Showing posts with label Joseph Dennis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joseph Dennis. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

WNO Premieres "Grounded", an Opera With Too Many Messages

The world premiere of Grounded reaffirms Washington National Opera as a leading producer of quintessentially American works.  Composed by Jeanine Tesori to the libretto of George Brant, based on his own award-winning play, the opera deals with travails of a female F-16 pilot, whose career gets derailed after pregnancy. It is not hard to imagine the drama this could cause in the life of an ambitious air force officer. But for the creators of Grounded this was not enough. Their opera tackles a myriad of other topics: the evolution of the American military, the changing role of women at home and at work, the pros and cons of using drones in war and allowing IT and surveillance technologies to invade our lives. It concludes with an anti-war message and perhaps others that may be missed in the crowd.


The curtain rises to the sound reminiscing the buzzing engine of an approaching airplane before it blends with orchestral music. The opening scene with a triangular formation of fully uniformed airmen, with one point of the triangle facing the audience, looks promising. A soaring mezzo rises above the male chorus and the squad leader steps out. It takes a while to realize it is a woman, who rose to the rank of major after a number of successful air raid missions. Her persona suggests she has made every effort to look, talk and behave no different than any of her male counterparts. It is hard to pick her out from the rest of the servicemen when the group gathers in a Wyoming bar during a home leave. Even her approach to romance and sex is so masculine that the idea of a local farmer being attracted to her beggars belief. And yet, he claims he likes her best in her uniform and calls her my "flygirl."

Emily D’Angelo as F-16 fighter pilot in WNO's opera Grounded

After this one amorous encounter, the pilot, her name is Jess, discovers she is pregnant. At this point, one would expect a dramatic turn in the opera, perhaps a confrontation with her commanding officer, but Jess (portrayed by Emily D'Angelo in her WNO debut) respects the rules and retreats to Wyoming to inform her one-night-stand (OK, maybe there were two nights) Eric of his impending fatherhood. She expects rejection, but Eric is thrilled, and within minutes we see their daughter Sam grow from a baby to a school-age child. Jess resumes service stateside and works long hours on duties that do not include flying (DNIF). The husband takes over the parenting role. Jess misses her F-16, or Tiger as she lovingly calls it, and the blue sky into which she melds during her flights. 

After about eight years, judging by the daughter's age, the star pilot is summoned by her commander and ordered to resume bombing missions. But this time they will be conduced remotely from a trailer in the Nevada desert.  Jess objects to joining what she calls the "chair force" where she would spend her days staring at gigantic computer screens and perform tasks better suited for a teenager proficient in video-games. The Commander says this is where she is needed and where she will have "war with all the benefits of home." Jess and her family move to Nevada and Eric gets a job in a Las Vegas casino.


 Split scene with Jess at home with Commander above,
photo Scott Suchman


This would have been a good time to end Act I because with the new assignment Jess's life will change drastically. But Act I plods on with  Commander extolling the virtues of a $17-million Reaper drone, which she and her assistant, Sensor, will use to pinpoint targets thousands of miles away.  

The bomber jet pilot disparages the windowless craft that she sees as soulless and blind, but her young assistant points out, that the drone actually has an eye - a camera trained to the ground where it picks up images of moving targets. After initial boredom with her chair job, which consists of scrutinizing grey pixilated images, Jess gets bouts of excitement from her remote-controlled strikes. But the images of dead American soldiers are traumatizing. Even blasting suspected terrorists causes pangs of conscience. Soon the reality and her imagination begin to blur. The appearance of her alter ego Also Jess (portrayed by splendid soprano Teresa Perrotta) is a clear sign that her mind is unraveling. 

