Chekhov Another Winner

Chance meeting is everything in this life at times. A couple of weeks back I found myself sitting in the VIA Rail train to Toronto across from an actor working over the details of a script. As a result of our conversation, I found myself last Thursday night in the Palace Theatre in London, Ontario, watching the preview performance of Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike by Christopher Durang, staged by the London Community Players.

Anyone not familiar with this comedy is probably wondering about the titles of the play and of my review. The simple explanation: the play tells a story of three siblings whose parents were university professors and community theatre actors, and loved Chekhov -- so they named their children after his characters. And I can never resist the urge to pun.

The script is also littered with allusions to Chekhov's plays -- all throwaways, in terms of the main line of the story. But the real under-resemblance is the presence of a collection of middle-aged people who feel they have wasted their lives, gathered together and sniping at each other between bouts of self-pity. But be assured: the sniping is funny as you please, not as dreary and depressing as Chekhov's own plays can be (he's never been one of my favourite playwrights -- can you tell?).

Durang's script takes me to one of my favourite places to have fun: watching a really good team of actors get up on stage and deliberately impersonate a really bad team of actors. That also brings up the equally tricky proposition that, when a script calls for totally over-the-top movement and vocal work, there's a frighteningly small space between "over the top" and "too far over the top." Maybe only one of the three siblings is an actor, but it's quite obvious that all three were raised by actors -- a significant point that the production definitely brings to light.

This production is a winner. Even with a few rough edges, and a small, hard-to-warm-up preview audience, the show was drawing plenty of laughs by the time we got to the second act.

At the beginning we meet Sonia (Dinah Watts) and Vanya (George Jolink), both middle-aged, both unmarried, and both frumpy and grumpy. Watts was particularly good here as she veered in and out of the edges of reality (her repeated "I am a wild turkey" a never-failing delight). Jolink wasn't given much to work with in this scene except to play the patient martyr to her endless complaints, but he did it well, and did it with a good deal more variety and texture than one might expect.

Linda Worsley entered next as Cassandra, the cleaning woman, and brought in her train another whole chain of theatrical inside references -- this time, to the world of Greek tragedy. Her name, too, proved to be no accident as she immediately began spouting oracular prophecies consisting of a mish-mash of Shakespeare and Aescylus, with some original material sneaked in from time to time. She warns Sonia and Vanya of trouble to come, and repeatedly tells them to "Beware of Hootie Pie!" None of which makes any sense to them -- like the ancient Cassandra's auditors, they pay no heed to her weird statements. Worsley in full prophetic flight, with arms windmilling furiously, was a sight to behold, and with her trumpet-of-doom vocal tone she had no trouble making herself heard to the back of the house -- and probably beyond.

The next arrival is the other sister, Masha (Caroline Dolny Guerin), a self-identified Hollywood "star." With her comes her hot young boytoy, Spike (Darryl Rayner). Dolny Guerin immediately projected the self-centred monster of ego, and then masterfully let the armour slip just a bit at a time until we could discern the hugely insecure woman under the controlled surface. Rayner, on the other hand, very quickly showed off Spike's manipulative colours, projecting raw animal energy so strongly at everyone in the room that the play began to look for a few minutes like Entertaining Mr. Sloane. He also made a comic highlight of the scene where Masha tells him to put his clothes back on like a striptease in reverse, and he takes her at her word -- all but seducing Vanya right there in the living room while very slowly getting dressed. A classic portrayal of "I am sexy and I know it."

The last character we meet is the likable ingénue of the show, the niece of the couple next door. As a likable ingénue, she is, of course, called (what else?) Nina. Nina is awed by the chance to meet her idol, the great Hollywood actress Masha, but with her sterling common sense ends up befriending Vanya and (later) Sonia. Hailey Hill gave a clear, consistent performance of what is definitely the most two-dimensional part in the script, and made as believable a character as the playwright would allow her to do.

And that's just the introductory material! From there on, the play -- like any good black comedy -- spins into more and more preposterous but perfectly natural outcomes of this setup. A mysterious play within a play (inspired by Konstantin's play in The Seagull), a complete set of Snow White costumes, a special kind of pincushion, Maggie Smith, a society party, a talking molecule, and Hootie Pie -- all play their part in the steadily increasing lunacy.

My favourite transformation was the moment when the dowdy Sonia suddenly reappeared as a glamour star. Watts gave a stunning performance in these scenes, both voice and physicality altered almost beyond recognition.

Without giving anything else away, I just want to commend four more great moments.

