NZ Opera’s “Eight Songs for a Mad King” a brilliant, Janus-faced experience

NZ Opera presents
EIGHT SONGS FOR A MAD KING

Music by Peter Maxwell Davies
Texts by Randolph Stow and George III

The King: Robert Tucker

The Musicians: Stroma New Music Ensemble
Hamish McKeich (conductor)
Rachel Fuller (keyboard/s)
Luca Manghi (flute)
Mark Cookson/Patrick Barry (clarinets)
Yuka Eguchi (violin)
Heather Lewis/Robert Ibell (‘cellos)
Jeremy Fitzsimons (percussion)

Director – Thomas de Mallet Burgess
Production Designer – Robin Rawstorne
Assistant Conductor – Timothy Carpenter
Repetiteur – Rachel Fuller

RNZB Dance Centre, Wellington

Monday 2nd March 2020

Firstly, some background for the curious – the “King” of this concert’s title is King George III of England, who suffered from mental illness throughout his adult life, eventually being removed from his throne and kept under lock and key in Windsor Castle. Over his final decade he lost his eyesight and hearing, and fell prey to frequent manic episodes, by all accounts babbling endlessly as he slid into dementia, and eventually dying in 1820 at the age of eighty-one. The King owned a number of caged bullfinches, and during his confinement became obsessed with teaching his birds how to sing tunes played by a mechanical organ or music-box. This instrument, along with a note identifying its provenance as owned and used by the unfortunate Monarch, came to the notice, almost two hundred years afterwards, of Australian author and poet Randolph Stow, who was inspired to create a series of poems, parts of which were drawn from recollections of witnesses to the King’s outpourings, and directly illustrated his pitiable condition. British avant-garde composer Peter Maxwell Davies set these poems to music, writing with the vocal talents of one Roy Hart in mind, a virtuoso South African singer who had become interested in exploring the range and limits of the human voice.

At the time of the work’s premiere, in April 1969, Davies fully expected “Eight Songs” to remain a “one-off” for Hart, never imagining anybody else being able or even wanting to perform the piece. He was therefore surprised and delighted at how the work soon took on a life of its own, becoming a classic example of a new “music-theatre” genre, which redeployed (and often subverted) existing performance conventions. Davies himself recorded the work with his own virtuoso avant-garde music-group, “The Fires of London”, though sadly for posterity, not with Roy Hart, the creator of the  role – fortunately the soloist on the 1971 Unicorn recording, Julius Eastman, was a worthy successor.

In his notes accompanying the recording, the composer stated that his intention was “to leave open the question – is the persecuted protagonist “Mad George III” or someone who thinks he is George?”. Naturally the work will forever be associated with the monarch in question, given that the song texts contain numerous actual quotations of the King’s words – the novelist Frances (Fanny) Burney was Queen Charlotte’s lady-in-waiting for five years, and during that time she recorded both events and utterances in which the King was central (as an example, the whole of the text of the sixth song, “The Counterfeit” is transcribed by Randolph Stow from Burney’s diary). But the suggestion that the character of the King might also represent any such deluded individual straightaway lifts the work out of its singular and historical confines and into the realm of general human experience, of which mental illness seems in our time to be an increasingly common affliction. Davies reminded us in his notes that until relatively recent times, “madness” was something to ridicule, and in more severe cases isolate, often in the most inhumane and nightmarish conditions; and while treatments and care-environments are nowadays less primitive, the stresses and inbalances that, if ignored, can lead to mental illness are still very much with us.

New Zealand Opera’s innovative production of the work gives audiences not one but two separate and different views of the terrain in all senses of the word – the mindscape of an extremely disturbed individual, firstly (as happened in my particular case) from the “outside” 0f the performance space, visible from the outside through windows, and audible by means of headsets for each audience member. So, first time round, we were seated in the open air, cannily underneath a tarpaulin in a space next to the building in which the opera was being performed – and through the windows we could glimpse the singer performing his on-stage peregrinations, and via the excellent headphones we clearly heard his cocktail mix of song, sprechgesang and random, wide-ranging vocalisings, along with the constant instrumental collaborations from the ensemble – the whole thing was an “outsider’s view”, a process that was observed, but without direct involvement, something that one could easily distance oneself from at a moment’s notice if one felt so inclined.

What a difference after one was ushered inside for the second performance (each took about thirty minutes), to sit right next to the stage (which was a kind of “catwalk” extending the whole width of the audience-space, and with seating on both sides)! Here, we straightaway felt “drawn in” by the immediacies, the sometimes startling proximities , and the “sharing-the-space” phenomenon that can make great theatre (and music-making, of course!). Singer Robert Tucker, looking none the worse for wear after having already given one performance of the piece appeared in close-up somewhat disconcertingly (a) youthful, and (b) dapper, not quite in accordance with my preconceived “image” of a deranged George III, but nevertheless exuding a kind of “authority” from the outset, entering quietly but portentously, and sitting at one end of the catwalk activating a “Newton’s Cradle”, waiting for the first of the instrumental explosions whose force and violence punctuate the music-drama.

In some performances the instrumentalists are positioned in separate giant birdcages, each player representing one of the King’s bullfinches he attempted to teach to sing – here the players weren’t thus confined, but sat as an ensemble at one end of the platform, the singer alternating his attentions between them, his audience(s) and wherever his mind’s fancy took him. And the “double audience” added a dimension to the singer’s confusions, his awareness of interiors and exteriors pathetically expressed amidst his tirades by glances through the windows at an “outside world”. Despite the close physical proximities, the venue’s largely empty spaces behind where we sat and its ample acoustic seemed to me to underline the essential solitude of the King’s existence. His interactions with his musicians and the audience, despite their sometimes startlingly visceral nature seemed all fantasy. “I am weary of this fate – I am alone” sang the character at the conclusion of one of the songs.

The performance in every way was astonishing – Robert Tucker as the King “owned” his character in a way that explored a gamut of human emotion, engaging our sympathies at his “plight” as readily as activating our discomfiture with his volatility. The demands of the role pushed the concept of “singing” into realms of expression which transcended the idea of the voice as a musical instrument as we might generally accept it through what the composer aptly termed “terrifying virtuosity”. But in appearing not as any kind of caricatured asylum-bound lunatic, whose tirades were neither extreme, nor “onslaught-like” as were some of the performers in the role I’ve witnessed on film, Tucker’s delineation of the character always seemed intensely human, in places touchingly bringing out the tendernesses of some of his utterances (as observed by Fanny Burney in her diary), if at times squeamish-inducing (as throughout his “close-up-and-personal” interactions with a hapless flutist, during “The Lady-in-Waiting”, brilliantly carried off by both singer and player). His anger, too, spectacularly vented at one infamous moment in the piece, mirrored a kind of reality of frustration, an impulse in tragic accord with human behaviour gone awry. This “one-of-us” aspect suggested  by the production brought home , to my mind, the “for whom the bell tolls” aspect of our human existence, so that our “relief” at the King’s eventual departure was singed with spots of pity and sorrow and even horror at the finality of the concluding percussive juggernaut, which consigned his heart-rending cries to oblivion.

Conductor Hamish McKeich led the Stroma Ensemble unerringly through a veritable thicket of coruscations, appearing to never miss a beat, shirk an uproar, or delineate a disorder! – and in parallel to these subversions the players sounded the lyrical moments, the dance-tunes and the whimsical parodies (a gorgeous two-step take-off of Handel’s music at one point) with delicious elan, as well as bringing to bear their array of bird-song devices in a veritable “chaos of delight” (alas, Charles Darwin’s words, not mine!). The accordance of theatrical movement with the music was exemplary throughout, the jaunty introduction to “To be sung on the Water” followed by beautiful ‘cello solos evoking a boat-ride down the river, one of a number of enduring memories of the performance.

Director Thomas de Mallet Burgess would have been well-pleased with both the powerful overall impact and the finely-crafted detailed focus his musicians brought to this production. Its dual-performance aspect gives it a singular kind of appeal, no matter in what order one experiences the “outside/inside” presentation, be it a savouring of expectation beforehand, or food for thought afterwards! – It plays again tonight (Wednesday 4th March) at 8:30pm, and then at the same time on both the 5th and 7th later this week at the RNZB Dance Centre next to the MFC in Wakefield St., Wellington.

 

 

 

 

Side by Side with Sondheim at Circa a life-enhancing experience

SIDE BY SIDE BY SONDHEIM
Songs and Lyrics from the stage musicals of Stephen Sondheim

Julie O’Brien, Matthew Pike and Sarah Lineham (singers)
Musicians: Michael Nicholas Williams and Colin Taylor (pianos)
Director: Emma Kinane
Musical Director: Michael Nicholas Williams
Choreographer: Leigh Evans

Circa One, Circa Theatre, Wellington

Saturday 23rd February (until 22nd March , 2019)

I’m not exactly a veteran of live performances of Stephen Sondheim’s musicals – New Zealand Opera did a splendid “Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” in 2016 (which production AND its performance I raved about, here on “Middle C”) and both the NZ Drama School and the NZ School of Music have presented sizeable excerpts from, respectively “Company” and “Into the Woods”, each of which was deftly, evocatively done. So Sondheim is a name which resonates for me more in reputation than actual experience – though judging from the amazing range and scope of the songs presented here this evening, he’s a composer whose work would seem likely to bear rich rewards upon examination.

Here, we were given something of a whirlwind tour with no less than twelve of the composer’s stage works represented – some repeatedly (both “Company” and “Follies” contributed eight songs each to the programme), though all the others were represented by either one or two numbers. Of the two most-represented shows, I thought the selection here in each case nicely touched upon the essences of the works, the songs from Company vividly encapsulating the lyricist/composer’s rather
savage anatomising of marriage as an institution via the portrayals of various couples and their interactions at a party given for their bachelor friend, Robert. As well as the married company, the “available talent” is no less caustically depicted via a sure-fire show-stopper of a first-half closer, “You Could Drive a Person Crazy”,  a trio featuring all three singers in a tour-de-force of energy, timing and sharp characterisation, with Matthew Pike as a thoroughly convincing “middle girl” – delightful.

“Follies” depicts a reunion of former showgirls, interacting with the ghosts of their former selves, re-instigating the trappings of their former glories, and reminiscing about former lovers, both sentimentally and naughtily – two of the girls, resplendent in feather boas, recall the particular talents of a particular boy in “Can that Boy” with suitably suggestive inflections putting lead in the pencil of the word “foxtrot” with suitable relish. Later, four consecutive numbers from the show take us to the beating heart of these faded glories, a trio (once again) of beauties introduce “La Grande Dame” extolling the charms of Paris, an Al Jolson-inspired “Buddy’s Blues”, and the heartbreak of a wannabe hopeful in ”Broadway Baby”.

Some of Sondheim’s most popular individual songs from other shows are here – I knew three of them instantly, the first, “Comedy Tonight” beginning the evening, both instrumentally (some nifty work by the two-piano ensemble of Michael Nicholas Williams and Colin Taylor, with barnstorming octaves in places from the former in the best romantic piano tradition) and vocally, the singers appearing one by one, bringing their very different vocal characteristics to the presentation mix. Another was “A Boy like That” from “West Side Story” for which Sondheim wrote the lyrics in tandem with Leonard Bernstein’s music, here presented as an individual number, though in a kind of medley entitled “Conversation Piece” various familiar songs from the show dominated the line-up.

