MACBETH - REVIEW OF LIVE IN HD FROM THE MET PRODUCTION

Anna Netrebko as Lady Macbeth, René Pape as Banquo, and Željko Lučić in the title role of Verdi's Macbeth. Metropolitan Opera. Photo: Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera

Reviewed by James Karas

The Metropolitan Opera’s ninth season of broadcasting productions from New York to cinemas around the world is under way with an exceptional revival of Adrian Noble’s staging of Macbeth. The production is dramatically intense with a triumphal finish and a fine twist in the final tableau.

The first-rate cast is dominated by the plush voice and extraordinary beauty of Anna Netrerbko as Lady Macbeth. This Lady Macbeth dominates her husband by the force of her character and the magnitude of her ambition without histrionics or overt pressure. Her physical appearance and vocal prowess establish and maintain her authority right to the end. Her Mad Scene is a model of restraint and controlled drama. The drama comes from within and not from any overt melodramatic movements. What a performance.

Baritone Željko Lučić is the ideal husband and foil for this Lady Macbeth. He appears older than her and although he falls in for her ambition, it seems as if it is not entirely in his nature. Even after he commits horrendous crimes, we never grow to hate him completely. Lučić has a wonderful voice, on the lighter side of the baritone scale, thus giving him a more humane and less threatening persona.

Bass René Pape and tenor Joseph Calleja play Banquo and Macduff respectively. They are both victims of Macbeth with Banquo being assassinated because the witches predicted that his children will inherit the throne and Macduff’s family being eliminated as a precaution. They sing impeccably.

Anna Netrebko as Lady Macbeth and Željko Lučić in the title role of Verdi's Macbeth. Metropolitan Opera. Photo: Marty Sohl/Metropolitan Opera

Verdi increases the number of Shakespeare’s witches into the dozens giving himself the opportunity to compose some outstanding choruses. The Metropolitan Opera Chorus looked like a bunch of bag ladies and the children looked like ragamuffins but all to good effect. The bag ladies carried purses which shone a light on their faces when opened. That is how they can foretell the future, I suppose, but they also sang marvelously.

Noble and Set and Costume Designer Mark Thompson deliver a dark and brooding production in modern dress with no attempt at realistic sets. The set is dominated by huge black columns that resemble tree trunks with rings of light. There are also leafless trees and for many stretches we see only a dark background. Much of the performance is done in a spotlight with red as the contrasting colour to the darkness. Blood is a dominant image of the opera, of course, with Macbeth emerging covered in blood after the murder of the king. Banquo and Lady Macbeth also appear covered in blood.

The staging is highly effective with numerous brilliant directorial touches. King Duncan’s bed can be seen on the stage between the columns. After the murder, his slit throat on the blood-spattered bed is revealed in an intensely dramatic scene.

The Met Orchestra is conducted with vigour and intensity by Fabio Luisi.

You will recall that the witches predict that Banquo’s descendants will occupy the throne of Scotland. We see Banquo and his son Fleance (Moritz Linn), the latter wearing a bright red scarf, leave the palace followed by Macbeth’s henchmen with orders to kill them. They kill Banquo but Fleance escapes.

At the end of the opera, order is restored with the crowning of Malcolm (Noah Baetge), the son of the murdered king. As the newly crowned king rises, he glances to his left and sees the boy in the red scarf. Is this the restoration of order or simply a prelude to the next battle for the Scottish crow? Marvelous touch.

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Macbeth by Giuseppe Verdi was shown Live in HD from the Metropolitan Opera on October 11, 2014 at the Beach Cinemas, 1651 Queen Street East, Toronto, ON, M4L 1G5 (416) 699-1327 and other cinemas. Encores will be shown on November 10 and 15, 2014. For more information: www.cineplex.com/events

GOLFO! DIRECTOR’S CUT – REVIEW OF AVLAIA THEATRE PRODUCTION

Reviewed by James Karas

Avlaia Theatre of Thessaloniki has produced a bold production of Golfo in Gothic Manga style that has some production values a great deal of imaginative touches but a final result that left me cold.

Golfo was written by Spyros Peresiadis in 1893 in a highly poetic, rural language (you could say hillbilly) and is described as an idyllic drama. Tassos and Golfo are poor but deeply in love. Stavroula, the daughter of the wealthy local grandee, let’s say rancher, wants to marry Tassos. Her haughty cousin Kitsos wants to marry Golfo. Tassos succumbs to the lure of wealth and disavows Golfo.