The hilarious opening scene of the second act, with the special pincushion.

The beautifully orchestrated unison crying scene.

The lengthy phone call, so believable that I was actually silently rooting in my seat for her to say "Yes" -- and gave a big fist pump when she did. Now, that's total involvement theatre!

And above all, that incredible monologue. This was George Jolink's crowning moment as Vanya. Vocally superb, with wonderful shading and gradation of tone, ranging the gamut from sad nostalgia to a slow burn and one definite outburst of anger. I'd like to see Jolink do less twisting and turning from side to side, and less half-facing to the audience in this long speech. Since the focus of his outburst is Spike, it's not really necessary for him to keep including the others in his big rant. The speech would have been better served by having Vanya keep driving in on Spike from every possible direction.

The rant quickly and directly leads to the denouement which proved once and for all that, really, everyone should have heeded Cassandra's warning to "beware of Hootie Pie!" And then, a very satisfying and naturally achieved settled -- perhaps even happy -- ending.

Laura Sepulveda's set design appeared unnecessarily complex at first glance, but the upper gallery level across the back proved to be well worth while when it came time for characters to "Make an Entrance" as opposed to simply making an entrance.

Director Jeremy Hewitson has crafted a well-paced performance, making effective use of the stage's spaces (with the exception already noted), and almost completely avoiding the trap of too much over the top. It's a rousingly funny evening of theatre, thought-provoking with it, and well worth anyone's time to see.

Vanya and Sonia and Masha and Spike is on stage at the Palace Theatre until February 25.

The Magical Mystery Opera

Fair warning up front:  this might well be the longest

review I've ever written of a single live performance.

But let's face it Wagner's Parsifal lasts for well

over 4 hours, not counting intermissions.  So naturally,

I have a great deal more that I need to say!

It's taken me just shy of fifty years to move from my first acquaintance with a recording of Wagner's final music drama, Parsifal, to my first live performance -- on Saturday afternoon at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

The first recording I ever heard was Sir Georg Solti's Vienna studio production for Decca Records, a performance which to this day still carries an unmistakable and powerful aura of mystery and inspiration from conductor, singers and players.  There was a comment in the notes to that recording that I've never forgotten because it sums up the nature of the work so perfectly (sadly, I've forgotten the author's name): 

"The music of Parsifal is wide and deep, and long too,

but not too long if you are interested.  It is not,

sagas are not, for people in a hurry."

Considering that I've been waiting for near half a century, the only thing I was hurrying for was to make sure I was seated before the curtain went up!  Because, of course, no matter how magical a work of music sounds on a recording, there is always an extra dimension of involvement and participation when you sit down with an audience of hundreds -- thousands, really -- to witness a live performance.

Having said that, though, I must go on to add that any production which does not recognize the mystical, ritual aura of the piece is going to fall flat with a resounding thud -- at least, as far as I am concerned.

The Metropolitan Opera's production probably shocked a lot of traditionalists by putting the characters into more-or-less modern clothes, and eschewing the realistic scenery of the Met's previous staging.  I did see one patron walk out after the prelude to the third act, the scene which departs most drastically from traditional expectations.

But there's no question that Canadian director François Girard captured the ritual aspect of the work in his staging of the first and third acts (the second act was a bit more problematic at first).  And there was only two points in the entire span of this 4.5-hour opera where the staging failed to illustrate the sung text, which for me is a key point.

The ritual aspect of the performance was strongest in the first act, and it was in the first act that the conjunction of some of Wagner's most deeply-felt music with the incredibly apt stage pictures reduced me to tears time and time again.  I know that sounds unprofessional, and probably unmasculine to some, but too bad -- that's the impact this performance had on me.

Michael Levine's set design consisted of a steeply raked surface of bare and irregular grey rock for Acts One and Three.  In Act Two, Klingsor's magic domain appeared as a narrow reddish rock slot canyon such as one might see in the American southwest.  In both sets, the cyclorama backdrop carried various projections of moving clouds, planets and the moon (as seen from space), and non-specific swirling patterns which resembled the celebrated "light show" from 2001: A Space Odyssey, a film which just happens to be fifty years old this year.

The other key visual element of the production is the blood.  Some people may cringe, but Wagner's libretto underlines the importance of this symbol regularly.  Where Girard really went to town on this particular element is in Act 2, where blood is splashed all around the stage by the end of the act, including all women's dresses and the bed.

Thibault Vancraenenbroek's costumes consisted of business suits and white shirts for the men, and plain black or white dresses for the women -- all basically modern in appearance.