But the show would have been unthinkable without the composer’s out-and-out signature tune, “Send in the Clowns”, from his work “A little Night Music”, a musical in which various relationships between people, both young and older are explored (it was based on Ingmar Bergmann’s 1955 film “Smiles of a Summer Night”. The song itself, unlike many we heard during the course of the evening, is more wry about than disillusioned with love and romance, and was presented here in suitably “Do I wake or do I sleep?” tones that also contrasted greatly with the high-octane thresholds of most of the evening’s “stand-and-deliver” excitements.

In contrast to the work of one of Sondheim’s mentors, Oscar Hammerstein, who became a kind of surrogate father-figure for the boy after his parents were divorced, most of the younger man’s stage works reflect an era of disillusionment and frustration within Western society, and specifically in the United States, presenting both the individual and whole groups of people at this time in conflict with their  expectations and aspirations, far removed from the worlds of standard fare like “Oklahoma”, “South Pacific” and “The Sound of Music”, with their “happy endings”. I remember being struck by something of this quality when encountering “Into the Woods”, at the end of which none of the fairy-tale characters get to “live happily ever after”. It’s the ambivalence about life that one comes away from Sondheim’s work feeling which matters and which is truer to life than any “dreams come true” scenarios.

Though the show wasn’t without its technical gremlins (resulting in the first half loss of a microphone for one of the singers) the performers, instrumentalists and singer/actors, threw themselves into this maelstrom of, by turns, wry and sardonic vexation and disenchantment, and brought a potent marriage of music and theatre to life. I thought the technique of getting the vocalists to “narrate” the context of each of the pieces made for an engaging, organic effect, perhaps to a fault in paces, as a few of the words were sometimes lost in an all-encompassing whirl of scenario-change activity.

It’s a tribute to the stage instincts of co-directors Emma Kinane and Michel Nicholas Williams that words, music and stage action here brought out for us all the variegated emotions and subtle detailings of Sondheim’s creations, given further ease and flow by Leigh Evans’ direct, unfussy choreography – the “clowns” were onstage in front of us at times, but they knew their place. Lisa Maule’s lighting I thought properly and stunningly “illuminated” what was important to notice and what was left to the imagination, engaging our sensibilities rather than putting things merely on a screen or in a box, enhancing the idea of our being in the same performing space.

I’ve already mentioned the almost visceral effects of the piano realisations generated variously by both players at their own instruments, with ample use of the “orchestral” effects of reducing the accompaniments in places, most movingly, to a single line. Each of the singers enhanced the songs’ individual contexts in this respect, so that we were readily taken by turns into those different, sometimes brashly-wrought, sometimes finely-delineated worlds of feeling as song followed song.

Each of the singers had their particular strengths, Julie O’Brien in particular “owning” everything she undertook, from the insanely tumbledown outpourings of “Getting Married Today” with its Gilbert-and-Sullivan-plus patter, through her naughtily teasing “I never do Anything Twice”, giving the fingers of her pianist Michael Nicholas Williams an anxious moment or two, to her ineffably moving, “imagined-out-loud” rendition of “Send in the Clowns” – throughout the latter, one could at any time have heard the proverbial pin drop most disarmingly. Matthew Pike’s gift for characterisation was evident throughout, but especially telling in “I Remember” (from the show ”Evening Primrose”),  a song requiring contrasting evocations of nostalgia, wide-eyed wonderment and spontaneous excitement, delivered here in spadefuls. And Sarah Lineham, bringing a completely different vocal quality to the mix, demonstrated a sweetness of tone and a stratospheric purity in places in her slower, quieter music, such as the opening of “Losing My Mind” from “Follies”, though her tones were more difficult to “catch” when her solo music quickened or hardened, as in the climax of the same number. However, I could forgive her anything after relishing her virtuosic solo trumpet-playing in “You Gotta get a Gimmick”.

Where Lineham also shone was in the ensembles, along with the other two – the contributions of all three in the first half’s closing “You could drive a Person Crazy” made for an absolutely delightful effect, as sharp and incisive as any “Andrews Sisters” realisation I’ve heard! The one or two stunning solo renditions apart, the overall effect of the presentation is one of superb teamwork, the only caveat being the extraneous microphone noises which made unwelcome contributions to the opening part of the first half – thankfully things seemed resolved and restored after the interval.

Sondheim fans will need no further urgings – the experience of hearing these songs so expertly brought to life has made me want to explore the composer’s work further, which I think in itself amounts to praise of a recommendable order. Many thanks to Circa and to the creative talents involved for providing such a life-enhancing experience!

Beautiful, visceral, hypnotic, disconcerting – Stroma’s “essential experimental” at Wellington’s Pyramid Club

Stroma presents:
ESSENTIAL EXPERIMENTAL
An intimate evening of song, water, glass, harmonics, beat frequencies and vases

Music by John Cage, Peter Ablinger, Antonia Barnett-McIntosh,
Alvin Lucier, James Tenney, Chiyoko Szlavnics

Stroma: Michael Norris (sponges), Barbara Paterson (soprano, voice), Ken Ichinose (‘cello)
Antonia Barnett-McIntosh (voice) Rebecca Struthers, Kristina Zelinska (violins)
Reuben Jelleyman (accordion), Emma Barron (viola), Matthew Cave (double-bass)

Venue: The Pyramid Club, Taranaki St., Wellington

Thursday 29th November 2018

The venue really brought it all alive, in a way that I thought a more conventional concert-chamber-like place wouldn’t have done. In the most positive way we in the audience seemed to be “put at ease” by the “late-night club” surroundings at Taranaki Street’s Pyramid Club, and, rather than attending a concert, were instead made to feel we were “eavesdropping” on the ongoing creative processes constituting and shaping each item. It was a feast of visceral interaction between performers, media and audience; and even if the results at times gave rise to as much bemusement as illumination (speaking for myself, here!) I felt these moments pulled our apertures further apart and teased our sensibilities with even more of the workings and their trajectories.

This was the first of two performances scheduled that evening, and the venue was packed in the most encouraging and atmospheric way possible. Stroma’s presentations, under the leadership of Michael Norris have constantly sought to stimulate, engage and challenge audiences, and have steadily earned the group a loyal following based on its remarkable set of capacities for renewal in the form of fresh explorations and bold, and compelling performance practices. This evening’s programme, entitled “Essential Experimental”, was no exception, the items generating sounds from sources and practices in some cases far removed from conventional means, even when a number of familiar instruments were involved in the process.

Michael Norris called the outcomes of these presentations “unusual but beautiful sound-worlds”, and the first of these, featuring a 2002 work by Austrian composer Peter Ablinger called Weiss Weisslich 31e, certainly made good that description by way of a most intriguing and diverting set of procedures. Norris himself was cast in the role of “performer”, with the title given in the programme of “kitchen-sponge hanger-upperer”, his function being to fix a number of wetted sponges to places along a line strung over a number of amplified glass tubes laid on the ground, allowing the drips of water from each sponge to land on corresponding individual tubes. Because the “operator” can only hang or remove one sponge at a time, the acceleration and deceleration of “drip incidence” from each sponge takes place at a different time from each of its seven fellows, making for complicated “canonic” results involving different tones from the amplified tubes. Norris further varied the interplay of the drips and their sounds by rehanging the freshly-wetted sponges in a different order a second time round! Magical!

At times the very slow drips found themselves “paired” with rapid ones – and with the different amplifications directed through speakers placed in different parts of the room, both the different speeds, pitches and physical placements of the speakers made for some atmospheric antiphonal effects. Interestingly I found that in sequences where many different drips were sounding, I often noticed specific ones ONLY when they stopped or the sponge was removed, indicating that it was as much my subconscious as my conscious hearing that was “registering” the drips. The composer himself wrote that his material here “was not sound but audibility” and that he could “set audibility then inaudibility”, further explaining that “inaudibility can arise through…too little occurring, but also through too much occurring…” The drips created pulse, melody, counterpoint and texture at various times, ranging from altogether what one commentator somewhere called “a turbulent polyrhythmic forest”.

From these abstractions we were taken to John Cage’s 1958 composition Aria, originally dedicated to one of the most renowned performers of contemporary vocal music, soprano Cathy Berberian, and here performed with remarkable assurance by Barbara Paterson, her voice dealing most adroitly with the work’s many changes of mode, style, timbre and character – at certain points I was in fact reminded of composer/pianist Donald Swann’s virtuoso rendering of his similarly exploratory song “Korkoraki” (part of the well-known Flanders and Swann “At The Drop of a Hat” presentation). Here were far more divergencies from the conventional “art-song”, including words from different languages and rapid fluctuations between different styles of delivery – the emotional effect of Paterson’s cornucopian rendering was not unlike witnessing a performer attempting to piece together some kind of coherent message while in the process of either suffering from a kind of schizophrenia, reliving a series of traumatic experiences, or giving us the full gamut of what any singer’s physical and vocal equipment is put through in performance, most of which the performer has ordinarily been taught to suppress! – an incredible display!

Continuing to ring the changes, the concert next featured a work by Alvin Lucier, featuring the ‘cello-playing of Ken Ichinose, performing in tandem alongside a number of empty, differently-sized vases, all amplified – somewhat literally, the work was called Music for ‘Cello with One of More Amplified Vases.  The cellist was required to begin with his lowest note and slowly play an upward glissando, right up to halfway along his top string. At certain points along this journey, the resonances created by the notes reverberated within the empty jars and created an additional “presence” surrounding the tones already being sounded by the player. To my surprise I thought I distinctly heard the nostalgic “drone” of the engines of a distant DC3 taking off from Milson Airport in Palmerston North, a regular occurrence for me when a small child. Sometimes the vases seemed to be “duetting” or “quartetting” with the soloist, while at other times the effect was that of a companion ghost or guardian angel. Perhaps the work ought to be retitled “Unlocked…” or “Liberated” Voices………..

I must confess to the readership that I found the next piece, by Antonia Barnett-McIntosh, the current composer-in-residence at the Lilburn House in Thorndon, a REAL challenge! This was a work given the title yesterday blocks, and one to which the term “composed” seemed to me, for some reason, an inadequate description of the process! In Barnett-McIntosh’s own words, her work is described as presenting “the specificity of sound gestures and their variation, translation and adaptation, often employing chance-based and procedural operations.” As with John Cage’s Aria the only instrument in evidence was the voice, here the composer’s own voice in tandem with that of Barbara Paterson’s. The two “artists” produced narratives that seemed at several degrees’ removal from one another, though towards the end of the different discourses there seemed to be glimmerings of TS Eliot-Waste-Land-like attempts at communication, of the “Speak to me – why do you never speak?” kind of impulsiveness. Up to then, the composer’s disjointed narratives had run teasingly and tantalisingly alongside the other speaker’s half-conversation with what seemed like unheard inner voices. Was it delineating a fragmentary relationship between thinking and vocalising, an out-of-phase attempt to bring together recall and the present, or a conversation between parts of the same personality? – somebody playing with/being played by their alter ego? I found the crossover aspects involving both spoken theatre and music fascinating, as the voices seemed to me to increasingly coalesce, as if they were starting to “decode” one another – in effect very daring! – but for me very confusing!

