Love”. There were ambient scintillations of lighting, colonnades of hues and colours bedecking the ceiling and walls of the auditorium, and (most disconcerting of all) a wondrously elongated “dinosaur-head” of a camera which, with neck protruding from its upstairs gallery “lair” swooped backwards and forwards over our heads like a curious brachiosaurus surveying a swampful of delicious succulents. I didn’t actually register any kind of rhythmic pattern to the beast’s – sorry, the CAMERA’S movements, but I wouldn’t have been surprised if there had been.
Technical jiggery-pokery apart, Dave Dobbyn’s song was a direct and heartfelt appeal to the emotions to “honour our 29”. Before the song the singer read out the names of all those who had died in the mine and whose bodies are to this day unrecovered. The subsequent audience response to the singer’s, the choir’s and the accompanying musicians’ efforts was properly and palpably life-affirming.
With the departure of the “technical people” and the migration to another undisclosed swamp of our friendly brachiosaurus (having presumably captured the “frisson” of Dave Dobbyn’s live performance of his song) one could focus more readily on the music scheduled for the concert’s second half. This was James McCarthy’s “17 Days”, commissioned originally by London’s Crouch End Festival Chorus and premiered by them at the Barbican in 2012. Tonight’s was its first-ever performance outside of the UK.
McCarthy’s work used largely traditional, essentially tonal harmonies and melodic structures throughout. It was music that didn’t to my ears make any cathartic demands of an interpretive nature on either performers or listeners – there were no grinding, shattering, shell-shocked moments of terror, panic or bleak despair depicted in the writing for either voices or instruments. The evocations were more reflective than immediate, though some sequences of the music “told” instantly and effectively, such as the rhythmic chattering of the children’s choir depicting the broken, piecemeal nature of the first news reports concerning the tragedy.
The texts chosen largely reinforced this reflectiveness (one of the poems, “Do Dreams lie Deeper?” by Charlotte Mews gave the work its title), though a different poet’s words later in the work brought forth what I thought the most interesting music from the composer – the poem “We live in mud” by Carol S.Lashof. In this work the all-pervading choking opacity of the mud, dirt and dust endured by the miners was contrasted with their thoughts of the radiance of their feelings for their loved ones above the ground, waiting. I thought this desperate love-song the most touching and telling moment of the piece, though Katherine McIndoe’s lovely solo soprano voice sounding from within the choir gave an added poignancy to parts of Charlotte Mews’ poem “A quoi bon dire”.
There was no doubting the work’s whole-heartedness at any given point – and the response by the forces, singers and instrumentalists, under Mark W. Dorrell’s enthusiastic direction was as radiant and forthright as could be imagined, with the Lyrica children’s voices in particular making finely-focused contributions to the setting of Emily Dickinson’s “Hope” such as with the words “And sweetest in the Gale is heard….” The performance deservedly brought forth at the concert’s conclusion enthusiastic acclaim from all sides.
The New Zealand International Festival of the Arts presents:
RIME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER
The Tiger Lillies
Martyn Jacques: Vocals, accordion, piano, guitar
Adrian Stout: Contra bass, musical saw, theremin, vocals
Mike Pickering: Percussion
Mark Holthusen: Animation and photography
St.James Theatre, Wellington
Saturday 8th/Sunday 9th March 2014
Review by Frances Robinson and Peter Mechen
This was an evening which, on the face of things, promised much, with a presentation that, right from the outset, looked terrific, but then didn’t go on to adequately develop the musical and contextual possibilities afforded by these arresting visual images. I’d not seen but had heard about the group’s previous appearance at the New Zealand Festival in 2000 with the anarchic musical Shockheaded Peter, and so was looking forward to what I hoped would be some comparably stunning realisations of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s visionary saga of a soul in torment.
Alas, past Mark Holthusen’s brilliant visual realisations, projected onto gauze screens arranged to give maximum spatial perspective, I thought the show was disappointingly bland as regards both music and literary response. Perhaps the advertising blurb unwittingly put its finger on the essence of the presentation, with its emphasis upon Holthusen’s “extraordinary animations” and its cliched description of the show as “the perfect fuel for those late-night club conversations” – I must have missed that part of it, for some reason.
Joking aside, there were sequences indeed well worthy of discussion, and indeed, argument, in the wake of it all – but they were invariably centred on the visual settings and those extraordinary projections of ships, sailors, oceanic swells, exotic places, and, of course, the ever-present albatross, the fulcrum around which the story of Coleridge’s poem revolves, both up to and subsequent to the bird’s untimely end, shot dead by the “Ancient Mariner”. In fact the show might as well have been a silent-movie realisation of some of the poem’s events, the three-man ensemble’s textual and musical realisations a grossly watered-down version of the poet’s richly-conceived detailings.
So, throughout the evening the narrative action of the Ancient Mariner was broadly depicted by these amazing film projections that unfolded within the stage space. These spanned from the backdrop, right out to the front edge of the stage, with multiple layers often operating simultaneously, hanging in the void like a series of ethereal, translucent curtains. They were never for a moment static, as within them moved the characters of the tale like the Mariner himself, the albatross, the mermaid, the hapless cabin boy (I thought some of the suggested sexual abuse of the boy a bit gratuitous) and the ship’s crew. Across these ethereal vistas moved the jagged icebergs and drifting snowflakes of Antarctica, the listless clouds of the doldrums, the heaving stormy seas of the roaring forties, and the doomed vessel itself. Most dramatic of all were the wondrously fearful sea monsters, spiky, scaly, sinuous of tail, and hideous in tooth and claw.
The role of the three piece band was built around the vocals of Martyn Jacques, which sometimes narrated brief portions of the story narrative, sometimes commentary on the events. They fell into two broad styles – heavy bass gig-style numbers thumped out from front of stage, with Jacques doing accordion and lyrics; or more soulful crooning cabaret-style numbers with Jacques doing piano and lyrics. In only a few instances was the diction clear, and only a few brief snatches of the Rime were clearly enunciated. The Coleridge poem provided no more than the skeletal framework for the vocals, while the sequence of the narrative was played out almost entirely by the projected stage effects.
I found this inbalance rather disappointing. I would have liked to hear much more of the wonderful tale, simply provided by Coleridge’s matchless word painting. Instead there were the booming lyrics from front of stage, with words barely distinguishable, or the keyboard numbers in a classic nightclub croon, complete with mangled American vowels which sat, to my ear, very oddly with the musings of a classic British tar.
In places I was reminded of another production I’d seen recently on DVD, that of Thomas Ades’s opera “The Tempest”, with Shakespeare’s texts disappointingly “flattened out” and the poetry’s extraordinary inbuilt resonances of ambience and rhythm destroyed. Here, the effect of the words was similarly diminished – only the predictable phrases from Coleridge were touched upon, and were rarely developed, apart from, in some instances, being subjected to endless repetition.
This may have been a deliberate intention, used to highlight the endless wanderings of the vessel and the hopelessness of the Mariner, or simply the group’s normal style of gig music. Having said that, some numbers married brilliantly with the visual effects, and particularly the finale. This comprised little more than the repeated phrase “Living Hell” thumped out numerous times, but the stage and band were progressively engulfed by leaping flames from every direction in a spectacular finish to the show. It brought the house down, which suggested that the audience came largely for a hugely entertaining production, which this most certainly was.
It was clearly not a “setting” of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner in the traditional sense, and this was probably never the intention of its creators. Given that, the Tiger Lillies and their inventive visual artist Mark Holthusen produced a highly creative spectacle where the visual effects were undoubtedly the standout feature.