Girard's stated intention was to bring us into the production in some way, so the opening prelude was accompanied by a scrim projection of the interior of the Met staring back at us.  Against this, the cast -- seated in neat rows -- gradually appeared, and then as gradually got up and carried their chairs to form a double circle, on stage left, of all the men.  The women, much more unconventionally, formed into a looser grouping upstage right (in Wagner's libretto, no women appear -- except for Kundry -- outside of Act Two).

The use of those seated circles immediately gave a ritual feeling to the performance.  The feeling was accentuated by the positions and stylized gestures used by all the male chorus during Gurnemanz's long narrative of Act One, and during the scenes with Amfortas and Parsifal.

Meanwhile, the female "chorus" (remembering that they do not sing in this act) used gestures and positions that followed the movements of Kundry when she appeared.

Given this classically poised manner of staging, the entire scene of the Grail and the Last Supper carried an emotional punch that the older, more realistic version lacked (I've seen it on video).

The second act opened with ranks of women standing between silver spears anchored in the ground, and this was certainly a gripping visual image.  What was less gripping was the similar use of stylized gestures in this act.  Klingsor's opening scene, and summoning of Kundry, operates on a high level of overt dramatic action which clearly separates it from the preceding ritual in Act One.  But this production conveyed a similar ritual nature in this scene, and that took most of the wind out of the drama's sails.  Even Klingsor, with his slow and elegant movements, came across more like a priest than an evil sorcerer.

Problems were exacerbated even further in the Flowermaidens scene.  The women's white shift dresses conveyed nothing of the "flower" appearance Parsifal describes, and the ritualized gestures convey nothing of the sensual atmosphere conjured by the music and text.  Only in the very last minute before Kundry appeared did the women become at all seductive in their approach to Parsifal.

In the final act, the disorder of the Grail Knights was aptly illustrated by the messed-up appearance of the original set.  During the lengthy prelude, we watched as one of the knights was buried, while the hopelessness of the others was also clearly visible.

Here, in Act 3, the other disconnect from the original text came with the well-loved Good Friday Spell, where music and words alike describe the appearance of the flowery meadows on the most holy morning of the year.  I'm glad the designers didn't opt for fake cutesy flowers suddenly appearing out of the bare rock surface, but the discrepancy from what we saw to what was sung was hard to miss.

The concluding scene of Titurel's funeral in some measure resurrected the powerful atmosphere of Act 1, and the director's most intriguing inspiration was the idea of having the redeemed Kundry be the one to open the shrine and remove the Grail.  An equally beautiful and heart-rending further thought was having Gurnemanz move downstage to catch Kundry and lower her gently to the floor as she dies, released at long last by Parsifal's constancy from the eternal life she was cursed to lead.

Now, what about the performers?

Trust the Met to assemble a powerhouse cast of incredible singers who know exactly where they are going and what they are doing in such a challenging work.

First and foremost: the opera may be called Parsifal, but the singer on whom it stands or falls is the bass who takes on the role of the senior Knight of the Grail, Gurnemanz.  For a bass, this role has to stand as equal in difficulty to the role of Siegfried in the tenor repertoire.  René Pape did full justice to the part, with his rich vocal tone and assured handling of Wagner's often-complex lines.  If his voice began to sound a little tired by the end of the performance, who could blame him?  But his quieter singing was as beautiful as his louder passages were powerful, and his diction was definitely the clearest of the entire cast.

Next in my esteem is Evelyn Herlitzius, making her Met debut in the role of Kundry.  Both as a singer and as a dramatic actress, she ruled the stage in Act 2, and then took on an appropriately less overt style in Acts 1 and 3.  Her projection of all the shifting tides of emotion in her attempted seduction of Parsifal was one of the dramatic highlights of the production -- just as her sudden plunge down two octaves without a hint of swooping or sliding was a vocal highlight.

Peter Mattei gave a strong, dramatically clear performance as Amfortas.  Seldom can the pain of this tormented man have been so strongly and clearly illustrated by the staging, but Mattei gave equal weight to bringing that torment into his voice and succeeded magnificently, especially in the opera's final scene.

Tenor Klaus Florian Vogt made a fine Parsifal, fully equal to the challenges of the drama in Act 2 while nicely underplaying the naïve simpleton of Act 1.  His finest moment was right where it needed to be, at the crisis of Act 2 when he suddenly starts up crying "Amfortas!  Die Wunde!"