More “conventional” (if such a word is allowed ANY currency pertaining to this concert!) was the next piece, Canadian composer Chiyoko Szlavnics’ Triptych for AS, written in 2006 for two violins and an accordion (“AS” is the composer’s mother, incidentally). Described as a “visual artist” as well as a composer Szlavnics is credited by the programme note with an “idiosyncratic” method of working, something about converting lines on a drawing to glissandi that exactly replicate the drawing (to say the first thought that came into my head, which was “Oohh, what about the “Mona Lisa” in sound?”, is to trivialise the concept, which I won’t!) What I also thought (hardly rocket-science!) was that there would be three “somethings” in all of what we were about to experience, as per the title.

The sounds were to be produced both acoustically (Rebecca Struthers and Kristina Zelinska the violinists and Reuben Jelleyman the accordion-player) and electronically (a bank of five sine tones). The opening chords straightaway had an “electric” quality, the upward glissandi generating incredible intensity, sounds with long, burgeoning lines, reminiscent of Ligeti’s “Atmospheres”. They seemed cyclic in effect with the strings re-entering the fusion and working their glissandi gradually upwards again. Both the second and the third pieces seemed to use higher pitches with a more intense result and a clearly augmented string-sound, the “quality” agglomerated by the electronic resonances. I liked the growing tensions, and the uncertainties of the points where the lines for the individual instruments “crossed” and the sounds “reared up”, Then, at the third piece’s conclusion, the accordion was suddenly left to carry the thread, a lone plaintive and isolated voice.

So we came to the final presentation in this hugely enjoyable panoply of creative innovation, a work by American James Tenney that’s part of a multi-movement piece called “Glissade”, in fact the first movement of the work, itself called Shimmer. Its three instrumentalists (Emma Barron, Ken Ichinose and Matthew Cave playing viola, ‘cello, and double-bass respectively) shared the sound-stage with ”delayed” computer-recorded reminiscences of what the strings played, the ensuing “womb of resonances” the agglomerated and on-going result of this five-second delay.

The viola began with a drawn-out repeated note, before moving into harmonics in a repeated arpeggiated pattern, before the ‘cello did the same, as did the double-bass – with all three instruments contributing plus their overlaid recorded echoings, I found the effect uncannily similar to parts of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold” Prelude, hypnotic and compelling, drawing one’s listening into the web and waft of it all. The discernible flecks of colour and tone added to the ongoing magic, as did the ever-increasing prominence of the glissandi, the sounds eerily ascending, before becoming like impulses of sunlight dancing on cloud-tops! As the tones gradually surrendered their intensities we became aware of being returned to a “place of origin”, eventually reaching a point where the players ceased, and allowed their own resonances to continue for a brief further moment in time, a treasure as much in the hearing as the letting go……what better a way to end such an absorbing collection of sound-adventures?

 

 

“Puss in Boots” Pantomime gives delight for young and old alike at Circa Theatre

Circa Theatre presents:
Puss in Boots – the Pantomime, by Paul Jenden

Directed by Susan Wilson
Musical Director / Arranger – Michael Nicholas Williams
Set and AV design – Lisa Maule
Lighting – Marcus McShane
Costumes – Sheila Horton
Choreography – Leigh Evans

Cast: Gavin Rutherford (Camilla Miller)
Simon Leary (King Justin/Citizen)
Natasha McAllister (Martha/Citizen)
Jeff Kingsford-Brown (Mr.Brown/Troll/Citizen)
Jonathan Morgan (Puss-in-Boots/Citizen)
Carrie Green (Ms Green /Troll/Citizen)
Ben Emerson (Arthur Miller/Citizen)

Circa Theatre
Taranaki St., Wellington

Sunday 18th November, 2018

A director’s note in the programme from Susan Wilson paid tribute to the late Paul Jenden 1955-2013), actor, dancer, director and author of this and several other pantomines performed by Circa over the years, describing his presence as “sadly missed”. One of his most successful pantomime adaptations was of the well-known story of “Puss-in-Boots”, based on the European fairy-tale known in Italy as Il gatto con gli stivali, and in France as Le Maître chat ou le Chat botté (“The Master Cat” or “The Cat with the Boots”). The story tells how a cat uses his wits to gain power and riches for his poor, lowly-born master. Jenden’s pantomime, first performed by Circa in 2012, was here revamped and updated to catch the current drift of events and personalities that make Wellington the ideal on-going setting for such fairy-tale goings-on!

With recent Circa pantomimes “Peter Pan” (2017) and “Jack in the Beanstalk” (2016) having set positively vertiginous levels of expectation, I was thrilled to here find myself just as freshly “caught up” in the time-honoured fairy-tale theatricality of larger-than-life characters palpably becoming flesh-and-blood for a few precious hours of make-believe. I did struggle a bit at the very outset, finding it difficult to take in all the words of the very first musical number, despite the best efforts of the otherwise superbly characterised trolls of Jeff Kingsford-Brown and Carrie Green, my ears obviously adjusting to the acoustic – what English comedian Michael Flanders once called “getting the pitch of the hall”. Still, the gist of the characters’ intent (evil and mayhem! – naturally enough!), came across strongly in the dance movement, depicting the pair bent on taking the “Well” out of Wellington by being the spanner in the works of all recent disruptions such as the chaos caused by changed buses, bus routes and timetables. The Wellington settings and references continued throughout the show, giving it all a truly home-grown flavour and striking regular chords of approval with the audience.

The appearance of the remarkable Gavin Rutherford as the show’s “Dame”, in this case Mother Camilla Miller, established an immediate rapport with a sympathetic audience, Camilla losing no time in articulating to us her plight as a poor, lonely widow woman in the Aro Valley, “ruined” by the activities of her late husband, whose feckless behaviour had squandered the family fortunes. She then introduced her son, Arthur Miller (played by Ben Emerson with plenty of boy-next-door goofy appeal), the name  immediately occasioning the remark by Camilla “Google it, kids!”, first of a goodly number of wry references, including the priceless remark “Can you see Arthur Miller getting married to a rich and glamorous woman?” Social positioning in a “desirable” suburb – “Hataitai? – or Naenae? – or even Karori?” gives the song “Movin’ on up” its chance, as  we catch a glimpse of the eponymous cat for the first time – though Jonathan Morgan’s character lacked an ounce or two of voice-projection when singing he made up for it in sheer puss-onality, his dance leading to the entrance of a bevy of cats for a number inspiring a near show-stopping fusillade of cat-calls!

Adroitly evading both Mother Miller’s Trade Me “Talking Cat” schemes and the “Gareth Morgan” bogeyman threats, the Puss inherited the late Mr.Miller’s boots (along with his “hippie gear”), and lo! – we were suddenly in business! The cat was magically empowered and empowering, galvanising Arthur’s sensibilities with the suggestion that he could, with the Puss’s help, become “The Marquis of Makara” and then cementing their partnership with a song “Stick with me kid”, one whose positive vibrations countered the reappearance of the Trolls and their avowed goal of the city’s ruination, little by little, troll by troll!

Where would a modern scenario of Wellington be without a leader? – enter King Justin (Simon Leary a wonderfully “fairy-story-obsessed” monarch), here heralded at first by his feisty, kick-boxing daughter, Marilyn/Moana/Martha, whom he wished “was more like the princess you are!” while easing the patience of “a poor, lonely widower man”, taking time out from his troublesome affairs of family and state with a lavish picnic.  Marilyn (played beautifully by Natasha McAllister as a tomboy with simple-life, anti-princess yearnings) encounters Arthur, who, of course, falls in love with her – but she will have none of the “wooing of a princess” rigmarole, introducing herself to him as “Moana”. All of this was to the chagrin of Puss, who tells Arthur in no uncertain terms that he “deserves a princess” and to that end has been setting up the well-known “duckpond” scene for his master to make the happy transition from commoner to aristocrat, courtesy of King Justin and his daughter.

The fast and furious action involving all of the characters heading for the duckpond, with the Trolls, Mr Green and Mr.Brown (Carrie Green and Jeff Kingsford-Brown in scintillating and energetic song-and-dance form), embodying delight in mischief and malice, Marilyn/Moana/Martha rejecting the hapless would-be Marquis, Camilla Miller and King Justin disconcerted by each other’s presence, and the Cat pronouncing the ensuing mayhem a “cat-astrophe”, closes the first Act with the kind of gusto that leaves a quivering mass of unresolved tensions awaiting the best possible outcomes, which of course are realised in suitably quirky and post-happily-ever-after ways by the time the Second Act runs its breathless course.

Buoyed along by the music, a mixture of old and new (one particularly heart-warming number I’d forgotten that I knew!), contemporary and generational, with absolutely delightful word-adaptations in places, the show is a tribute in itself to the skills of musical director Michael Nicholas Williams, who accompanied most of the songs and joined in the vocalisations on occasions. Cheek-by-jowl with these energies was the engaging choreography of Leigh Evans, brilliantly tailored to fit both songs and situations, and performed with real panache by the cast members.

Pantos need “add-water” audiences to work, and this one was no exception – I found it at least as entertaining and involving from my “relatively sedentary” point of view as the other Circa productions along the same lines I’ve seen, with Gavin Rutherford’s command of blandishment and persuasiveness as potent with grown-ups as it is charming with children – the “bringing-onto” the stage of younger audience members is always a highlight of the proceedings, particularly the ensuing “out of the eyes of babes” expressions on some of the faces, immersed as they are in such a wondrous and magical land of flesh-and-blood make-believe! The range of jokes and gags covered all ages and sensibilities, with nothing too obviously risqué though still sufficiently “naughty” for the outrage to be funny. I thought the costumes and set designs and props deliciously colourful and beautifully lit (two highlights being the “cups” sequence performed by the King and Martha/Moana/Marilyn as they sang “When I’m Gone”, and the entrance of the royal carriage, with wondrously inventive horses providing a visual feast of spectacle and movement.)

In short, I would lose no time finding a jolly soul-mate (ideally along with one child at the very least!) with whom to go to this presentation. Susan Wilson’s direction and collaboration with her “creative team” has produced both a winner and a worthy memorial to the talents of the show’s original creator, Paul Jenden.

At Circa Theatre to the 23rd December 2018, and then from the 2nd to the 12th of January 2019.

 

SONGS FOR NOBODIES – Ali Harper explores the ordinary and the fabulous

Songs for Nobodies

a play by Joanna Murray-Smith

Ali Harper (actor/singer)
Trio – Daniel Hayles (piano)/Johnny Lawrence (double bass)/Lance Philip (drums)
Director – Ross Gumbley

Circa Theatre, Wellington

Sunday, July 8th, 2018

Having previously enjoyed Ali Harper’s one-woman shows Legendary Divas and A Doris Day Special,  I was eagerly looking forward to my “latest” theatrical outing in her presence, which I imagined would be her “take” on the singers mentioned in the pre-show publicity. Apart from Maria Callas, the famous names listed were ones I actually knew very little about, so as well as being entertained, I was expecting to be informed via a kind of mini-theatrical biopic of each of them. I did recall the publicity mentioning “encounters between five everyday women whose lives had been touched in some ways by five legendary divas”, but still expected that the singers would be the ones ultimately in centre-stage.

