I was just rereading the Met's plot synopsis of Forza. Either late-19th-century Italians had masterful memories or the opera houses had scoreboards so that the audience could keep track of the plot and characters. ("So, you say Leonora has already sung three arias and it's not even the end of Act I yet? Incredible!")
I guess, maybe, in our TV-plot-soaked society, we're used to bad writing. We've learned to recognize it. "Sarah Conner Chronicles" on Fox? Yep. Pure drivel. "Survivor IV"? Supposed to be real, but c'mon! They haven't picked regular people to be on that show since the original. "Walker: Texas Ranger" (on Hallmark family channel for some unfathomable reason)? Chuck Norris: Who started in American "B" chop-suey movies and went downhill from there; best acting so far is done in the "Classy, but Strong" Honda commercial where he doesn't say anything. There's a reason "Walker" is on an obscure cable network!
But in the 19th century, most people, if they were able to read at all, didn't have the National Enquirer at the local market. So they had to read books and treatises and things like that from the great classicists of the time. They hadn't read any trash, so a plot like Forza would seem very intriguing, different. There was probably a cultural predisposition, too. Americans don't have a whole lot of banishments in their history. (I vote we start with "W.") But Italians, aside from the fact that they have about 1,000 years more worth of history behind them, are used to hearing about a princess or marquis being turned out, and every family's gone through at least one Hatfields-vs.-McCoys blood feud at one point or another. So maybe opera plots would make more sense to them.
In addition, the world has gradually "sped up" over the years. The last vestige of arts patience was probably with Wagner operas or Mahler symphonies and things begin to get shorter and shorter from there on out. Nowadays, a pop star can't possibly write a 6-minute song and expect it to get any airplay. You can't even find an unabridged version of "Stairway to Heaven" on the radio anymore, despite this or that station's "Classic Rock" moniker. No network with any sense would even dare propose a miniseries in this day and age.
I think about the early American settlers and how they endured months and months and months of hardship and toil just to get where they could find a home; today, I get irritated when I have to go all the way out to Farragut to check on the remodeling my late parents' house. Oh, that Cedar Bluff and Turkey Creek Traffic! I'm certain that any Oregon-bound conestoga wagon driver would be equally vexed at having to drive all of 15 minutes on a well-ordered, extremely smooth and relatively flat interstate highway along with a thousand other wagons... or would he or she? They probably wouldn't enjoy passing convenience stores every two minutes, too. I, likewise, would merely laugh if I saw a snake bite my Honda Accord's tire. It would more than likely kill the snake rather than vice-versa. The to-be Oregonians' horse would be another matter entirely.
So, yes, maybe operas don't make sense to the modern acclimated mind. Think about how little we know about Biblical times, how we struggle to understand why people did what they did in that period. Will Verdi's operas be collected and published a thousand years in the future? Will anyone even begin to understand them then? I imagine people asking things like: Why would Don Carlo want to kill Alvaro? The whole thing was just an accident. Can't he see that? And, after all, Alvaro does make his sister very happy. Why would Don Carlo be so hung up on the color of Alvaro's skin? Why didn't he let the authorities track Alvaro down instead of traipsing all over Europe haphazardly trying to run into his father's murderer? And c'mon! He doesn't even recognize the guy when he next sees him?! Plastic surgery must have been more advanced than was originally thought back then, but Verdi makes no mention of Alvaro's operation. (There is that surgeon character in there, though.) That would be the only way Don Carlo wouldn't recognize him, right? Wonder how many people Don Carlo killed because he thought that they were Alvaro? Seems like that kind of anger and indiscriminant use of a weapon would get him locked away in a Super-max pretty quick.
Ah, well, I just get paid for acting the story out. Not my job to play Roger Ebert... or even Tom Eberts, for that matter... and attempt to understand Verdi's plots.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
It's Always the Guys
Wow! An unexpected (Monday) night off for the guys. As Don said in his email, "A rare occurrence." Normally us guys are there, seems like, 24/7, or at the very least every night. I keep waiting and hoping for an opera, or at least a scene. where the men aren't involved and, thus, get to come late or leave early. I think the last all-x-chromosome scene we had was in Flying Dutchman, way back in 2000. I suppose in an art form that is largely male-dominated it's to be expected. But it would be nice for the guys to occasionally get a night off while the women toil away. Since I don't see Dialogues of the Carmelites being performed in the near future, I guess I'll just have to dream. (Trust me, you thought Salome was a snoozer!)