Baritone Evgeny Nikitin was effective as Klingsor, especially in conveying the mocking anger and unappeasable rage he felt towards the Grail Knights and Titurel in particular.

By no means an also-ran was basso Alfred Walker in the brief but important off-stage role of Titurel.  The rich dark colour of his voice contrasted well with the onstage bass of Pape.

The various smaller roles of sentries and knights were all strongly cast from within the company, and all added lustre to the overall quality of the performance.

The passages involving offstage singers, solo and choral, were all beautifully sung and balanced, but with no clear sense of the direction from which the voices were coming.  It would be nice to hear that the heavenly messenger, identified simply as "A Voice", was coming from somewhere above -- perhaps in the flies above the auditorium.  But that's a minor detail.

Which brings me to the Metropolitan Opera Chorus, prepared by Donald Palumbo.  There are very few operas in the repertoire, certainly none by Wagner, where the role of the choral singers is so critical.  Throughout the piece, the singing and acting by the chorus members was spot-on, and the ambience of the work was greatly enhanced by their contribution.  A particular highlight was the dark double chorus processional at the beginning of the final scene.

The Metropolitan Opera's house orchestra, under Music Director designate Yannick Nézet-Séguin, gave a memorable rendition of every page of a score littered with even more subtle danger spots than any of Wagner's earlier operas.  Throughout the work, Nézet-Séguin chose appropriate tempi, and achieved careful balance with the singers. Only in the Flowermaidens scene, did I feel that he might have been marginally too fast, but the majestic speeds of the two great transformation scenes more than compensated. Best of all, Nézet-Séguin managed to hold some volume in reserve until that magnificent moment in Act 3, right before the Good Friday scene, where the "Dresden Amen" mounts to the skies after Gurnemanz's invocation of Parsifal as the new King of the Grail Knights. This was easily the most stirring orchestral passage of the entire performance.

Toronto Symphony 2017-2018 # 4: Romance of the Tone Poem

The tone poem or symphonic poem was the pre-eminent form invented during the Romantic era of European musical history, and was practised by many composers throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century.  Famous creators of multiple tone poems include Liszt, Dvorak, Smetana, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Richard Strauss -- to name only a few.  Some commentators even insist that the earlier concert overtures of Beethoven (particularly the Leonora # 2 & 3) and the later symphonies of Mahler are tone poems in all but name.

Throughout my concert-going career, tone poems have almost exclusively been a one-to-a-concert item.  But this week's Toronto Symphony Orchestra programme included no less than three tone poems, and a striking and diverse collection they made indeed.

First up was Lyadov's The Enchanted Lake, Op. 62.  The orchestra beautifully captured the sound world of this rarely-heard piece which murmurs quietly but mysteriously throughout its length, never rising above a mezzo-forte -- if indeed it even goes that far.  The term "diaphanous" perfectly describes both Lyadov's music and the orchestra's subtly-coloured performance of it.

The next work was the three-part Nights in the Gardens of Spain, for piano and orchestra, an unusual example of a tone poem which includes a concerto-scaled part for a solo instrument.  Despite the large solo part -- and with all due respect to Ingrid Fliter's skillful performance -- this most definitely is not a concerto.  You just have to look at the piano part -- mostly arpeggio elaborations of themes presented at the same time by the orchestra -- to see that the piano here is a part of the ensemble rather than an opposing dramatic voice.  But no matter.  Fliter and conductor Juraj Valčuha partnered in a sensuous, evocative performance of Manuel de Falla's inspired score, ranging from the perfumed darkness of the Generalife gardens at the beginning to the celebratory party atmosphere of the concluding Mountains of Cordoba.

After the intermission we heard the first successful entry in Richard Strauss' chain of tone poems, Don Juan, Op. 20.  This is music of great energy, beginning with the uprushing opening notes -- a Romantic-era nod backwards to the "Mannheim rocket" of the classical period.  Orchestra and conductor alike certainly caught that energy with an impressively crisp and precise launch.  As always, I hoped to be convinced of a clear through line tying the piece together -- and hoped in vain.  That's a near-impossible problem wished by the composer onto the interpreters of most of his tone poems, with their disjointed structures arising from the episodic programmes or (in this case) no stated programme at all.  But the players certainly gave it their all, and the final dying-away achieved great emotional intensity.

The concert wrapped up with a suite of excerpts from Richard Strauss' most successful opera, Der Rosenkavalier, Op. 59.  The suite is uncredited, but is generally believed to have been created by the conductor Artur Rodzinski, who led its first performance.