I was surprised, therefore, to encounter a distinctly muted and downbeat series of scenarios featuring in each case a young woman who had at some or other time encountered one of these legendary artists, and who was telling the story of the interaction from her own viewpoint. Here was Ali Harper, presented in a manner far removed from the glittering glamour and self-possession normally associated with famous performers, taking on the personas of a series of “nobodies” – a cloakroom attendant, an usher, a young English/French girl, a junior reporter, and a nanny. It was through these ordinary young women that the “Songs For Nobodies” playwright Joanne Murray-Smith allowed us tantalising glimpses of the stars. All ten characters, the singers and their admirers, were played (and their songs sung) by Ali Harper, moving both fluently and distinctively between personas via their different accents and attitudes with considerable skill and focus.

The music accompaniments were discreetly and ably provided by a trio of musicians, performing behind an opaque screen, both part of and distanced from the world conjured up by the single, immediate figure of Harper, like silhouettes who were animated by the music, evoking the smoky interiors of bars and club venues – pianist Daniel Hayles, double bassist Johnny Lawrence and percussionist Lance Philip.

Each scene was set with directness and simplicity, doing without any distraction in the form of colourful costuming or detailed sets (a chair was the only stage-prop needed).  All served to focus us on Harper, as she conjured up a stark feeling of each of the places and times, as well as of the characters, ordinary and extraordinary, that she portrayed. Her spoken delivery was strong and consistent with the voices of nearly all the “stars”, though in a few places sounding a tad under pressure during the more tremulous or agitated utterances from the “nobodies”, the rapid pace clouding a detail every now and then.

We were taken firstly to the Plaza Athene, in New York City, in 1961.  Bee Appleton, a cloakroom attendant, was depicted in turmoil at her recent breakup with her husband, reflecting whimsically on the meaning of happiness, and whether “you know when you have it” and what happens to you when it is gone. She found herself of a sudden in the presence of the show’s star performer, Judy Garland, and was able to perform a simple service to her by fixing a hem on her costume. They talked and a rapport sprang up between them, a feeling which communicated a fresh sense of worth and of being whole again to the young woman, a feeling that was then crystallised by Harper’s incredibly intense performance of Garland’s song “Come rain, come shine”, leaving us stunned with its impact as darkness ended the scene.

Next up was the character of Pearl Abelone a theatre usher in Kansas City in 1963, where country-and-western star Patsy Cline was performing. An aspiring performer herself, Pearl contrived to sing the song “Amazing Grace” to Cline before the star went on stage to perform her own scheduled number. The exchanges between Pearl and her idol led to the philosophical, with Cline observing that “applause doesn’t help you when you’re lying in bed at night”. Here, the music worked its simple but powerful spell of unquestioning faith, with Pearl’s strength of utterance also persuading the singer to choose the girl to back her in one of her vocal numbers on the stage – a touching moment. And tragedy was evoked, too, at the moment when Pearl related how the singer decided to fly back home to see her family, and died when the plane crashed – her devastating comment was “I never brought Patsy any luck, but she brought me plenty”.

Each one of the scenes deserved comment by dint of its individuality and varied response on Harper’s part, the third being an almost surreal tale involving French songstress Edith Piaf, the “Little Sparrow” – we met Edie Delamore in West Bridgeford, Nottingham, a librarian of half-English, half French descent, whose Father was in the French resistance. Edie related how he was saved from certain incarceration in the infamous Dachau, after Piaf contrived to smuggle him out as one of the supporting musicians she had when performing in the German prison camps. Harper re-evoked the girl’s love for her father and admiration for his bravery at only nineteen years of age as a member of the Resistance. She interspersing the girl’s wonderment at the “falling from the skies” feeling about her life with verses of a gutsy Piaf-like rendition of verses of the song “Non Je ne regrette rien”.

Following the fastidious spoken delivery of the English/French girl’s epic tale, we met the contrastingly racy American tones of a young journalist, Too Junior Jones, desperate to prove herself with “real people”assignments. She persuaded her boss (Harper brought off a gem of a cigar-sucking executive cameo, here!) to give her the job of an 800-word profile of singer Billie Holiday. Here, the outpourings were fast and furious, too much for absolute clarity at all times, but conveying the youngster’s confidence and energy in spadefuls. By contrast, the singer’s persona came across as thoroughly dissolute and miserable, refusing at first to answer any questions, but then breaking into the dark, disturbing tones of the horrifying song, Strange Fruits, a kind of discourse on the US white South’s history of racist violence towards black people. Harper’s tones here tellingly penetrated and realised something of that unique timbre of Holiday’s “thick blue ink” voice.

Eventually Holiday told some of her story, reflecting that her life had been “one big problem”, that of “doin’ everythin’ too soon”. She had no musical training, but still became the first black woman to sing with a white band (Artie Shaw and his Orchestra) in the United States. Sadly, promoters created problems for Shaw and his band over Holiday because of her race and her unique vocal style, and Holiday had to eventually leave Shaw to go out on her own. Though experiencing occasional success and maintaining her reputation as a leading jazz singer, she developed addictions to both opium and heroin which eventually led to her death in 1959. Her funeral was reportedly attended by 3,000 people.

I thought the last evocation, that of a connection between opera singer Maria Callas and Orla McDonagh, the Irish Nanny of Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis’s children, the most tenuous. The encounter highlighted a pivotal moment in Maria Callas’s life, her wooing by Onassis after she and her husband, Meneghini, had been invited on a cruise on his yacht, the Christina. The observations of Orla, the Nanny, indicated that all was not well with Callas’s marriage, and Orla’s own less-than-salubrious interactions with Onassis himself underlined the man’s inveterate womanising which, of course, was to eventually leave the unfortunate Callas abandoned as she had done her own husband. Interesting and absorbing as it all was, it seemed less “involved” as an encounter compared with the others, a quality which I thought was unfortunately intensified by Harper’s brave, but at the aria’s climax, somewhat strained rendition of Puccini’s “Vissi d’arte” from the opera “Tosca”, one of Callas’s most famous roles. Coming at the end of the demanding programme, I felt it overtaxed Harper unfairly, in view of what she had already achieved – perhaps a less operatic approach (which the trio’s skilful accompaniment initially suggested, and which worked well) might have better served those taxing ”dramatic soprano” moments. Even so, the Callas episode seemed relatively “removed” to me, compared to the visceral encounters with greatness experienced by the other “nobodies”.

Despite this, the whole was a fantastic performance from Harper, equally convincing across a range of vignettes, from the vulnerable but hopeful young women touched by their encounters with greatness, to the stars themselves, somewhat bruised and battered by their popularity, but all showing aspects of the magnificence that earned them their fame. As I’ve said, the pace of the delivery was, in places, fast and furious, in moments too much for the meaning of the words, so that I missed the full impact of certain of Harper’s renditions of the homespun philosophies and observations. Still, one was left in certain knowledge of the transforming effects that stars could have in the lives of everyday people, the resonances of their songs and the inspiration that they provided. It all earned Ali Harper justly-deserved acclaim for her memorable and richly-wrought performance.

 

 

 

Spectacular centenary concert for Leonard Bernstein from the NZSO

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra conducted by Brett Mitchell with Morgan James – vocalist
Bernstein at 100

Three Dance Episodes from On the Town and two songs
Peter Pan
: ‘Dream with me’,
On the Waterfront
: symphonic suite
Candide
Overture and ‘It must be so’, and ‘Glitter and be gay’
West Side Story
: The Balcony Scene (‘Tonight’) and Symphonic Dances

Michael Fowler Centre

Friday 11 May 2018, 6:30 pm

Faced with an auditorium less than half full for a concert to celebrate a hundred years of one of the most famous (I carefully refrain from using ‘greatest’) composers and conductors of the 20th century, raised interesting thoughts. One was that I had expected about this sized audience; that, before I’d seen the NZSO offer of big ticket discounts.

I’ve no doubt that everyone interested in classical music and broadly defined popular music recognises the name Bernstein, and would agree that he was a famous and important figure. Name his best known music! Well, of course West Side Story, and, mmm… and some might add Candide, the two Broadway musicals and the ballet Fancy Free, and a few would have heard Chichester Psalms (Orpheus Choir about a year ago), or Mass, and there are three symphonies, aren’t there??? Who’s heard them? And the attentive might recall Orchestra Wellington playing a couple of pieces in 2013 (the Serenade after Plato’s Symposium and Fancy Free), and a brave concert performance in 2012 of Candide from Orchestra Wellington and the Orpheus Choir.

But he doesn’t conform easily to the usual characterisation of a classical composer. Where are the piano sonatas, the other operas, the chamber or choral music? And for that matter, why aren’t his Broadway musicals or his orchestral music, other than what was on this evening’s programme, familiar?

The Symphonic Dances from West Side Story hasn’t been absent from the Wellington concert halls. The NZSO under Miguel Harth-Bedoya played them in October 2012.

On the Town
The pieces from the Broadway musical On the Town of 1944 (a search in the Middle C archive shows the dance episodes were performed by the then ‘Vector Wellington Orchestra’ in July 2009) comprised the three dance episodes and two songs. They opened the concert and brought soprano Morgan James to the stage to sing ‘I can cook too’ and ‘Some other Time’. American conductor Brett Mitchell who I’d heard in a lively, Broadway-style interview on Upbeat at midday, entered and immediately launched into a startling performance of Dance of the Great Lover, the first of the three dances from On the Town which rather astonished me for the super-raunchy, trumpet-attacks from nowhere, then throaty trombones, cutting clarinets (two guest clarinets, David McGregor and John Robinson, in the lead positions I noticed). There was nothing symphonically genteel about it and Mitchell exclaimed at its end, “the NZSO can swing!” I have sometimes dismissed remarks from conductors tackling this genre of American music, that the orchestra has a great feeling for its brazen energy, the rhythms and attack, as if the entire band had served its musical apprenticeship on Broadway. Here such praise seemed totally justified.

Then Morgan James arrived, in the first of four different costumes, each capturing the spirit of the songs she sang. She sang two from On the Town: ‘I can cook too’ and ’Some Other Time’. Of course, she was amplified (I doubt that the 1944 performances were? – miked voices on Broadway only became common in the 1950s. She is a Juilliard graduate and had of course learned how to enrich and project her voice properly. Though she has clearly learned how to use the microphone to advantage, why not let us hear the excellent, unmanipulated voice? Why all the pains to reproduce what Bernstein actually wrote in his score for the orchestra but falsify the voice?).

James’s vocal colours and command of dynamic variety were indeed spectacular and the combination of authentic orchestral sound and a voice that has roots deep in the worlds of Broadway, jazz, most areas of popular music, as well as the traditions and techniques of classical music, was both arresting and flashy. The contrast between her two songs was vivid: the self-confident attack of the Broadway ‘belting’ style of her first song, and her ‘Some Other Time’ that expressed a casual acceptance of the impermanence of a fleeting, shallow romance. And her tour de force, ‘Glitter and be gay’ from Candide, was her parting number; though it was touchingly followed by her encore: ‘There’s a place for us’ from West Side Story.

Likewise, the orchestra created entirely different moods with the other two dances from On the Town: muted trumpets, more prominent oboes and cor anglais, alto saxophone and a great variety of highly polished percussion.

On the Waterfront
The much-played symphonic suite from On the Waterfront employed most of the same characteristics as On the Town with occasional striking solos – from principal horn, from timpani, from tom toms, vibraphone and xylophone, and frequent opulent chorale-like passages from trombones and tuba. Again, there were all the hallmarks of a fine classical composer, a brilliant orchestrator, and above all an orchestra and conductor with all the swing and swagger of popular Broadway.