In the second act Jess is clearly suffering from the PTS disorder. She is rattled by surveillance cameras in the shopping mall and paranoid about being watched every step of the way like she watches her targets in the hostile territory. Instead of the sky blue she is craving, everything around her seems grey. The Nevada desert becomes no different than deserts thousands of miles away in Syria or Afghanistan. At home she collapses from physical and mental exhaustion after a 12-hour shift, and cannot find comfort with her family. In bed with her husband she splits into Also Jess who is present physically and real Jess whose spirit drifts away.  The threat of death has been removed, but not the threat to her well being. In one scene she wipes the invisible blood from her hands like Lady Macbeth. After a year in the trailer, she is assigned a high-profile mission, but is unable to accomplish it after seeing her daughter's face in the image of a foreign girl running toward her father, who is the target. Jess sabotages the order to strike and is court-marshaled. 

Brant's original play was an 80-minute monologue by an unnamed female pilot.  Using drone in wars was a relative novelty a decade ago and its impact on the soldiers was not understood. A piece focusing on the PTS disorder garnered great success in both US and European theaters. Tesori was impressed by it too and wanted to expand it into a full-scale opera, that would include characters mentioned in the pilot's monologue. Brant worked with Tesori to create a libretto with roles for those characters and scenes in which they interact. He added dialogues between the protagonists, mostly military personnel, and peppered their language with crude words for authenticity's sake. The result is a 2.5-hour long opera that wavers between engaging moments and weak spots. In the final scene, for example, the penalized pilot delivers a cringe-worthy warning (to Americans?), a sort of "Live-by-the-sword, die-by-the-sword" cliché, ending with the single word "boom", in hushed tones. Perhaps an echo of a real explosion reverberating in the pilot's mind?  

The music incorporates sounds of military trumpets, popular soldier tunes or country music to help set the scene. The score is full of likable passages that are in no way innovative, revolutionary or memorable. 

Apart from Jess, the characters in the opera are not adequately fleshed out. Eric (tenor Joseph Dennis) is more of an accessory to his wife, sort of like Mattel's Ken to Barbie. Bass Morris Robinson as Commander and baritone Kyle Miller as Sensor are more convincing in their shorter roles. 

Set designer Mimi Lien employed digital technology and more than 300 interlocked LED panels to create real and imaginary places in Jess's world: blue sky around her flying jet, evening at her Wyoming home, Nevada desert during her commute to work, a sonogram of her baby's fetus. The stage is split in two levels: the lower representing places on the ground and the upper showing the blue sky, military scenes or imagery from Jess's troubled mind. Advanced video technology enhances the sense of the environment and understanding of the pilot's state of mind. The sets and lighting work in concert with the sound for the best effect.


Pilot in the control room with Sensor and two observers, photo Scott Suchman

Grounded is an impressive undertaking, tackling issues that resonate with many Americans today. Have we enabled women to shine in any career they choose or is motherhood still an impediment? How do we advance at work in an era depending increasingly on robots, AI and digital technology better understood by younger people? How is our brain affected by never-ending involvement in wars, exposure to violence and shrinkage of meaningful interaction with family and friends? All of these topics are worth exploring, but not in one opera. With too many themes vying for attention, Grounded explores none in depth and fails to make a powerful impact. If it is to open next year's season at the Metropolitan Opera, it may have to undergo a major overhaul. 

Tesori is an accomplished and popular composer, best known for her musicals. She has found a staunch supporter in WNO artistic director Francesca Zambello, who has sponsored her forays into the opera. Earlier this year WNO presented Tesori's opera Blue, and on  Saturday, it opened its 2023-2024 season with much heralded Grounded. Later this year, the company will revive Tesori's holiday favorite The Lion, the Unicorn, and Me.  

Blue was a masterpiece in every respect: from the enfolding drama and convincing dialogues to well developed characters, excellent interpretations and great music throughout. Created in cooperation with librettist Tazewell Thompson, the award-winning work offered an insight into a personal tragedy of a black US policeman whose son was shot by another policeman. In Grounded, a bunch of hot issues are thrown together without a connecting thread or a clear and coherent message. Without impressive music, or sufficiently dramatic moments to lift the tedium of two long acts, an opera risks staying grounded forever.

There are five more performances of WNO's opera Grounded, with the last one on November 13.