Here we are in the second week of staging and we haven't even met the full principal cast yet. What kind of opera did Verdi think he was writing? Granted, tons of chorus numbers have been cut to get the show in under the three-hour musician's union "service" time allotment, but this is just plain weird not knowing who your co-performers are. Wouldn't it be strange to not have met a principal until opening night:
"Excuse me, you don't look familiar. Are you hear as someone's guest?"
"Oh, no. I'm so-and-so and I'm playing so-and-so."
Awkwarrrrd!
Ah, well. Hard to believe we'll be moving into the theater and doing the stiz this weekend. I see we're doing the sitz on Sunday at 2:45 and then Teching the first two acts at 8. Waitaminute! The only chorus in the first two acts are the men! Great planning! Superbowl Sunday, perhaps the most masculine holiday (C'mon! It's time we admitted it) of the year, and us guys are going to be at opera while the womenfolk sit at home and attempt to ignore the next to last vestige of football until August (the Pro Bowl being the last). I mean, it's being touted as an incredible mismatch and, statistically, will probably be a rout, but a bad day with an uncompetitive game on the tube is better than a good one without a game.
Besides, as a Vol fan, you gotta feel some kind of genetic kinship for Eli, and even if you're not comfortable with that, he's a former SEC player. Surely Eli won't embarrass himself any worse than he and Peyton (and Archie and Olivia) do in that goofy "Double Stuff (Oreo) Racing League" commercial. (Cooper and the dogs, apparently, were the only family members with enough sense to bail on that one.)
Well, opera time. Gotta go. Sorry about the spazzed-out entry.
Here we are in the second week of staging and we haven't even met the full principal cast yet. What kind of opera did Verdi think he was writing? Granted, tons of chorus numbers have been cut to get the show in under the three-hour musician's union "service" time allotment, but this is just plain weird not knowing who your co-performers are. Wouldn't it be strange to not have met a principal until opening night:
"Excuse me, you don't look familiar. Are you hear as someone's guest?"
"Oh, no. I'm so-and-so and I'm playing so-and-so."
Awkwarrrrd!
Ah, well. Hard to believe we'll be moving into the theater and doing the stiz this weekend. I see we're doing the sitz on Sunday at 2:45 and then Teching the first two acts at 8. Waitaminute! The only chorus in the first two acts are the men! Great planning! Superbowl Sunday, perhaps the most masculine holiday (C'mon! It's time we admitted it) of the year, and us guys are going to be at opera while the womenfolk sit at home and attempt to ignore the next to last vestige of football until August (the Pro Bowl being the last). I mean, it's being touted as an incredible mismatch and, statistically, will probably be a rout, but a bad day with an uncompetitive game on the tube is better than a good one without a game.
Besides, as a Vol fan, you gotta feel some kind of genetic kinship for Eli, and even if you're not comfortable with that, he's a former SEC player. Surely Eli won't embarrass himself any worse than he and Peyton (and Archie and Olivia) do in that goofy "Double Stuff (Oreo) Racing League" commercial. (Cooper and the dogs, apparently, were the only family members with enough sense to bail on that one.)
Well, opera time. Gotta go. Sorry about the spazzed-out entry.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
A New Year, A New Production
New Year's. The cold, clean air is cut by cheers from numerous stadiums as college bowl games are played out in a seemingly endless progression of television hype; whereupon, the fans come to the numbing thought that the season is over! The fever pitch of the NFL season, content with Sundays, Monday nights, and an occasional Thursday night, begins to monopolize football fans on now-vacated Saturdays; finally pundits can begin their speculation on Superbowl teams backed up by myriad statistics and not just their "gut instinct." College basketball teams, content to crush hugely inferior teams for the past two months, now turn the season toward the dreaded foes, conference opponents.
And, for those of us involved in Knoxville Opera, there comes the realization that the holidays are over and, yes, our (unmemorized) music is buried somewhere under several hundred Christmas cards and the first rehearsals of the new year are only days away.
Anyway, that was a month ago. Now, we're already a full week into staging. (One would hope that music has been memorized by now, though there are always a few laggards.) And, with the always-active staging of Carroll Freeman, comes the realization that we ate waaaaaaaayyyyy too many Christmas cookies over the holidays and are huffing and puffing about the rehearsal stage, having to make the decision between sucking in sweet oxygen to keep cell in our bodies alive or singing the choruses with appropriate gusto. Oh, well. We didn't need those brain cells anyway. We didn't lose any more than we did with a week of binge drinking our freshman year in college. Eventually, we'll start to drool out of our mouths and wonder why that's happening, but by then we'll believe that it's 1907 and we're singing in the Met chorus, doing Butterfly with Farrar, Homer, and Caruso, with Puccini himself in the audience.