The overture to Candide has become one of Bernstein’s best known pieces, a compounding of Offenbach and the Chabrier of L’étoile, not to mention Broadway itself. And rather unlike the low-powered performance of Berlioz’s Carnaval romain overture the next evening, the utterly quintessential comedy overture.

Between ‘It must be so’ from Candide and ‘Tonight’ from West Side Story Morgan James spoke interestingly about her musical values, and ended with an almost disembodied top last note.

West Side Story
The Symphonic Dances from West Side Story is a more standard concert work that captures the vitality, violence, anger and occasional calm lyricism (‘Somewhere’ and the Finale) of the score and the orchestra’s playing exhibited all those characteristics with tremendous energy and unflagging precision. Finger-clicking, a shrill whistle… Nowhere more vividly than in the riotous ‘Mambo’ where the only missing element was the dancers.  And then the calm after the long, grieving flute solo brought the suite to a lovely conclusion.

The clamorous applause belied the impression of a small audience.

Cynthia and Gertie go Baroque with Purcell at Circa Theatre

Circa Theatre and Willow Productions presents:
CYNTHIA AND GERTIE GO BAROQUE

Written and performed by:
Helen Moulder – CYNTHIA
and Rose Beauchamp – GERTIE

Directed by Jeff Kingsford-Brown
Design/Lighting/Stage Manager – Deb McGuire
Costumes – Janet Dunn
Theatre and Puppet Makers – Struan Ashby,
Anna Bailey, Rose Beauchamp

Circa Theatre, Taranaki St., Wellington

Wednesday, 13th December, 2017

(until 23rd December)

Firstly, a note of thanks to Cynthia Fortitude and Gertie Rallentando – Thank you both, for your indefatigable energies and your irrepressible buoyancies! Together, you were as a matching pair of Courtenay Place street-lamps to our sensibilities throughout the intoxicating journey upon which you launched us, offering support as well as illumination! Your concerted efforts generated such refulgence, shining forth from within the textures of one of the masterpieces of English music, Henry Purcell’s opera “Dido and Aeneas”.

Cynthia and Gertrude are hell-bent upon performing a version of Purcell’s renowned work which charmingly as well as outrageously brings it all the more to life for present-day audiences. In fact one of Cynthia’s most telling and candid observations of the evening came towards the end of the show, her remark being that it was probably lucky that Purcell had been dead for four hundred years in view of what she and her colleague Gertie had wrought upon his most famous musical and dramatic work, over the course of the presentation.

Though raising a laugh, it was a piece of tongue-in-cheek repartee which perfectly and ironically accorded with the documented fact that Purcell’s librettists for many of his vocal and theatrical compositions gave him extremely rudimentary and at times uninspired material to work with – to the point where a contemporary of the composer’s, the satirist Thomas Brown, versified thus at the time:

“For where the Author’s scanty words have fail’d,
Your happier graces, Purcell, have prevail’d”.

Also, the librettist Nahum Tate, who adapted the “Dido” story from an episode in Virgil has come in for some damning criticism over the years, summed up by the following verdict of a modern-day commentator – “Little enough of Virgil remains (in the opera) – Dido is drastically simplified, and Aeneas is made into a complete booby. And the sense of cosmic forces at play is replaced by the machinations of an outrageous set of Restoration witches” (Joseph Kerman “Opera as Drama” 1988 University of California)

So, taking the advice of a literary genius who proclaimed “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet”, Cynthia and Gertie lost no time in cutting to the dramatic quick by adroitly revitalising the identities of the characters in the original story. Here, we encountered not Dido and Aeneas, but “Diana” and “Andy “as the ill-fated lovers, and with chaperone Amanda (rather than the maidservant, Belinda) ready at a moment’s notice to “unbottle and dispense” support and advice as if it were on tap. So, it was pretty much “instant update – just add water”, and with the help of the vernacular, away we were whirled on our dramatic journey!

But wait! – we wouldn’t have entrusted our evening’s entertainment to the unknown so easily without first assuring ourselves of the likelihood of these performers being able to “deliver” the goods, still – after all, anybody can put on costumes and don wigs and pirouette randomly around and about the stage, lip-and-finger-synching to music already being played. True, the immortal duo’s previous show “The Legend Returns” has already become a living classic, having made its way into the most distinguished annals of New Zealand’s theatrical history – but after twenty years, were the old instincts and impulses still firing on all cylinders? Did the flame still burn as brightly and energetically in those theatrical bosoms? Could Cynthia and Gertie still do it?

It took but a few moments to reassure us that all was as real and earnest, realigned and refurbished, as before – Gertie with her introductory harpsichordic displays of prestidigitation, and Cynthia with her congenitally “grand manner” and gesturings appropriate to a “practitioner of rallen-tando” swept up our sensibilities and lost no time in absorbing us in the business of their on-stage preparations . Cynthia primed her audience up superbly, charming and reassuring those whose front-row seats would normally have given their occupants grave concern at having “greatness thrust upon ’em” at any given moment and providing the rest of us with suitably inscribed flash-card response indications – you simply knew where you were with these two in charge!

So, we were given an invaluable Janus-faced view of proceedings, being party to these (sometimes surprising) preparations, as well as enjoying the pleasures of their ultimate fruition, thrills and spills included! Tempting though it is for me to here reproduce some of the choicest moments of the entertainment, it would be a pity to spoil their delightful surprise value! – without giving too much away, I might mention the highly-diverting and all-too-human use of performer-enhancement aids, with Cynthia (bless her!) in need of an occasional “pick-me-up-and-redirect-my-befuddlement” pill! – and the use of a puppet-theatre and its suitably recontextualised puppet figures to crystallise the opera’s action.

Helped further by a racy reworking of the all-too-prosaic original libretto, Purcell and his (renamed) characters were able to live again in their extremely visceral glory, thanks to the energies of our two star writer/performers, and the support they garnered from various quarters – flowing direction from Jeff Kingsford-Brown, suitably atmospheric set design and lighting from Deb McGuire, and lavishly resonating costumes from Janet Dunn. Then there was Struan Ashby’s charming puppet theatre, complete with figures  fashioned by Anna Bailey and Rose Beauchamp herself.

I should add that further support came from a suitably and skillfully-coached audience – after we’d survived a querulous “What are you doing here if you’re not auditioning for our show?” moment from Cynthia, we really came into our own in the Witches’ scene! In fact, our contributions, in the finest baroque fashion, were actually divided into parts rather than left as a kind of mindless unison!

Before concluding, I can’t resist letting slip the merest smattering of the libretto’s updated raciness, simply for sharing’s sakes! – and as the Trojan hero Aeneas seemed to come off worst as a character in Purcell’s original, it was only fitting that he was given more of his dues in this presentation – by way of preparing us for his puppet-entrance, the already-entranced Queen told us that “He’s genetically engineered /so he’ll be marvellous in bed”. Alas, as befits a modern operatic playboy, the eponymous hero, after accessing his hacked online updates, suddenly expostulated “Receivership? – I’ll have to run! I’ll have to get away! I need an exit strategy today!” Well, you get the idea!

It remained for the spurned Carthage Queen to bemoan her loss, and, bereft of love and hope, accept her time-honoured fate as one who died of a broken heart. Such were the conflicting emotions brought into play by Cynthia and Gertie recasting this scene as either one of the great comic tragedies or, alternatively, tragic comedies, I was and remain gobsmacked at the outcome’s cathartic effect! – I may even have to go the show again! What I do remember is that we in the audience, having a participatory role in the grand peroration, were caught up in it all to the extent that when the divine Cynthia indicated to us her “encore” flash-card and the irrepressible Gertie took the lead we capitulated like lambs to the slaughter!

Whoever similarly takes the plunge and “Goes for Baroque” with these two stellar performers, Helen Moulder and Rose Beauchamp, will be similarly transported, their appreciation of Baroque opera enhanced, perhaps even beyond the point of “no return”.

A whole lot more than the girl next door – Ali Harper as Doris Day at Circa in Wellington

Ali Harper – A Doris Day Special
Written by and starring Ali Harper
Voiceover Actors – Michael Keir-Morrissey, Ravil Atlas, Tom Trevella,
Stephanie McKellar-Smith, Phil Vaughan

Director – Stephanie McKellar-Smith
Musical Director – Rodger Fox
Musical Arrangements – Michael Bell
Set Design – Brendan Albrey/Richard Van der Berg
Technical Operator – Deb McGuire

Circa Theatre, Wellington
Saturday, 16th September 2017

(until October 14th)

To my surprise, a friend I was recently speaking to about my theatre-going plans said, “Doris Day? Why would you want to go to a show about her?” It was a generational thing, I suspect – I counted myself lucky to have “caught” Doris Day at the end of her active career during the 1960s, whereas my friend, a dozen years younger, thought herself fortunate – obviously by heresay –  that she’d missed out on nearly all of it. What Ali Harper’s one-woman show at Circa Theatre makes quite clear is that Doris the performer was a veritable force to be reckoned with, somebody who turned to gold practically everything she touched by dint of her blazing singing talent, natural and unspoiled loveliness, and unflagging determination to succeed at whatever she did. Ali Harper, in fact, for an hour and twenty minutes on the Circa TheatreStage, for me WAS Doris Day!

Since I’ve never seen Doris Day perform live, and don’t claim to have seen all of her films or listened to all of her songs, one might think my claim for Harper’s stunning characterisation of the star is a questionable one. But, as I noted during the previous stage appearance of Harper’s I’d experienced featuring her characterisation of a number of great female singers, Legendary Divas, she has that indefinable but overwhelming star quality which seems to fuse with whatever song she is singing, and whatever persona she is presenting. Even in one or two places in this latest show, A Doris Day Special, where her inspiration as a scriptwriter for me seemed to strike the occasional fitful patch, she was able to carry the theatrical “charge” of the singer’s character through the hiatuses and back into the juicy, blood-pumping stuff once again.

The Show’s presented as a “live” television special, complete with audience (us), cameras, a film/television screen (used most effectively in places), a sizeable wardrobe gracing a voluminously groaning clothes-stand, the voice of an unseen director, the occasional barking of a pet dog, and of course, the star herself, freely moving between the apple-pie naturalness of the “real” person, and the various “characters” projected with each song by the polished performer. Harper and her director, Stephanie McKellar-Smith used the songs mostly chronologically, and almost always incrementally, letting the music build onto what had gone before, what was being talked about or what was about to come.

Particularly moving in this respect was Harper’s singing of “Make Someone Happy” as an adjunct to her alter ego’s disastrous loss of her earnings at one point at the hands of her husband/manager, the star’s qualifying comment being “There’s more to life than money”, a sequence whose essence I thought the song most fittingly expressed. Its homespun equivalent was the song “Powder your face with Sunshine”, which grew from the compliments Day received early in her career regarding her “natural beauty” and her possible “secret” – which Harper then steered in the direction of a kind of “commercial break” during which we were treated to Doris advertising Vaseline – “This is how I protect my skin” – I’m not sure whether the ad was genuine or not!