Tuesday, August 5, 2014

Santa Fe Opera

The Santa Fe Opera 2014 season includes the U.S. premiere of a Chinese-language work and the company's first staging of Beethoven's only opera.   The mixed results show that updating an older staging does not always work, and that sticking to the classical form in a new work sometimes does.

The long-standing motto in theater production has been "when in doubt, go Nazi." I've seen Ian McKellen as a crippled version of Hitler in Shakespeare's Richard III, I've seen Ionesco's Rhinocéros dressed in shiny black Nazi raincoats, I've seen a number of Wagner's operas with staging nodding to Nazi Germany, and countless of other "nazified" classics that I only vaguely remember.  So the Santa Fe Opera's offering of Beethoven's Fidelio with a Nazi twist was nothing new, but it was puzzling.   With names like Leonore, Rocco, Fernando, Jaquino and Pizarro, perhaps Franco's Spain would have been a more logical choice.


Alex Penda as Leonore/Fidelio
One could tolerate the unimaginative production if the singing or acting were first-class. Neither was the case in Stephen Wadsworth's drab offering.  The dungeon scene was so dark that you could not see anyone's face even through a good pair of binoculars.  Paul Groves, who once delighted me as Nemorino, was hardly suited for the role of Florestan. He seemed more angry than hungry or exhausted as he would be after two years of harsh imprisonment.  Petite Hungarian soprano Alex Penda was a passionate Leonore, just not an electrifying one.  The chorus was the star of the program although the group was too small to be representing inmates of a Nazi concentration camp as their clothing suggested.  The Mariinsky made the number of soldiers in Prokofiev's War and Peace appear huge by making the extras circle around the stage and throw their shades onto the backdrop. Wadsworth did not have any novel idea in that respect.  The program says it's the Santa Fe Opera's first ever staging of Fidelio.  One wonders why bother for such a mediocre result. On a miserably cold and rainy August night there was simply no reason to sit through the whole performance when a good book and a warm blanket beckoned back in the hotel room.

Since I did not go to Santa Fe to see Fidelio, the disappointment was not huge, but rather expected.  The real reason for my first foray into an opera house away from the East Coast was the U.S. premiere of Huang Ruo's Dr. Sun Yat-Sen.  It was my first Chinese language opera, but not first by Huang, whose one-hour-long An American Soldier premiered recently at the Washington National Opera.  As described by most reviewers, the music for Dr. Sun Yat-Sen is a successful blend of Chinese and classic western idiom.  Standard opera lovers who shy away from the often jarring sounds of modern music need not fear: Huang's music is gorgeous and the theatrical structure is mostly classical.  There are beautiful arias, duets, quartets and choral parts, there is drama, there is romance. Huang must have a thing about motherhood because two most beautiful solo arias he has written are the mother's aria in the closing scene of An American Soldier and Soong Ching-ling's aria about a baby lost by miscarriage in Dr. Sun Yat-Sen.  Chinese language (or languages) did not sound as strange as a westerner might expect.  In terms of sound, this opera did not feel any more foreign than, for example, a Russian opera.  War and Peace kept coming to mind.

The singers were good throughout, and some were excellent, especially Corinne Winters as Sun Yat-Sen's young wife Ching-ling and Dong-Jian Gong as her father Charlie Soong. The one weak point in my opinion was the title character.  As Huang said, his opera portrays the Chinese revolutionary icon as a private person with all his qualities and failures.  Huang said he wanted to show the human side of the revered historic personality, and there is nothing wrong with that.  But in my opinion, the composer did a better job with Soong whose leadership qualities as well as his human weaknesses were clearly delineated and well portrayed by the interpreter who made his character memorable and appealing.  Tenor Joseph Dennis looked and sounded more like a turn-of-the century British gentleman, than father of the Chinese revolution.  Without a synopsis, I probably would have mistaken the Charlie Soong character for Sun Yat-Sen. 
Reporter at Santa Fe Opera

Despite weaknesses, which I believe could be fixed (as they were in the cases of many world famous operas) Huang's opus is an exceptional work, that should enter standard opera repertory.   I hope Santa Fe will serve as a starting point in that direction.  A soprano desiring to record an interesting new album would do well to include the Ching-ling "lost baby" aria and/or find a tenor with whom to sing the lovely wedding duet. 


