Friday, June 27, 2008

Got weekend plans?

If you're still looking for something fun to do this weekend, let me suggest that you go to the Studio Theater here in Washington and watch their new production, This Beautiful City. The show premiered a couple of weeks ago, and will go to Los Angeles this fall and then move to Broadway after the first of the year.

Last Sunday, my neighbor Joel and I went to see the show, and it was a very enjoyable evening.

This Beautiful City is a rather unusual work that tells the story of Colorado Springs, Colorado, the "Vatican" of the Evangelical Christian movement in the United States, a Denver suburb sitting in the shadow of Pike's Peak. About two years ago, the ensemble and writers went to Colorado Springs to do on-site research and interviews in the run-up to the 2006 elections, thinking they were merely studying conservative Christianity. Fortuitously for them, during their residency, the scandal broke over the alleged drug use and homosexuality of Ted Haggard, national evangelical leader and the pastor/founder of the mega-megachurch, New Life, and that became the focus of their script. The show explores the growth of the evangelical movement in Colorado Springs, the evangelical scandals at the U.S. Air Force Academy, the Colorado anti-gay ballot measures, and, of course, the impact of Haggard's disgrace on his church and other religious institutions in town.

The cast is a three-man, three-woman ensemble called The Civilians, each actor doing multiple roles. The Civilians has done several other productions with a similar technique of research and interviewing to develop the scripts for those shows.

I'm not sure whether to call this show a "musical" or a "play with music." They seem to favor "play," yet there is a lot of music by composer/lyricist Michael Friedman—eleven big songs—so I tend to think of it as a "musical." They had a small instrumental ensemble on stage in the wings off stage right, and cast member Stephen Plunkett also played lead guitar during a lot of the songs as a part of his roles. The music, though, isn't a series of polished, production numbers, and there are not a lot of memorable tunes. Friedman was at his best crafting "praise songs" for the cast to sing when they were portraying members of New Life Church, and I could see those song being developed into actual church music. Some of the cast singing was a little shaky, but I couldn't tell if that was a performance weakness or if that was how the music was written. I really would need to see the show a second time.

The cast members were all very good in their portrayals of their various characters. Marsha Stephanie Blake stood out particularly as an accomplished and effective actress. As the lone African-American cast member, her multiple roles included both a troubled member of a large black Baptist church and the male pastor of that church. Her portrayals were full of depth, nuance, and stage presence, and I think you'll be hearing from her as a major television or motion picture actress in the future.

When I first got tickets to this show, I wasn't sure how they were going to handle the evangelical church members. Was this going to be a send-up of the evangelicals, full of caricatures and stereotypes? So many evangelicals act like caricatures in real life, what with their arm raising in prayer, their esoteric vocabulary, and their constant references to having to pray about every little mundane act in their lives. The cast and writers went to great lengths to try to be fair and balanced in what they were doing, so much so that I thought their portrayals were rather reserved compared to real-life evangelicals I know. The show definitely is not a satire or exposé about evangelicals.

It will be interesting to see how this show evolves during "try-outs" here in Washington and then later Los Angeles. It definitely needs to be trimmed and tightened (running time was about two hours, twenty minutes). There also is no sense of a plot line to the show; it's more of a newsy series of vignettes, with a few short story lines that are followed during the evening. Of course, the plotless musical is nothing new—after all, look at the success of Cats. And, while friction between evangelicals and non-evangelicals in Colorado Springs is noted, there is no "conflict" between any of the characters, except maybe the ongoing, real-life conflict between Ted Haggard and reality. So, with no real plot and no real conflict, once the show ends, the playgoer just leaves, with no sense of joy or sadness or catharsis.

Sets and costuming were simple. During much of the show, cast members merely traded hats or jackets to help establish their current character. The main backdrop of the set is a huge aerial photograph of the city with Pike's Peak in the background. On the sides of the stage are large projection screens much like those used in big evangelical churches to project song words or the preacher during the sermon. The show used the screens for other photographs and diagrams to illustrate what was being discussed, including some actual press photos of Ted Haggard as his scandal was unfolding. Lighting design, also, tended towards the simple, creating both standard stage lighting during the expository dialogue and mimicking church stage lighting during the worship service scenes.

This Beautiful City is a fun show and will provide you with an entertaining evening (or afternoon). I wouldn't mind seeing it again. So, if you don't have anything else planned this weekend, go to Studio Theater.

Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Yevgény Onyégin

One of the challenges of having once been an on-stage opera singer and actor is that it becomes difficult to engage in opera performances as a spectator; the task is even more difficult when the performance is a "concert version" (without costumes, sets, or acting) of the opera. Thus was my challenge Monday evening when we went to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to see the National Symphony Orchestra to see their concert presentation of Tchaikovsky's major opera, Eugene Onegin.