Whether clearly connected (Day’s first big hit “Sentimental Journey” featured Harper’s singing alongside a black-and-white film of a steam train making its trek across America’s vast spaces to towns in the middle of nowhere, a sequence I thought worked brilliantly well) or merely providing entertainment (the extremely silly but entertaining song “I said my pyjamas”), the music sat so well in each instance’s context. For that reason I though it a pity that Harper’s “leading men gallery” (a veritable galaxy of talent, incidentally!) was so under-characterised, for me, the weakest and most static part of the show – instead of a “whirl” of jaw-dropping names and images, everything becalmed as the faces appeared, none with any particular or distinctive context – Harper sang “You do something to me” as the images came up, but I would have preferred to see at the very least “stills” from each of the films showing interaction between the actress and the men who were “doing something” to her. The film/television screen was ideally placed for us to enjoy a recap of these scenes (incidentally, nothing from “The Pyjama Game”, which I thought was an opportunity missed) – I wonder if there were copyright issues which might have prevented Harper from doing something like this?

Apart from this, the “show” sizzled and zinged as it ought to have done – I was divided regarding the use of an obviously “miked” voice for Harper throughout – initially it did give the presentation an illusion of a television broadcast, but long-term I found the effect a little wearying. What I really did like (and wished we had had more with some of the other songs) was Harper’s synchronising of her singing with the Rodger Fox Big Band on the television screen – absolutely brilliant in effect, especially the dovetailing of the band members’ vocalisations with the singer’s (the bantering “dig it” responses from the players came over splendidly!). A pity we didn’t have a similar scenario for the “Choo-choo Train” song, intead of the (for me) faintly, but stll embarrassingly infantile cartoon-like realisation we were given on the screen – “Chacun en son gout”, as the French say!

As well as providing entertainment, Harper’s show gave us an understandably once-over-lightly, but still welcome resume of the life of the phenomenon called at birth Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff! – we were told of her early car accident which effectively changed her career trajectory from dancer to singer, and then how the name “Doris Day” originated, complete with a performance of the life-changing song “Day after Day”; we caught glimpses of her versatility – her performance of just one instance of this quality, the song “I just blew in from the Windy City” was a tour de force for both the performer and her subject, (another example of the fusion between the two that we experienced); and we got a sense of the intense rapport between Day and at least one of her leading men, Rock Hudson – again, some sequential film images would have captured our stardust-prone receptivities even more readily (the recent “Jacindarella effect” nonwithstanding!). Then, not least of all (and helped by some sequences enacted behind the clothes-rack involving canine noises and soothing-owner blandishments!) we were given a sense of the star’s life-long love for animals, reinforced amusingly by her involvement in a dog-food commercial, but more profoundly, by references to her later involvement with animal welfare.

Linked with those “There’s more to life than money” sequences already referred to, were the moments in which Harper conveyed, deeply and warmly, the singer’s love for her only child, Terry Melcher. The latter’s disturbing initial involvement with and narrow escape from the attentions of the psychopathic killer Charles Manson and his “family” I didn’t know anything about beforehand, which couldn’t help for me give this part of Harper’s show an added edge of shock. Of course celebrity murder ought to be no more horrifying that that of any “unknown” person, but there was no denying the dramatic and theatrical tensions generated by the bizarre connections between forces of light and darkness.

Though not quite as consistently focused or realised by Harper as was I thought her “Legendary Divas” show, she resolutely got the “Doris Day magic” working to a sufficiently engaging and involving pitch. There were moments when an exra notch or two of momentum and vigour could have been injected – I wondered at times whether another onstage presence, a music- or show director, or even a wardrobe mistress-cum-confidant might have given Harper a kind of character foil against which to bounce and resound, providing her with some synergy, as it every now and then seemed something of a lonely haul. Alternatively, a more dynamic and varied use of the film/television screen could have helped to project even further the Doris Day that Harper was living out for us so passionately and with such energy and commitment.

Those comments aside, I enjoyed being, once again, “galvanised” by Ali Harper, by turns basking in and further energising the fulsomeness of her commitment as a performer and communicating that same energy to her fortunate audiences. Obviously, the world was, and still is, a better place for the presence of Doris Mary Ann Kappelhoff, ninety-five years young, still, at the time of writing, and better known to us as Doris Day – and Ali Harper put across that same conviction with life-enhancing certainty.

Destination Beehive 2017 at Circa Theatre – too serious to be taken seriously

Circa Theatre presents:
DESTINATION BEEHIVE 2017

Written by Pinky Agnew and Lorae Parry
Directed and choreographed by Jan Bolwell
Music played and directed by Clinton Zerf
Lighting and Set Design by Lisa Maule

Circa Two
Circa Theatre, Wellington

Saturday 9th July 2017
(until 5th August)

Legend has it that American songwriter and political satirist Tom Lehrer gave up satire when American Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. It’s perhaps just as tempting for any present-day satirist to take a similar stance in the face of the antics of those real-life dodgers, shysters, con-artists and masters of illusion we know as politicians – why bother, she or he might argue, drawing attention to their absurdities when they themselves do it so much better simply by BEING themselves?

Fortunately for us here in Godzone, that intrepid duo of Pinky Agnew and Lorae Parry, having tasted blood in the run-up to the 2014 election with their expose of the goings-on in the “swinging seat” of Port Nicholson give these personalities even MORE rope with which to hang themselves from various vantage points on the brand-new electorate of “Tinakori Heights”. By way of the “Kiwi Media” Show, driven (flailed?) along at a great lick by personalities Katrina Coleman (Lorae Parry), Tina Fisher (Pinky Agnew) and Bryce Allen (Tom Knowles), we are brought close-up and personal to this year’s power-hungry hopefuls, ready and willing to try and fool all of the people all of the time!

The authors themselves seemed well aware of the danger of being outflanked, at any given moment, by their moving targets’ next unscripted moves – a case of “expect the unexpected” thus prevailed, both onstage and out there in cloud-cuckoo Beehiveland, a flux which kept our ears pricked, our toes stretched and (thanks to newly-developed rear-end surveilance methods installed, so we were informed, in our audience seats) our buttocks ready for lateral activation – left, or alternatively right, for you-know-who, blurring ideological divisions and all! Like the redoubtable election-night coverage “worm” of a few rounds ago, one was mesmerised by the process, whatever the outcomes!

After the cinematoscopic hype of introduction from Katrina, Tina and Bryce, the whole cast launched into a bubbling, energetic “Hokey-Tokey” – sorry, make that a “Votey-Votey”! – giving the well-worn adage “turning the other cheek” a whole new lease of theatrical and political life. Throughout the show music and movement was a constant delight, with old, seemingly played-out numbers (eg., “I will follow Him”, “Anyone who had a Heart”, “I got you, Babe” and “Santa Baby”) springing back to life with freshly-worked words , messages delivered with dangerous feistiness that delightfully belied the original banalities.

This was just part of a show which featured nine singers/actors (with stage Manager Neal Barber sometimes roped into the goings-on) playing over thirty characters between them and delivering over a dozen songs, the whole co-ordinated by director/choreographer Jan Bolwell with tremendous energy, vision and authority, and backed up by musical director Clinton Zerf’s brilliant and fluid keyboard realisations. Together with co-authors Pinky Agnew’s and Lorae Parry’s effervescent and outrageously provocative dialogues and song-lyrics, it makes for an “everything you wanted to hear” entertainment package which ticks all the appropriately risible boxes.

Of the actors, the doyen is of course Dame Kate Harcourt, celebrating her real-life status as a nonagenarian by conjuring up a populist tide of electoral enthusiasm (motorised chair “bestriding” the stage) as the Tinakori Heights NZ First Candidate, Maude Hornby. In what seems a remarkable “coup”, she was introduced by none other than a pre-recorded Winston Peters, appropriately scripted, and joining in the fun with a will, – with such advocacy, one was prepared to surrender all to the visceral jungle-drum rhythms of an updated “I will follow Him”, sung by Harcourt and her entourage with Messianic conviction!

Dame Kate’s fellow-thespians are a mixture of familiar and new, the former including the show’s two aforementioned writers, both of whom assume the trappings of a bewildering array of personalities in very different ways – Pinky Agnew is the shapeshifter of the two, effecting breath-catching transformations from TV show host to none other than the resplendently red-clad Hillary Clinton, adroitly re-aligning her geographical surroundings with the help of flash-card prompting , before morphing into the Mrs.Mopp-like Faye McFee, who’s the ACT Party candidate’s campaign manager, and then (most stunningly of all) reclaiming the international limelight as Angela Merkel, complete with anti-Trumpery antennae.

By comparison, Lorae Parry’s no less able assumptions involve relative micromanagement of appearances, mannerisms and pronouncements enabling simple, strongly-etched portrayals of personalities such as her alter ego Helen Clark (here to introduce a “surprise” Labour candidate, who’s already been mentioned), a co-anchor of Foxy TV, Parris la Touche, the “gnat-in-a-bottle” Lynette Scott who’s the Tinakori Heights ACT candidate , and then none other than Theresa May, still a force to be reckoned with, and here with Angela Merkel to help further the cause of the local pussy-hat brigade by confronting the actual cause célèbre in person.

Carrie Green’s another election veteran with a couple of long-(self?)serving characterisations such as “born-again centrist” Metiria Tureia, along with a somewhat addled-value Paula Bennett with resplendently fluid thigh-support, a sequence that Green herself wrote. She also gave us a scary Marama Fox (who scatters the National sympathisers like chaff in the wind), as well as partnering Lorae Parry as the “other” Foxy TV anchor, Felicia Fanning, and is the centre of focus for the Justin Bieber take-off “Youth Song” – high energy input, here, with exhilarating results.

Similarly traversing the spectrums of ideology and character with versatility and elan was Tom Knowles, one of the three “Kiwi Media” presenters (Bryce Allen) at the start, and then by turns an opportunistic Grant Robertson (I’ve got you, Labour”), a platitudinous National candidate Dick Webster (“We aim to make our rivers WATERSKIABLE! – by 2040!), a feline-phobic Gareth Morgan with a feline-phobic moustache, and (Trumping everything else!) the world’s No.1 pussy-predator on a fake-news-finding visit to Godzone, involving “your President English!”, with riotous outcomes!

And then, there were the newbies, four student actors from the “genius tutelary” of Whitireia, whose song-and-dance skills added considerable “schwung” to the proceedings and whose characters all hit the ground running! – Molly Weaver relished both her TOP candidate Jilly Caro-Cant and a starry-eyed Jacinda Ardern in thrall to Labour’s latest “recruit” with style and surety, while Alexandra Taylor’s alarmingly abandoned Jekyll-and-Hyde take on United Future candidate Celine Smith rivalled in effect the legendary Salome’s besottment with the head of John the Baptist in her all-but-visceral orgasmic reaction to images of a bemused-looking Peter Dunne!

Shawn Keil traversed the interchangeable credibility gap between Green (“May the Forest be with you”) and ACT party personalities with schizoid skill, drawing from both Bizet’s “Carmen” and the late, lamented Trevor Rupe, in a rose-between-teeth realisation of David Seymour as a fantasy figure to Habanera accompaniment, augmented by Agnew and Parry in their vociferously operatic “Seymour!” – an equally far cry to Keil’s “always-going-somewhere” Bill English take, bouncing between put-downs by various world leaders. And the elegant Charles Masina as Dr.Riki Te Rapa, the Māori Party candidate, made the most of his advocacy from Carrie Green’s Marama Fox and his expedient coming-out reaction of “I’m bi!” to questions regarding ethnicity.