It's only natural that this suite zeroes in on the numerous waltz fragments which pepper this beguiling operatic score.  The problem is that they remain, as in the full stage work, fragments.  But the arranger has devised the sequence and the linking passages with much care.  The one disappointment for me is that the suite doesn't end as the opera does -- with the great trio and love duet followed by the brief, light-hearted scherzando passage up to the final chords.

Players and conductor alike let the seductive waltz rhythms expand and sweep along in the most organic way, and the instrumental colours of the score shone out with gleaming purity.  This suite brought the concert to a most rewarding conclusion.

Awesome Anthology of Dance

Two weeks back, Toronto company Kaeja d'Dance presented an unusual and truly effective evening of dance entitled Solo Dance Xchange as the second phase of their multi-year project, Xtraordinary TO Dances.  I'll do the usual honours right up front.

Conflict of Interest Alert:  My nephew, Robert Stephen, was one of the dancers.

I wanted to put that right at the outset, because I would never have heard of this programme or gotten a ticket for it unless Robert had told me about it.  This kind of performance isn't usually on my radar, as my interest gravitates on the whole (but not entirely) towards more classical art forms.  

The concept of the co-artistic directors of Kaeja d'Dance, Alan and Karen Kaeja, was simultaneously complex and inspired.  The project began last year with the production of a film featuring 22 leading dancers from Toronto.  Each one was filmed in a short improvised dance segment in a location of his/her choice. 

Since the project began with the film, entitled XTOD: Moments in Reel Time, the show did likewise.  We took our seats in the theatre of Streetcar Crowsnest, a relatively new arts performance space in a modern condo building at Dundas and Carlaw in east Toronto.  The film lasted about 25 minutes, from which one can easily tell that the individual segments were indeed brief, and the linking moments between segments likewise.  For all that, this short "documentary" -- if that's the right word -- brought together beautiful camera work, creative editing, and evocative background soundscapes with the variety of locations chosen.  Whether by accident or design, all of the dance segments were filmed outdoors and all but two or three of the dancers chose locations involving nature in the city -- flowing water, trees, shrubs, the lakeshore.

After the intermission, each of the dancers presented a 2-3 minute solo dance inspired in some way by the film segment of one of the other dancers.  Names had been drawn from a hat, and each dancer then spent some time conversing with her/his "muse" about the sources for the flavour of the filmed improv solo.  Each dancer then created the short live segment for the performance, using some aspect of that interview or of the film as a point of departure.

The whole performance was effectively counterpointed with very creative lighting work by Simon Rossiter, and soundscape music by Eric Cadesky, Laurel MacDonald, and Phil Strong -- all of which was improvised during the space of a night or two before the first of the three performances.  

I've gone to the trouble of explaining all this in so much detail, because it helps to show my faithful readers why a conventional review of such a performance is incredibly difficult to write.

As the dance segments unfolded in front of us, one by one, I was struck by the incredible diversity of what we were seeing.  Throughout the evening, dichotomy was the rule of the day.  Some segments were deadly serious, and some were comical.  High-speed energy was succeeded by slow, controlled movement.  Props from sticks to tables to skateboards were used by some, while others simply moved within the space.  Elaborate costumes were followed by simple clothes and -- in two cases -- by complete nudity.  Some segments were impressionistic in the extreme, while others presented much more concrete images (Atlas holding up the world was my immediate impression in one case).

Styles of dance, by intention, ran the full gamut.  Mi Young Kim's traditional Korean dance  gave us the height of stylization.  Robert Stephen took us into the world of ballet.  Esmeralda Enrique brought Spanish flamenco into the mix.  Shawn Byfield presented an energetic tap-dancing performance.  Other performers explored the infinite variety of movement possible in the liberating environment of what is loosely called "modern" dance.

By way of review, all I can really say is that this lengthy sequence of dances (about 90 minutes) remained totally engrossing and fascinating for me throughout.  Equally fascinating was the performer talkback at the end.  Each dancer was asked to name their "muse" and briefly speak about what they took from that person to work with.  There followed an audience Q&A session, which brought out the fact that these quasi-improvised performances kept growing and changing from night to night of the 3-show run.  (I attended the final show).

During the performances, I had been looking for influences of a visible kind.  But in the talkback, it became plain that many of the dancers had taken up their muse's influence at a more subtle level, rather than making it overtly visible.  None the less, I remain convinced that some of those influences spilled over into more than one of the other performers' solo segments.  I wonder if that was another by-product of the continuing growth and change of the dances through the three performances?