She is heartbroken and takes poison; he repents and apologizes but is too late. The poison takes effect and he stabs himself. The lovers are joined in death. Think of it as a Romeo and Juliet story with some variations.

Simos Kakalas takes the main plotline of Golfo and creates something very different and calls it Golfo! Director’s Cut. Four actors play seven of the play’s thirteen characters. Kakalas’s version has a narrator/chorus who becomes perhaps the play’s most important character. Except for the narrator, the other characters wear masks and act and speak in a highly stylized way as if they were cartoons or marionettes. It could easily be taken for children’s theatre because almost all the actors speak in an unnatural and at times childish voice.

The play opens with a length monologue by the Narrator. He is wearing a black foustanela and a black sailor’s hat and accompanies himself on an accordion. He has a long rambling monologue with a wide range of references almost none of them related to Golfo. The monologue is self-indulgent but some of the audience seemed to find it amusing. I assume the Narrator was played by Kakalas but no attempt was made to identify him or the other actors in the programme. Presumably the audience knows them all.

When the monologue is over the play begins. All is back throughout and there are projected videos of black and white cartoon figures and country scenes as well as photos of the Acropolis.

Tassos and then Golfo appear wearing masks in and play in stylized movements and stances. When birds are mentioned the Narrator appears and “produces” the birds and makes what are supposed to be humorous comments. Tassos disappears and Golfo keeps busy while we wait for Kitsos to appear. The delay is because the same actor plays both parts, Golfo tells us. Golfo wears a mask that has wide child-like eyes. She has pigtails, wears a young girl’s dress and speaks like a child.

The plot of Golfo is told fairly faithfully subject to interpolations and interruptions. Near the end the actor playing Golfo removes her mask and delivers a poignant curse to Tassos that is overwhelming in its emotional impact. She later retracts the curse again very effectively. It serves to emphasize the beauty of Peresiadis’s verse and the travesty of what Kakalas has done to the play.

One of the interpolations by Kakalas is the presentation of a Chaplinesque Hitler and a rendition of “Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer” in English to the tune of a Greek folk song. That, the English titles on the screen, the political and cultural references, the awful music and the self-indulgent humour left me in turn wondering, annoyed and at times utterly bored.

Simos Kakalas takes credit for direction, sets, movement and the script (the latter with Xenia Aidonopoulou). The actors aside from Kakalas are Dimitra Kouza, Elena Mavridou and Mihalis Valasoglou. As I said, I don’t know who played what role.

The title Golfo! Director’s Cut by Simos Kakalas is a good indicator of where the play will lead. Spyros Peresiadis is not mentioned anywhere in the programme but the director’s self-indulgence is everywhere.

Old wines can be poured into new bottles and may even gain by the transfer. But mixing new wines with old ones is a risky task that should be approached with care and humility. Kakalas exercised neither care nor humility. He jumped on the idea of shoving Golfo into a Gothic Manga straitjacket and the result was a very bad night at the theatre.

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Golfo! Director’s Cut by Simos Kakalas based on play by Spyros Peresiadis played at the Avlaia Theatre, Thessaloniki, Greece until September 29, 2014. www.avlaiatheatre.gr

MARRIAGE OF FIGARO IN ST. MARK’S ENGLISH CHURCH, FLORENCE

View of St. Mark's English Church, Florence.

Reviewed by James Karas

How is this for an opera season: forty-five performances of ten operas and an evening of love duets. Most opera companies don’t come even near those numbers.

Early September can be a dry month for operas in many cities. But that does not apply tp Florence, Italy where St. Mark’s Opera Company started its fall season on September 2.

Producing opera in St. Mark’s, the English Church in Florence, is like entering a boxing match with one hand tied behind your back. The odds are stacked against you but that does not mean you will not get in a lot of jabs and hooks to leave your supporters cheering.

The programme lists only four singers, a pianist and a Narrator. The latter is Franz Moser who, with his wife Ilse, founded the opera company that is now in its twelfth season. No director is listed and I will assume that Moser does that job. He is also the audience welcoming committee, the prop mover between acts and who knows what else.

Much credit goes to the singers who perform under less than ideal conditions. Elise Efremov is a lovely and lively Susanna. She sings beautifully in challenging surroundings and is spritely and comic. Alvaro Lozano has a good, big voice but he suffered from the acoustics of the Church.