In all, a show which elevates politics to the status of love in terms of its sufferers – a tragedy to the heart and a comedy to the intellect! Those who saw the 2014 version of the show and enjoyed it (and how could anybody not?) can take heart that it’s more of the same but very different. And for those who are first-timers – well, along with everything else one expects from entertainment, it’s also something of a healing experience!

See also reviews by Ewen Coleman (The Dominion Post)
https://www.stuff.co.nz/entertainment/stage-and-theatre/94551736/theatre-review-destination-beehive-2017
and John Smythe (Theatre Review)
https://theatreview.org.nz/reviews/review.php?id=10397

Melbourne’s Ring cycle revival a spectacular triumph

Der Ring des Nibelungen by Wagner

Opera Australia

Musical Director: Pietari Inkinen; Stage director: Neil Armfield; set designer: Robert Cousins; costume designer: Alice Babidge

The cast members are named in the course of the text

State Theatre, Melbourne

Friday 9 to Friday 16 December 2016

Introduction
I went to the third run of the Ring in Melbourne, in December. At its first incarnation in 2013, I had rather set it aside, partly because the ticket prices were pretty steep – well over $1000 for the four – and something in me said that, as I have seen the entire cycle five times over the years, in various places including Bayreuth, I doubted whether Opera Australia would offer me any really new insights beyond what one can get a lot cheaper in most parts of Germany.

But when I started getting reports from people who’d been and had their lives changed, I regretted not going. I doubted that it would be revived. After all, the Adelaide Ring of 2004 had been stored in the hope that Opera of South Australia or another Australian company would revive it. But that never happened and the $20 million worth of staging, costumes, sets were sold off for peanuts.

About the end of October I decided to go, reinforced by the chance to see Handel’s Theodora being staged by Pinchgut Opera in Sydney about the same time: I could see all in the space of about 12 days.

I did not plan to write a comprehensive review of all four music dramas; and as I hadn’t asked for press tickets I was under no obligation. Anyway, I wasn’t sure I wanted to be burdened with the inevitable note-taking in the dark that I always rely on to support my erratic memory. In the event I just enjoyed it untroubled by the search for words, but I kept a sort of diary through emails home. Some weeks later, and after writing about Theodora, I decided to bestir myself and pieced together these impressions, to describe the elements that I found especially interesting and which I could remember in sufficient detail. What follows is about five times the size of what I’d planned to write: it kept growing and is still, of course, far from comprehensive and probably not well balanced.

Production
The production was by leading Australian theatre and opera director Neil Armfield with set designs by Robert Cousins and costumes by Alice Babidge. Their approach varied widely from scene to scene – it was at times spectacular and surprising, at other times bare, black and minimalist, so the drama relied largely on the acting and singing. What really sustained it and often held my attention during episodes that I have sometimes found a bit protracted and tedious, was the commitment of the whole production, the portrayal of emotional interaction through acting and singing; above all, and in contrast to many such enterprises, Neil Armfield was largely successful in placing it firmly in the present day.

There are many excellent reviews available on line, most with a selection of photos of representative scenes which you will find interesting and evocative. A good way in is through the Richard Wagner Society (Victoria) which contains links to most of the reviews (http://wagnermelb.org.au/wp/reviews-of-the-melbourne-2016-ring/.

 

Das Rheingold

There’s no other theatrical experience that takes hold of you as powerfully and as filled with excited expectation as the opening of Das Rheingold. It immediately banishes any residual feelings that it might be diminished through knowing the music and the story pretty intimately. In the dark theatre, the below-the-stave E flat arpeggios slow emergence from silence is an almost overwhelming experience.

I wondered whether the many in the audience who saw this production three years ago had misgivings – would it work again?

The first impression as the curtain rose was of a vivid scene with the three Rhine Maidens (Lorina Gore, Jane Ede, and Dominica Matthews), scantily clad in shimmering white cabaret array, emerging from a writhing mass of bathers; they were said to represent the currents of the river, though no attempt was made to represent water. Fortunately, all three singers were so physically endowed as to profit from such exposure. (I can’t resist quoting The Guardian’s review here: “…with the Rhinemaidens in seafoam sparkles, like Tivoli Lovelies en route from a beachfront spectacular…”).

It set the scene for an updating to the present, which convinced through its sheer unapologetic openness; challenging us with, “well, isn’t this how Wagner conceived it?”, even though obviously, he didn’t. And we took it in our stride.

Alberich – Warwick Fyfe – well known in New Zealand, was hardly the repulsive predator sometime portrayed, and his seduction attempts failed amusingly; provoked to revenge, he steals the gold. He sang and acted with gusto and total conviction, and was critically judged one of the chief ornaments of the entire cycle.

In the second scene, we meet Wotan, wife Fricka, daughter Freia; James Johnson’s Wotan, a beautiful if somewhat underpowered voice, Jacqueline Dark, Fricka, the voice of moral responsibility and financial rectitude, alarmed at Wotan’s reckless deal with the giants to build his new castle, Valhalla; and Hyeseoung Kwon in the small but engaging role as Freia, the provider to the gods of the apples of eternal youth. She’s taken hostage by the giants as guarantee of payment for their construction work on Wotan’s unaffordable new palace, Valhalla.

Here, as throughout the cycle, the implications and details of the story were presented with unusual clarity even though some physical elements were passed over. No effort is made to put the two suited giants on stilts or otherwise to simulate giantness: New Zealand bass Jud Arthur and Australian Daniel Sumegi took the roles of Fafner and Fasolt splendidly.

Some reviews, naturally, felt suits diminished the impact of the myth’s universality and meaning, and at certain moments, so did I, though the conviction of the acting and generally superb singing usually overcame that.

Challenged by Fricka to deal with the debt predicament, Wotan and Loge set off to rob the gold that Alberich had stolen from the river, in an underworld whose subterranean horrors had to be created in the mind. No attempt specifically to portray Alberich’s transformations with the power of the tarnhelm though.

In the last scene the giants are paid off with the stolen gold and Freia is released in a curious mix of mythical tale and modern matter-of-factness. The deal, for the giants, includes both the magic tarnhelm and the ring but Wotan at first refuses to give up the ring until convinced by Erda, the earth mother, that he must surrender it. She acts somewhat like Cassandra in the Iliad and Berlioz’s Les Troyens: knowing the past as well as the future but, as with Cassandra, she is ignored: she warns that possession of the ring will bring the reign of the gods to an end. Liane Keegan projected it with impressive power and conviction.

Erda later reappears in Siegfried, forewarning that it will bring about the end of the gods, for Alberich, furious when the ring was taken from him, had placed a curse on it forever. Apart from the gorgeous reappearance of ‘Rainbow girls’, to accompany the gods taking possession of their new home, the music contributed more to the empty grandeur of the gods crossing the rainbow bridge to Valhalla to bring Rheingold to its splendid end.

 

Die Walküre

Right at the start of Walküre there were a few things that didn’t seem to work or at least didn’t fit the story, especially in Act I. Though the hut that served as Sieglinde and Hunding’s home in the forest didn’t need to be a pretentious, columned-portico affair, this was more like a tiny hut in the Tararuas, with scarcely room for one bed and a table. Siegmund couldn’t even enter from the storm and sat outside, while the text makes it clear that he’s stumbled inside. Nor was the great World Ashtree supplied, in which the powerful sword is lodged; when the time came, Siegmund simply pulled it from the floor.

However, Siegmund and Sieglinde (Bradley Daley and Amber Wagner), both performed with strong, elegant and perfectly well-placed voices (but see below) completely in tune with their characters. Their appearance, as twins, was happily reinforced by their singular likeness, but for me their attire didn’t fit one’s preconceptions (though I read no other misgivings on that account). Sieglinde’s violent husband, Hunding, was Jud Arthur who succeeded in exploiting a reversal of his real self in a Jekyll and Hyde manner, cruel and unbending, actually a somewhat more interesting creation than his Fafner in Rheingold.

Nevertheless, with Daley’s  superb “Winterstürme wichen dem Wonnemond”, the first act came off magnificently with its rapid build-up of energy and excitement, through “Siegmund heiss ich, Siegmund bin ich”, taking the sword, brother and sister race out together.

At the start of Act II there was an announcement that Daley (Siegmund) had a voice problem and would be replaced in the wings by an understudy, Dean Bassett, while the silent one did the acting. I was lucky to be well back in the theatre so the problem of misplaced voice wasn’t too conspicuous. Bassett’s voice was an excellent fit for the task, seeming conscious of the fate that Fricka will demand for him and which becomes clearly inevitable.

Brünnhilde (Lise Lindstrom) appears for the first time, in Act II. At first Wotan tells her to help save Siegmund in the forthcoming fight with Hunding; but then Fricka (Jacqueline Dark) arrives to challenge Wotan, to demand he punish this affront to morality, and the ground shifts.

The stage was dominated by a huge, rotating, spiral ramp on which most of the action took place. In sharp contrast to nil stage sets in other scenes, it was spectacular and visually interesting but hardly in line with one’s picture of the abode of the King of the Teutonic gods (Wotan – James Johnson) and his lady-wife (Fricka). But these things soon diminish in significance.

The beginning of the end of Wotan’s hegemony
The shocking combination of adultery and incest between brother and sister is too much for Fricka. Now, far more than the ritual, carping wife, Jacqueline Dark is assured, clear-sighted, though guided by convention, taking the high moral ground; her voice captured all that confidence and authority. She laid her cards on the table with great skill and Wotan could be seen visibly retreating from his authoritarian position. This further sign of his inevitably crippling loss of power was vividly exposed. Oddly, coincidentally, Wotan’s voice began to show signs of wear during his long Act II monologue, though it was arresting nevertheless.

Eventually Hunding, again violently impressive, strong-voicedly, comes to wreck vengeance on Siegmund; in the fight, Wotan intervenes to break Siegmund’s sword so Hunding can kill him; and then Wotan contemptuously despatches Hunding.

Here Brünnhilde (Lise Lindstrom) intervenes, determined to rescue Sieglinde who, she knows, is carrying the child destined to save Wotan’s godly kingdom (Siegfried). Lindstrom soon emerged the star of the show and got the biggest applause at the end. Slim, pretty, fair, with a splendid but not stentorian voice, that was far from being the archetypal horned-helmeted Valkyrie, but evinced a touch of vulnerability, yet resolute in her essential humanity.

A photo reproduced in the critical website, Man in Chair, review shows Johnson and Lindstrom in Act II about to embrace ecstatically on the spiral ramp with the array of stuffed animals behind them (meaning, a matter of debate). Worth looking at: (https://simonparrismaninchair.com/2016/11/24/opera-australia-die-walkure-review-melbourne-ring-cycle-2016/).

The famous opening of Act III was generally celebrated by critics; typically, David Larkin of Man in Chair wrote graphically:

“Apart from their wonderful singing and stirring acting, the nine women playing the Valkyries deserve bravery medals for their incredible entrances. Flying in from the heavens on swings as they sing the famous war cry, the woman promptly unhook their harnesses and leap into action on the stage. The natural hair and costuming mean that each of these invaluable women can be very clearly identified.” And he proceeded to describe each…

The action was “jaw-dropping, descending from the heavens with voices powerful enough to resurrect the dead”, wrote Tim Byrne in Time Out.