Unfortunately, the clips from the opera offered on YouTube do not include Corinne Winters' poignant solo.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4j3ydqeYINI

Santa Fe's Carmen was a pleasant surprise.  I got a ticket as an afterthought, and expected to leave early as I did from Fidelio, but the production was innovative in an attractive way.  The plain boxy sets were moved around and lit differently to change the setting from a cigarette factory to jail, then to a smugglers' hangout, a border crossing and finally a plaza outside a bullfight arena.  They also served as a screen for black-and-white video projections which showed events between the staged scenes, for example Micaëla's tending to Don Jose's sick mother, and Don Jose's grim attendance at the mother's funeral.  The latter actually helped understand his desperation during the final confrontation with Carmen.  A few production details that raised questions were prison bars on the tobacco factory and factory girls working in their underwear.  The girls' exit from the factory seemed like a release of prostitutes from jail after an overnight police raid.  Carmen's arrival to the bullfight in a blond Marilyn Monroe-style wig was also puzzling until Don Jose tore it off her head.  But was it necessary? 

The choice of soprano Ana Maria Martinez for the title role was an unusual one and in my opinion not the most fortunate.   She lacked the dark and brooding quality of the tragic gypsy girl.  But she looked the part of a modern drug smuggler she portrayed in this production, and held her own vocally.  Tenor Roberto de Biasio was not your favorite Don Jose.

The highlight of the season in my view (although I did not see Don Pasquale) was Stravinsky.   His short and rarely performed opera Le rossignol was preceded by Mozart's The Impresario and cleverly presented as a play within a play.  Bickering singers and their agents from The Impressario were "hired" to perform in Stravinsky's piece.  But while The Impresario was only somewhat amusing, Le rossignol was a jewel of scenic design, lighting, costumes, singing and acting.   A music critic might have found details to complain about, but I was too mesmerized by the production as a whole to be distracted by minutiae.  As far as I am concerned, that one hour of opera was worth a trip to Santa Fe all by itself.

Santa Fe Opera Auditorium
Finally, a word or two about the Santa Fe Opera business.  The building is attractive and offers a good view of the stage from every seat in the house, including the $40 spots all the way back and on the sides.  The income lost on cheaper seats is well recompensed by items of clothing and comfort sold in the gift shop at exorbitant prices.  Simple nylon jackets are sold for $65 a piece, or $95 if lined.  A cheap-looking thin hoodie you can get for a little over $10 at the Old Navy costs $40 to $50 at the opera shop.  The cheapest essential item, a bright red polyester lap throw, is $25.   And I say essential because the uninitiated may come to Santa Fe unprepared like I did.  When the night falls in Santa Fe and temperatures drop by some 20 degrees, usually just before the intermission, the chilled patrons rush into the store and buy whatever they can get their hands on just to be able to sit through the rest of the performance without shivering.  If it rains during the intermission as it often did while I was there, the shop and the restrooms are the only available shelter for a crowd of more than 2,000 patrons unless, of course, you want to remain in your seat.

On a clear day, the views
from this beacon on the hill are spectacular - all rolling hills dotted with sage brush, pine trees and junipers.  But I found the open-air picnic tables mostly deserted in early August.  Who can sit through a meal with cold winds blowing from all sides and the threat of an imminent thunderstorm above your head?  The picnic-minded people brought their own little folding tables and chairs and set them up next to their cars in the parking lot, where they sat sheltered from the wind.  They enjoyed their wines and their salads with a view of other cars and in the air permeated with fragrance from the exhaust systems. But, hey, aren't we more used to the smell of gas than the pleasures of mother nature?  I certainly would have preferred to sit in my car all evening than returned to Washington as I did, covered in humongous mosquito bites  (or was it something else ?) . The Santa Fe bugs are a sneaky and treacherous lot.   I never heard a buzz of warning.  The repellent does not bother them either, so save your money there.