By James Jorden
Of hundreds of juicy anecdotes in Ken Mandelbaum’s indispensable volume Not Since Carrie: 40 Years of Broadway Flops, one stands out perhaps a little more than the others. It’s about a show called Reuben Reuben which closed out of town in 1955. This was a through-composed absurdist piece by Mark Blitzstein, and Mandelbaum reports that on the opening night of the show over 300 audience members walked out of the Shubert Theater in Boston. (more…)
By James Jorden
The Metropolitan Opera debut of Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, an amazing 180 years into the work’s history, won mostly respectful reviews last week—in between snipes at Anna Netrebko’s momentary breaking of character during the “Tower Scene.” A common thread in both published and popular opinion, though, was that the piece itself was not very interesting, at least absent a Maria Callas or Edita Gruberova to kick a little life into it. It’s hard to argue with taste, but possible, I think, to propose that the perceived longueurs of the opera are not integral to the work but rather a function of the way it was presented. (more…)
By James Jorden
It’s not hard to guess why Peter Gelb would choose to import a recreation of the original production of Nixon in China instead of devising a new staging from scratch. It would hardly be prudent to blow a million dollars on a six-performance run of a work unlikely to be revived any time soon, and surely the Met’s General Manager felt he should offer an olive branch to Peter Sellars after the snub of Dr. Atomic.
On the other hand, if I wanted someone sensible and kind running the Met, I wouldn’t have voted for Peter Gelb. (more…)
By James Jorden
New Year’s Eve may have marked a significant turning point for the Gelb administration at the Metropolitan Opera. The replacement of the “beloved” Franco Zeffirelli Traviata extravaganza with a lean, mean non-literal staging has garnered rapturous reviews and strongly positive audience reactions. The single reported boo for director Willy Decker’s production team (someplace over house left in Orchestra) was, from where I was sitting, drowned out by applause and moderate cheering- though, to be perfectly accurate, there weren’t many shouts of “bravo.”
The point, though, is that the sky hasn’t fallen. Big Bad Regie hasn’t chased the audiences away from the Met. Remaining performances of the run, including tonight’s, are heavily sold, and rumor has it that the production will be revived in the next two seasons. So, what went right? Why is Traviata the triumph that Tosca or (thus far) the new Ring is not? (more…)
By James Jorden
What makes a dedicated opera queen (well, anyway this dedicated opera queen) sad? Well, it goes like this: the General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera hosts a panel discussion to introduce the company’s upcoming new production of La traviata, the first non-Franco Zeffirelli take on Verdi’s tragedy to be seen there in over two decades. No tears yet? Bear with me. (more…)
By James Jorden
Of course it’s insanity in the current financial climate to suggest that the Met should have done a new production of La fanciulla del West this year, even though it’s a very special case: the centennial of the work’s world premiere, which was also the Met’s first world premiere.
In fact, to replace a production of a Puccini opera after only 19 performances would seem foolish even in an era of unbounded prosperity just about anywhere except the Paris Opéra, where the rule is that when a new intendant takes office he is supposed to junk everything this predecessor did, especially the successful stagings. (more…)
By James Jorden
It’s the laziest of journalistic tropes to lead off with “this guy I know says…” but in this case the guy in question has provided me with what I consider a really handy peg for a first column on opera stage direction. Anyway, this guy—who’s in his 70s now, a retired opera record pirate, but, more to the point, one of the survivors from the 1950s golden age of the Met standing room line—he’s got a “line” expression for just about every operatic experience imaginable. (more…)
by Ken Smith
After my review in the Financial Times asked what exactly was new in the “global premiere” of “the Chinese version” of Tan Dun’s opera Tea at Beijing’s National Centre for the Performing Arts, I got an email from someone insisting that, based on the photo that ran in the print edition of the FT, the production is indeed the one that premiered last fall at the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic’s International Composer’s Festival. I’m still keen to know what was new here. Interestingly enough, the sole credit given to the Stockholm Philharmonic in the program (in the smallest type possible) concerned the most problematic element of the evening. During a love scene on stage between the main characters, a Japanese monk and a Chinese princess, the scene incorporates background projections of animals mating. The version created for Stockholm apparently went well beyond the birds and the bees, and Chinese censors balked. A shortened version was later approved, leaving the production team to interpret the censors’ silent ruling as “No mammals.”
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One of the more remarkable things about the marketing for the Tea premiere last week was the absence of the director’s name in Chinese. Placed awkwardly on a vertical Chinese design were two words in English you had to turn your head to read: the name “Chiang Ching.” The problem for the Taiwan-born, American-based dancer-director – who is probably most famous in operatic circles for choreographing Franco Zeffirelli’s Turandot for the Met – is that she shares the exact given name of the most hated women in modern China. Not only did the Ministry of Culture refuse to print her Chinese name in public – it did appear in the program – but they acknowledged her only in the officially detested Wade-Giles method of Romanization (still the standard in Taiwan) rather than the mainland system of pinyin, where she would be “Jiang Qing,” the same as the infamous wife of Mao Zedong, who remains she-who-must-not-be-named in the Chinese media. In this regard, Tan could’ve learned a lesson from his Columbia University colleague Bright Sheng, whose opera “Madame Mao,” written for the Santa Fe Opera in 2003, is still unmentioned in the Chinese media. Sheng was widely assumed to have been blacklisted from China performances for several seasons after Santa Fe had announced the commission.