Don’t think I’ve ever seen a production in which the dilemma of the gods and the options available to them have been more vividly explored. The very long dialogue between Wotan and Brünnhilde in Act III can sometimes seem too much, but every statement and counter-statement here had such credibility as a deeply felt confrontation between loving father and daughter that it is worth every long five minutes for the power if its wonderful music.

This long, intensely moving scene in which Wotan relents and agrees to protect his daughter with the fire, is an emotional high point, perhaps THE emotional high point of the entire tetralogy.

There are so many nuances that can be perceived in this denouement, and in the tetralogy as a whole; and as Time Out wrote: “All to the most immersive, often overwhelmingly and intensely beautiful, music written for the stage”.

 

Siegfried

I admit I often find the scene with Mime (Graeme Macfarlane) and Siegfried (Stefan Vinke) trying; their mutual hatred and childishness just wearies me, and I don’t suppose there’s much a director or the singers can do to alter its essential character. This is Siegfried’s first appearance in the cycle, brought up by Mime in a cramped house; the drawings on the wall behind Siegfried’s top bunk speak of a stunted childhood, but also of his already great interest in animals and nature.

(Wagner apparently saw Siegfried as the comedy part of his tetralogy! Equivalent to the Scherzo in a symphony, did he really think all this was amusing?).

Suspension of disbelief is needed too, for Siegfried’s re-forging of Siegmund’s sword which had been shattered by Wotan so that Hunding could kill him (Siegmund). The conflict between realism and symbolism is never convincingly resolved, for the score calls for the hammering to be part of the music.

Things become more interesting in Act II. It reintroduces Alberich and Wotan, aka The Wanderer to do some scene setting. Mime’s long-term plan to get the Ring is revealed; after Siegfried has killed the dragon, Fafner – Jud Arthur – and got the ring, Mime will kill Siegfried and take the ring.

Though I can do without dragons, here I was spared it, as the dragon was invisible behind a screen with a black hole in its centre; we see just a huge projection of his horrible face, snarling and grimacing, with his hollow voice booming and Siegfried seizes the chance to stab Fafner, still unseen, apart from blood that spurts in the form of red ribbons. Then suddenly a stark naked Jud Arthur appears in full view to utter his final words. A coup de théâtre for sure!

Siegfried was infected with a drop of Fafner’s blood which suddenly enables him to understand Mime’s plotting his death, as well as to understand the song of the Woodbird (Julie Lee Goodwin) who is often hardly seen, but here quite visible, and most enchantingly portrayed.

Meantime, Siegfried fully realises Mime’s intentions and kills him. The Woodbird then offers to lead Siegfried to a new companion – behold! Brünnhilde!

Siegfried awakens Brünnhilde
The third act starts with Wotan/Wanderer calling on Erde to advise him, but the sins of men have clouded her mind and the Wanderer finally realises that the end of his world is nigh.

Then there’s his confrontation with the (still) obnoxious Siegfried, ignorant that he’s talking to his grandfather, and he breaks The Wanderer’s spear (which carries the ‘treaties’ by which the gods rule the world). No more is seen of Wotan.

Siegfried is then guided to Brünnhilde by the Woodbird, safely penetrates the fire and wins her. The love scene evolves in which the brilliantly cast Brünnhilde effects the sudden maturing of Siegfried, making him a nearly credible lover, reviving something of the atmosphere of the opening of Walküre; and Siegfried becomes more adult and tolerable.

David Barmby wrote in Performing Arts Hub that Stefan Vinke as Siegfried was the outstanding voice and character of the night, considering him a highly gifted actor and singer and great interpreter of the Wagnerian heroic tenor roles.  He felt that Vinke both looked the part and was “a fully formed character, embracing boredom, loneliness, impetuousness, naivety, heroism and love”.

Reviews varied about the success of the love scene that soon takes hold. One wrote: “Thereafter follows one of the most impassioned duets in the Cycle, wonderfully realised by Lise Lindstrom and Stefan Vinke, finishing the opera with thrilling elation on a unison high C”.

David Larkin in Bachrtrack wrote: “Even the love duet between Siegfried and Brünnhilde at the end of the opera is far inferior to the fervent exchanges between Siegmund and Sieglinde in Die Walküre.” But then he confesses that he found Siegfried the most uniformly enjoyable part of the Melbourne Ring so far: testimony to the production, singers and musicians. But one called that love music that ends Act III “one of the most impassioned duets in the whole cycle”.

 

Götterdämmerung

Here I will reproduce, more or less as I wrote it, my email home describing what I felt the overwhelming impact of Götterdämmerung; it was truly marvellous.

Part of my more than ever delight was the excellent surtitles (English Wagner scholar, Barry Millington) that were bright and clear, didn’t switch off before a relatively slow reader could read and to take in what they meant. There were little things whose relevance I better understood this time: some of the foretelling by the Rhinemaidens at the beginning; Waltraute (Sian Pendry)’s dramatic and movingly sincere plea to Brünnhilde to give the ring back to the river, which struck me more powerfully than ever before.

I’ve never seen the scenes in the Gibichung palace so clearly portrayed, both through design and histrionically – and I don’t mean simply the palace itself: rather, the handling of the potion that makes Siegfried forget Brünnhilde; the awareness/unawareness of the action; and its implications for the roles of Gunter and Gutrune.

The wedding was the most stunning scene of all as Hagen (Daniel Sumegi) seems utterly convinced that Brünnhilde will just accept the inevitable, marriage to Gunther (Luke Gabbedy); however, her reaction on seeing Siegfried about to marry Gutrune (Taryn Fiebig) was tumultuous, her total dismay and fury was hair-raising. Gunther can sometimes be portrayed as a weak-willed inconsequential figure, but here he stood his ground respectably with Siegfried in their particularly graphic and gory blood-brotherhood ceremony. Yet his apparent obliviousness to what had happened and what he was involved in was more bewildering and stupefying than it is sometimes.

The wedding was the conventional middle class affair of a generation ago perhaps: long tables laden with goodies. It was an astonishing scene as the guests remained oblivious to what had happened and blind to the realities until Brünnhilde really spelled it out. Then there was the hunt, proposed by Hagen so that he can kill Siegfried (to get the ring, inter alia); the killing (by revolver) is nakedly perfunctory and the more shocking for it.

It was formal attire all round with both Hagen and Gunter in modern naval uniforms with the correct numbers of bands on the sleeves for naval commander and captain.

The palace however was a bare gabled framework of posts, all on a revolve which was often used but not excessively. And the burning of Valhalla for which the same edifice served, was lines of gas burners the full length of the posts and beams. Perhaps not such a chaotic conflagration, end-of-the-world feeling that I’ve seen in other productions; there was a bit much light, but the tumultuous orchestra and Brünnhilde’s penetrating voice filled out the visual elements. They used a huge chorus, both men and women, though its scored just for men, but they were a prominent part of the Gibichung court and were very present during the last scene.

I’d like to end with a quote from one of the excellent Australian reviews, from Tim Byrne in Time Out: “The rest of the opera is taken up with Brünnhilde’s final act, her self-immolation on the funeral pyre of her husband and other self. It is a purification by fire that seems to take in all the sacraments: a baptism, a confirmation, a wedding and a last rite. Lindstrom is quite simply phenomenal; her voice penetrates to the heart of every note, glorious in the quiet moments and devastating in the throes of passion.”

The stage for the curtain calls was crammed with singers and extras, and then Inkinen called the entire 130-or-so orchestra to come up on stage too. I’ve never seen that before. And the clapping went on and on. Perhaps this especially spectacular curtain call was to mark the last of a total of twelve performances.

Pietari Inkinen and the orchestra
Before finishing, I must refer to the music; orchestra, chorus (in Götterdämmerung), soloists, all conducted by Pietari Inkinen, late of the NZSO. I might be prejudiced in his favour but here are some of the comments:  (To balance the Trans-Tasman tensions, I did see and delight in the Hamburg Ring a few years ago under Simone Young).

“Conductor Pietari Inkinen was masterly, unfailingly sensitive to the singers and to the musical flow, while the 100-strong [about 130 actually] Melbourne Ring Orchestra was superb.” (The Age)

“Pietari Inkinen directing the Melbourne Ring Orchestra brought a new vigour and enthusiasm to the work with particular mention to be made not only for the famous orchestral passages, particularly in Act 3, but also for the extended, sensuous and lingering chromatic sections at the realisation of love in Act 1, complete with some excellent solos from within the ensemble. The exquisitely delicate suspensions as Wotan leads Brünnhilde to her rock were profound and memorable.” (David Barmby, Performing Arts Hub)

“Together, Inkinen and Armfield have created an inward-looking Ring, low on gimmicks and as darkly still as Neidhardt’s was brightly energetic. Armfield’s premise is to tell the Ring as a tale of the human race today, steadily destroying its own environment while failing tragically at the business of love. Wagner’s magic is translated as show-business sleight of hand.” (Shirley Apthorpe in The Financial Times)

“…the orchestra once again turned in a sterling performance … One of the only places where Inkinen let the orchestra dominate was the culmination of Mime’s hallucinations, where the fiery music drowned Macfarlane’s cries of ‘Fafner’, but this was not dramatically unwarranted. The open pit may throw up challenges in terms of balance, but it has also allowed the perception of fine details of Wagner’s colouristic orchestration: particularly gorgeous was the delicate sound beginning the “Ewig war ich” section of the duet, the tune famously repurposed for the Siegfried Idyll.” (David Larkin in Bachtrack)

“Under Inkinen’s watch, the Melbourne Ring Orchestra is in superb form, in particular the lower brass that is the Ring’s thrilling engine (and shout out once more to the Ring feature that so delighted me back in 2013, the “anvil orchestra”: an offstage room full of, well, playable “anvils” that soundtrack Das Rheingold’s descent into Nibelheim).” (The Guardian, London)

“With Pietari Inkinen’s sublime conducting, and the orchestra’s intense and supple playing, the effect is almost uncanny.” (Tim Byrne in Time Out Melbourne).

“Maestro Pietari Inkinen presides over a massive orchestra of players sourced not only from Orchestra Victoria and the Australian Opera and Ballet Orchestra, but also from ten other national and international orchestras. The effect of the glorious music emanating from the voluminous pit from so many players is difficult to describe. Most striking is the sense that various strains of music are originating from distinct sections of the pit; this effect is usual enough in opera orchestras, but is significantly magnified on this scale. With a profound knowledge of the music, and gentle air of assured confidence, Inkinen capably caters to musicians and singers alike.” …
… and elsewhere: “As the Cycle progresses, the supreme capability of maestro Pietari Inkinen becomes ever clearer. Adroitly managing subtle underscoring and dramatic climaxes alike, Inkinen maintains manageably brisk tempi and supportive accompaniment. Inkinen’s expertly judged conducting shows the incredible musicians at their best without ever drawing undue attention.”  (Simon Parris in Man in Chair).

Even though this revival didn’t attract the nationwide excitement and attention that the earlier 2013 one did, by its end the three cycles had created the sort of communal emotional impact that a football world cup might generate in those who derive their spiritual sustenance from that sort of thing. It’s one of the most wonderful music experiences I’ve had (that is, since my last Ring).