Chiara Panacci was a moving Contessa Almaviva. One could see why the Count’s eye may stray toward the lively Susanna but Panacci’s rendition of her two great arias, “Porgi amor” and “Dove sono” convince us that she deserves to be treated well.

Franco Rossi as Almaviva was impressive and when caught acting like a fool with an axe in his hand, he was quite funny. Eva Mabellini  was fine vocally as a red-haired Cherubino but she was somewhat stilted in a role that requires  a body trembling with sexual excitement.

All the other characters and the chorus were deleted and as a result the opera was done in two hours including an intermission.

The vaulted ceiling of St. Mark’s Church is not opera-friendly. The piano playing of Eugenio Milazzo displayed some very intricate finger acrobatics but it suffered for coming out fortissimo because of the acoustics when less volume would have been more pleasing to the ear. The same fate befell the singers especially the strong, low registers of Rossi and Lozano. The sopranos fared better.

In the tiny playing area of the church there is hardly much room for maneuvering and the set consisted of a couch and a few essential furniture. The seats did not allow much of a view and we had to settle for seeing most things above the knees of the singers.

Yes, this is not La Scala but there is an intimacy and a sense of opera in the raw and on the inexpensive all worthwhile.       

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The Marriage of Figaro by W. A. Mozart was performed on September 4, 2014 at St. Mark’s English Church, Florence, Italy.  http://stmarksitaly.com/music-arts/opera-at-st-marks/

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING OR MOLTO RUMORE PER NULLA – REVIEW OF ROME’S GLOBE THEATRE PRODUCTION

Reviewed by James Karas

When in Rome, you should, to coin a phrase, do as the Romans do. In the summer you should go to the Globe Theatre and watch productions of plays by William Shakespeare. 

No, I am not mixing up my cities. Rome has a replica of the Elizabethan Globe Theatre where for the eleventh year in a row there is a summer season of plays by Shakespeare and other playwrights.

I caught a fine production of Much Ado About Nothing or Molto rumore per nulla directed by Loredana Scaramella.

Scaramella captures the comedy, both high and low, and gives a very lively accounting of the play. Mauro Santopietro and Barbara Moselli make an energetic Benedick and Beatrice. Fausto Cabra as Claudio looks and acts like a dunce and, of course, he is. Claudio does come through in the end because we need a wedding and a happy ending.

Leonato (Daniele Faccioti) is gracious as the Governor of Messina and passionately furious as the father of Hero (Mimosa Campironi), the bride-to-be of Claudio who is accused of conduct unbecoming the night before her wedding.

The show was stolen by Carlo Ragone who played the inimitable Dogberry and made something significant of Balthasar. As Dogberry he is dressed vilely and has hair that looks like an oil slick. He has one leg shorter than the other and hops around the stage as he gives his orders. Hilarious.

As Balthasar he sings and directs a three-man band and elicits laughter while doing justice to the songs including a few falsetto shrieks. Quite a performance by an actor who seems to have comedy in his bones.

The rest of the cast did fine work but a few comments about the directing are a propos.

For some reason Scaramella has decided that the cast need microphones strapped around their heads. That meant we heard all the characters through the loud speaker closest to us. In a small theatre this seemed unnecessary and at the beginning of the performance, annoying. You get used to it after a while.

The action took place all too often in the front of the stage as if the sides did not exist. This is surely an oversight. The Globe is an oval-shaped theatre and the people sitting on the sides should not be ignored.

The most distinct aspect of Fabiana Di Marco’s set design was the use of sheets on clothes lines. They seemed pointless at the beginning but they came in handy as poor but comic covers for Benedick and Beatrice when they were being fooled into believing that they were madly in love.

There is considerable room for physical humour in the play and Scaramella provided some but I felt that there was room for more and the sheets were not enough.

The Silvano Toti Globe Theatre was built in less than four months in 2003 in the Villa Borghese and holds 1250 people of whom 420 sit on the floor. These are the yardlings of Shakespeare’s Globe but unlike them who must stand throughout the performance, the Romans are seated on the ground. In London, the actors frequently play down to the yardlings to great effect. In Rome in the production that I saw, they were largely ignored.

The current season runs from July to September and is dedicated entirely to Shakespeare. Love’s Labour’s Lost runs from September 11 to 18 and there is a Shakespeare Fest on September 19, 20 and 21, 2014 to end the season.  In Rome, if you please.

