Unsuk Chin, Alice in Wonderland (2007)

Who's got two thumbs and has seen a whopping THREE operas by women? Not to brag, but that's a total of almost exactly 1.5% of the total! Okay, kind of pathetic. But I have to wonder: even if you decided that your only goal was to see as many operas by woman as possible, how many would you be able to accrue? Would you be able to get to triple digits? I have my doubts. It's not a problem that can be individually solved.

Chin is a Korean composer. Is the opera in Korean? We should be so lucky. But okay, MAYBE English makes more sense, given the story. We all know about Alice in Wonderland, right? It's one of those books that everyone at least sort of half knows about, yeah? Well: maybe. But here are two comments on the video. "I love how this focuses on the madness of wonderland and the effects they use to pull off the iconic moments." And: "well...it does capture the essence of Lewis Carroll's story." So what do you think "the essence of Lewis Carroll's story is," exactly? It's not just LOL random, hur hur he must have been on drugs stuff. It's whimsical, obviously, but mostly, it's stuffed full of mathematical and linguistic jokes and concepts. If you don't dig any deeper than "this is weird," you haven't really dug at all. It's a purely surface reading of the text.

Well but so...unfortunately, I actually feel that the libretto here hasn't done any digging either. Because it really is just an unending string of nonsense babble, some of it directly from Carroll, some significantly embellished. Nor does it follow the plot, such as it is, of the book. I have no idea what that dude meant by "the iconic moments" because it mixes everything up; scenes with the Caterpillar Cheshire Cat Mad Hatter and so on are really not anything like what you'd find in the original.

Of course, there's no need to directly follow Carroll's text. It's fine to do your own thing and bring your own interpretation to the story (although people tend not to do anything very interesting with it, if you ask me). But then we have to ask: okay, but what is this opera doing,exactly? And, as indicated above, I think the answer is "not much." I was actually kind of into it at first, but at a certain point I realized that there would be no drama here, that nothing would ever resolve into anything, and I have to confess to you, I got SO BORED. Oh my goodness. Fair's fair, possibly if I'd been more engaged I would've gotten more out of it. But...well, there's a catch-22. The music is sort of minimalistic and dischordant in a way that made me sort of think of Wozzeck,which I recently saw for the second time via the Met's Live in HD. So that would be fine, but the thing about Wozzeckis, I may not fully have my head wrapped around Berg's music, but the story really sucks me in. Not so here.

Yeah, the production is sort of as zany as you'd want, I guess, with most of the characters (including Alice) wearing giant puppet costumes and not showing their faces. It's fine; I just didn't feel like it was in service of much. There is a rather striking climactic moment where she takes off her mask and reveals her face (it's Sally Matthews, last seen by me as the lead in Handel's Deidamia--hard to imagine a more different opera from this than that), and that's kind of cool, but...eh. Honestly, I can't really recommend this to anyone, and I would be extremely reluctant to see a hypothetical Chin Through the Looking-Glass.