Man, no sooner do I say that something is the first opera I've seen with an all-female cast than I see another. Although admittedly, this one isn't as "pure" as Suor Angelica in that regard. Orfeo was originally sung by a castrato and is today sometimes sung by a countertenor, but here it was a mezzo-soprano. Also, there men in the chorus. BUT IT STILL COUNTS. Kind of. What to the evs, foax.
In a baroque opera like this, there's always going to be a lot of dancing and whatnot. This is...I hesitate to call it a "modern-day" production, since a mythological story like this kind of exists in a historical null-space where talking about a specific time period isn't meaningful, but at any rate, they were in modern dress. The other thing of note is that there's a large chorus (a hundred-odd members, probably); here, they were on the three different levels of a big three-tiered platform thingie, and--this is the main thing--they were each dressed as a different historical figure. Some were recognizable, more or less, some not; but we have Abraham Lincoln, Gandhi, Cleopatra, Frederick Douglass, Jonn of Arc, &c. The idea--per the director (who characterized himself as an "opera queen") is that these are all the spirits of these people observing and commenting on the action. The fact that they come from different eras of history emphasizes the ahistorical nature of the whole thing. This is a cool idea in theory, I think, but in practice you do have to wonder whether it was actually worth the effort, to do this thing that absolutely nobody is going to appreciate as a whole. Well, maybe that's not necessary.
Still, honestly, I didn't find the business of the production that rewarding. The dancing left me largely unmoved. Still! It's redeemed by the performances themselves. There are actually only three foreground singers: Orfeo, Euridice, and Amour, the god who gives them another chance. You almost certainly know the basic plot: Orfeo mourns his lost love, goes to Hades to retrieve her with the stipulation that he can't look at her until they've gotten back to the surface (or tell her why); he does, of course, but--veering from the original story a bit--Amour decides to give him a mulligan, what the heck, and they are happily reunited.
All three of these singers are pretty great. Stephanie Blythe as Orfeo did--to me--take a little getting used to; this largish woman en travesti is...well, a bit unusual. But I did, it is no joke, get swept away in the end such that that no longer mattered. Danielle de Niese is appropriately ethereally lovely as Euridice, and a very forceful soprano to boot. Finally, Heidi Grant Murphy is a hoot as Amour, dressed in slacks, a pink polo shirt spangled with glitter, and intentionally (you've gotta assume, right?) chintzy-looking Cupid wings. The best part of the production, for me, was the only one with no extraneous singers on stage, where Orfeo and Euridice are escaping from hell as she begs him to look at her. Blythe's and de Niese's voices intermingle most bewitchingly. And Gluck--a composer you don't think about every day, or at least I don't--wrote some great baroque music. I like. I should watch Monteverdi's Orfeofor comparison purposes.
You know, I feel like as long as they were going to make this modern-day-ish and have a woman play Orfeo, they might have dispensed with having said woman in drag.
ReplyDelete(Feel free to mock me for my lack of consistency re: our previous discussion. But my excuse is that my line of thought goes something like "I'd rather you didn't do this thing. But since you're going to be changing so much anyway, you might as well do this thing all the way through and do it right.")
I dunno. Women playing men is a long operatic tradition, so even if this specific opera wasn't written in that way, it seems to fit.
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