Ah! Madama Butterfly. Now there's a fairly understandable plot, despite all the years that passed during the second intermission. At least Puccini used plot lines that, while rather melodramatic (Duh! It's Puccini!) and trite, were at least plausible. I would like to think that worst screenwriter in Hollywood--that is, the ones that haven't "made it" yet and, thus, are still non-union and writing--could pull together a less complex, believable, and coherent plot than the one Verdi used for Forza. One might posit that Forza's plot line is as, uh... "great" as the music to the Hymn of the Nations. At least we have the amazing plot twists that we've come to expect from Verdi to fall back on. We know, even before the curtain goes up, that the lead character is either going to unknowingly kill a sibling or child or the sibling or child will unknowingly kill them. That's a given, right? M. Knight Shyamalan should write plot twists so well. I suppose that, had UFOs and aliens been a source of discussion in mid-19th-century Italy, we'd probably be watching a Verdiesque adaptation of Signs. We'll leave that up to a future episode of The Twilight Zone or the next incarnation of Jean Cocteau to imagine.
You know, it's kind of nice to be able to work with the same director again and again. You see facets, subtleties in the various productions that you might've missed had we been on the one-opera-one-director treadmill that was previous de rigeur at KO. Carroll is, more or less, a known quantity, which is not to say that Carroll's productions are staid and predictable. I mean, it's like, over the holidays, as you're eating those previously-alluded-to Christmas cookies, you know you're thinking, "Oh, man! I'm going to pay for eating these when Carroll starts staging us at the end of January. I'll be so out of breath." Caveat emptor.
And, for those of us involved in Knoxville Opera, there comes the realization that the holidays are over and, yes, our (unmemorized) music is buried somewhere under several hundred Christmas cards and the first rehearsals of the new year are only days away.
Anyway, that was a month ago. Now, we're already a full week into staging. (One would hope that music has been memorized by now, though there are always a few laggards.) And, with the always-active staging of Carroll Freeman, comes the realization that we ate waaaaaaaayyyyy too many Christmas cookies over the holidays and are huffing and puffing about the rehearsal stage, having to make the decision between sucking in sweet oxygen to keep cell in our bodies alive or singing the choruses with appropriate gusto. Oh, well. We didn't need those brain cells anyway. We didn't lose any more than we did with a week of binge drinking our freshman year in college. Eventually, we'll start to drool out of our mouths and wonder why that's happening, but by then we'll believe that it's 1907 and we're singing in the Met chorus, doing Butterfly with Farrar, Homer, and Caruso, with Puccini himself in the audience.
Ah! Madama Butterfly. Now there's a fairly understandable plot, despite all the years that passed during the second intermission. At least Puccini used plot lines that, while rather melodramatic (Duh! It's Puccini!) and trite, were at least plausible. I would like to think that worst screenwriter in Hollywood--that is, the ones that haven't "made it" yet and, thus, are still non-union and writing--could pull together a less complex, believable, and coherent plot than the one Verdi used for Forza. One might posit that Forza's plot line is as, uh... "great" as the music to the Hymn of the Nations. At least we have the amazing plot twists that we've come to expect from Verdi to fall back on. We know, even before the curtain goes up, that the lead character is either going to unknowingly kill a sibling or child or the sibling or child will unknowingly kill them. That's a given, right? M. Knight Shyamalan should write plot twists so well. I suppose that, had UFOs and aliens been a source of discussion in mid-19th-century Italy, we'd probably be watching a Verdiesque adaptation of Signs. We'll leave that up to a future episode of The Twilight Zone or the next incarnation of Jean Cocteau to imagine.
You know, it's kind of nice to be able to work with the same director again and again. You see facets, subtleties in the various productions that you might've missed had we been on the one-opera-one-director treadmill that was previous de rigeur at KO. Carroll is, more or less, a known quantity, which is not to say that Carroll's productions are staid and predictable. I mean, it's like, over the holidays, as you're eating those previously-alluded-to Christmas cookies, you know you're thinking, "Oh, man! I'm going to pay for eating these when Carroll starts staging us at the end of January. I'll be so out of breath." Caveat emptor.
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