Onegin is not one of the "old warhorses" perpetually done by American opera companies. There are not any whistleable tunes or familiar melodies from some movie, although Tatiana's "Letter Aria" is often done by operatic sopranos in recitals. Most American audiences are not that familiar with the opera; I, however, am. The very last opera I prepared in my limited "career," just before moving to Washington, D.C., was, in fact, Eugene Onegin.

So, off to the concert hall we went. My lawyer friend Jim, who was in his long-distant youth a violinist, accompanied me (much to the disappointment and jealousy of his lady, who was left home alone). We sat on the right side of the house on row S, which is about halfway back, a place where there's usually a good sound blend.

Musical forces were provided by the National Symphony under the baton of soon-to-be retired music director Leonard Slatkin with choral music by The Washington Chorus under the direction of Julian Wachner. The soloists were almost all young Russians.

From the first phrase of the overture, I knew we were in trouble. The NSO has some amazing musicians; there have been times I've heard them and felt it was a transcendent experience; this was not one of those nights. As I have oft bemoaned over the past few years, the orchestra frequently doesn't play well at all for Slatkin. They were languid, even sloppy in their playing. It lacked care, cohesion, and crispness.

Once we finally got to hear the chorus, I was disappointed with them, too. It was a very static, sterile, "park and bark" effort with no sense of drama. And, what's worse, the diction was woefully lacking. Now, Russian is a very difficult language to sing. Russian words have a tendency to start with like a dozen consonants, all of which have to be voiced, and I know from having sung Onegin before that many of those consonant strings are on sixteenth notes at quarter note=144. So, it's not easy. But, all I was hearing from the chorus was a wash of vowel sound, with very, very little consonant expression at all.

The young women soloists were quite fine. Irina Mataeva, clad in a simple, white satin, A-line dress, sang the leading role as Tatiana. She's at the age where she can still play the ingenue credibly, and where she has the maturity and power to sing dramatically when needed. Ekaterina Semenchuk sang the role of her younger sister Olga with a tomboyish playfulness, emphasized all the more by the role's mezzo-soprano tessitura.

I was somewhat more critical of the men. The poet Lensky was sung by the young Daniil Shtoda from the Mariinsky Academy in St. Petersburg. While he had nice vocal sensitivity and a sense of drama, I thought his voice sounded rather constricted and lacked volume and power. He's only about thirty years old—considered "young" for a tenor—so perhaps his power will improve as he matures.

On the other hand, Sergei Leiferkus as the title character had just the opposite problem. Leiferkus has been a major performer for probably thirty years, and his baritone is now more suited to mature roles like Germont pere in La Traviata than to younger, vibrant characters like Onegin. When Leiferkus and Shtoda made their stage entrance together, I was confused at first; Onegin and Lensky are supposed to be good friends; while a little age difference between Russian male friends isn't unusual, when these two men entered, it looked like father and son, if not grandfather and grandson. Later when Leiferkus sang his meeting scene with Mataeva, he had to sing some of the higher notes in falsetto. Even Jim commented at the interval that with Leiferkus's interpretation, Onegin must be a "jerk" and was not a sympathetic, troubled figure at all—that makes it very difficult for the opera to meet its mark at the end of the opera, when the abandoned Onegin must be a tragic figure that garners the audience's pathos.

Local character tenor Robert Baker came out in a white dinner jacket and made quite a favorable impression in his turn as the French poet Triquet. His serio-comic performance gave the concert a much-needed breath of fresh air.

Other soloists included Irina Tchistjakova as Tatiana's mother's Larina, Mzia Nioradze as the nanny Filipyevna, Gustav Andreassen as Prince Gremin, Nathan Herfindahl as the captain, and Grigory Soloviov as Zaretsky.

And, thus went Eugene Onegin. I should have known better than to go to a three hour-long concert opera, especially in a language I don't speak, and especially without any big name stars to make the evening interesting.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Osage County

The play August: Osage County cleaned up at the Tony Awards last night. I really must get to New York some time to see it.

Back in the years before I moved to Washington, I used to live for about five years in a remote little house on sixty acres in the woods out "on the Osage" (so called by the locals because Osage County and the Osage Indian Reservation are conterminous), and I grew up in a town that straddles the Osage and Cherokee Nations. So, I know those people!

Aframe

Friday, June 13, 2008

Extra ticket

I have one extra ticket to hear a concert version (meaning, no costumes, sets, or acting) of the Tchaikovsky opera, Eugene Onegin, performed by the National Symphony Orchestra on Monday night at 8 p.m. at the Kennedy Center here in Washington. It'll be sung in Russian with English surtitles.

Who wants to go with me?