View: Next message | Previous message Next in topic | Previous in topic Next by same author | Previous by same author Previous page (July 1999, week 2) | Back to main OPERA-L page Join or leave OPERA-L Reply | Post a new message Search Options: Chronologically | Most recent first Proportional font | Non-proportional font ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Date: Sun, 11 Jul 1999 21:11:35 +0000 Reply-To: "H.E.Elsom" Sender: Discussion of opera and related issues From: "H.E.Elsom" Subject: Do I hear a waltz, Landor Theatre, 9Jul99 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Leona Samish Rebecca Little Renato di Rossi Ras Johansen Signora Fioria Kate Copstick Mrs McIlhenny Susan Scott Mr McIlhenny Tom Murphy Jennifer Yaegar Leahn Sharman Eddie Yaegar Paul Callahan Giovanna Daisy Moon Mauro Damon Unwin Guide/Waitress Nicki Inman Director Myles Stinton Music director Danny Whitby Mab's Factory My initial reaction to Do I hear a waltz was that it is as bad as people say, and too irrating for me to want to write about. There were, it's true, a number of good things about this production. The Landor Theatre is definitely a Good Thing, a sixty-seat space above the eponymous pub on the eponymous road in Clapham (and they were doing good, basic and inexpensive barbeque food in the garden on Friday). The production itself, while it couldn't use the big effects of space and lighting that the work seems to require, was deft, with a map of Venice painted all over the peforming space. And the performances were generally spot on. Rebecca Little was too young and attractive for Leona Samish, the career-successful but damaged spinster looking for romance in Venice, but she knew exactly what to do with the words and music. Kate Copstick was hilarious, sad and throaty as Signora Fioria, a skinny mediterranean Madame Hermine. Leahn Sharman was uptight as Jennifer Yaegar (that's what it says in the programme), and contributed punchily to the ensembles. Paul Callahan was nice but dim as Eddie, who has a fling with Fioria, and Susan Scott and Tom Murphy were touching as the devoted, enclosed older couple. They were so sympathetic that their puritan outburst came as a surprise, which I suppose it wouldn't have in the 1950s. (There seemed to be several similar couples, probably minus the puritanism, in the audience.) Ras Johansen, the only genuine American in the cast got to play Renato, the Italian who woos then dumps Leona. He wasn't exactly exuberant, but he suggested some emotional complexity and has a pretty good voice. But there are a couple of things that are close to intolerable. For a start, the title. Leona tells Fioria that when she falls in love, she'll hear a waltz, to which Fioria says "then go to Vienna, not Venice". I don't know whether Leona's waltz is in Arthur Laurents' novel, but this looks like an attempt to gloss over the fossilized remains of a different concept entirely. Maybe the problem is the character of Leona herself, who is presented as a wide-eyed and totally ignorant tourist. Maybe there's a suggestion that just as she doesn't know what she wants with Renato -- a fling, friendship, marriage -- so she doesn't really know which bit of abroad she's in. And the underlying reason for her lack of openness and awareness is her low-grade materialism which makes her value garnets, semi-precious stones, a symbol of her limited but materialistic aspirations. She explains her present situation by her parents' deaths when she was sixteen, which left her to raise her younger siblings alone. But there's no hint that she could learn and grow, either with experience or with love. She goes bitterly home when her affair with Renato fails. The other Americans are shown as limited, with the Yaegars' marriage damaged by every exposure to something different and the McIlhennys preserving their union by shutting out all alternatives. But the Italians who offer the alternatives as shown as manipulative and cynical. It's all really rather depressing, and made more so by some lapidiary lyrics by Stephen Sondheim that suggest clever talking over despair, and a prosaic, dance-based score by Richard Rogers. But Do I hear a waltz also seems to come at a focal point in the development of American music theatre. I can't find a date in the programme, but it seems to belong somewhere after West Side Story (substitute Rogers for Bernstein), and presumably after the 1955 movie Summertime, also scripted by Arthur Laurents and with Katherine Hepburn in the Leona role. The anatomy of the couples, especially the Yaegars, is not far from Trouble in Tahiti, though of course they have gone further than a movie theatre to try to sort things out. The singleton kibbitzing on other people's relationships, unable to manage her own, and perhaps to be rescued by a casual affair, is a clear precursor of Bobby in Company. And the dance-form numbers, including the waltz, suggest the creative discipline that Sondheim made work in A little night music. Interestingly, the setting in Venice also points to Henry James and the problem of Americans abroad. This is a more egalitarian matter in a world where a lonely secretary or a couple of old dears can hop on a plane. (What do we do? We fly! is the one real winner of a number, and every word is still true.) But it's still seen as worlds colliding. Perhaps this reflects a worry about what the United States gained from its losses in Europe in the second world war. I'm not sure, either, of the exact chronology of the rise of Great Books courses in American universities (always with Death in Venice or The Aspern papers somewhere on the schedule). But Do I hear a waltz seems to come from a similar background to the academic canon, and also as other post-war American operas which worry about being European. Stravinsky dealt with his worry by being more European than the Europeans (in the Rake for example). But American composers still tend to do either Great Books or Americana, which suggests that the worry about opera and high-end music-theatre as a European form is still there. Sondheim is ironically a rare example of a composer who hasn't left a trace of the cultural cringe in his choice of subjects or in his music. Regards, Helen - H.E. Elsom he@helsom.demon.co.uk http://www.helsom.demon.co.uk/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to: Top of message | Previous page | Main OPERA-L page ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Back to the LISTSERV home page at LISTSERV.CUNY.EDU.