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Much Ado About Nothing (Molto rumore per nulla) by William Shakespeare ran from August 22 to September 7, 2014 at the Silvano Toti Globe Theatre, Villa Borghese, Rome. www.globetheatreroma.com

JUNO AND THE PAYCOCK - REVIEW OF SHAW FESTIVAL PRODUCTION

Reviewed by James Karas

Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock receives a thrilling production at the Shaw Festival directed by its Artistic Director, Jackie Maxwell.

The play is set in a Dublin tenement during the Irish Civil War in the early 1920’s. Maxwell and the cast create convincingly the atmosphere of life in the tenement and the neighbourhood and capture the musicality and rhythm of the play’s language. The colourful characters, the humour, the pathos, the human strengths and weaknesses of the people and in the end their tragic fate are brought forth in a masterly manner.

The Boyle family tries to survive against all odds. The daughter Mary (Marla McLean) is out of work. The son Johnny (Charlie Gallant) has lost one arm in the fighting and has a crushed hip. He has betrayed the son of a neighbour. The father, Jack Boyle (Jim Mezon) drinks to excess and cannot or will not work because of his legs. He is a useless person but a colourful story teller.

Jack and his equally useless friend Joxer Daly (Benedict Campbell) are frequent visitors to the local pub and just as frequently if not permanently drunk.

The family is kept together by Juno (Mary Haney), a powerful woman who commands respect and attention. She sees what her husband is and lives in fear of what may happen to her son, the betrayer.

This very ordinary, poor family gets some good news. They have been left an inheritance by a relative; they have struck it rich. The Boyles borrow money on the strength of the inheritance and go on a shopping spree.

The scenes of happiness, exuberance and hope culminate in a loud party which happens to take place during the funeral procession of the betrayed neighbour’s son. The cheerfulness and wealth will all disappear when they discover that there is no inheritance and Johnny’s treachery is about to be avenged an eye for an eye.

The central character of the play is the powerful Juno and in Mary Haney Maxwell has an equally powerful actor to portray her. Haney gives us a woman of towering strength, compassion and understanding. A magnificent performance.

Mezon and Campbell are superb as the drunken friends. They stagger on stage looking for yet another drink. They are colourful and perhaps even loveable if only they were not useless and had some hold on reality. They don’t.

Juno has a large cast of secondary and minor characters as O’Casey tries to give us a portrait of Ireland at war. Gord Rand is the solicitor who brings the news about the inheritance, pursues Mary and disappears when his negligence in drafting the will becomes apparent.

Jennifer Phipps appears as the distraught mother during her son’s funeral procession to put a damper on Boyles’ party. Donna Belleville replaced Corrine Koslo as Mrs. Madigan the day I saw the production. All to good effect.

The main actors and most but not all of the others managed excellent to decent Irish accents.

The single set by Peter Hartwell was simple but effective.        

        

The olive wreath goes to Jackie Maxwell for this outstanding production. 

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Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey continues in repertory until October 12, 2014 at the Royal George Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. www.shawfest.com.

THE BEAUX’ STRATAGEM – REVIEW OF STRATFORD FESTIVAL PRODUCTION

Colm Feore (left) as Archer and Mike Shara as Aimwell in The Beaux' Stratagem. Photo by Michael Cooper

Reviewed by James Karas

Antoni Cimolino has selected some of the Stratford Festival’s finest actors for his production of The Beaux’ Stratagem, George Farquhar’s 1707 comedy. The result is a highly successful production of a play that is not produced very frequently.

The Beaux’s Stratagem is a literate and fast-moving comedy with some nineteen characters who take us through a number of plot strands leading to a happy conclusion.      

Aimwell (Mike Shara) and Archer (Colm Feore) are socially gentlemen but financially impecunious. The solution: find a wealthy heiress in some small town and marry her or join the army. They stop in Litchfield pretending to be a nobleman and his servant and a series of events unfolds to keep the audience splendidly entertained.

They meet the unhappily married Mrs. Sullen (Lucy Peacock) and her drunkard husband Squire Sullen (Scott Wentworth). Archer lays amorous siege on Mrs. Sullen but she resists him even though she is highly tempted by his efforts. Aimwell pursues the lovely Dorinda (Bethany Jillard) with fervour and is more successful because she is not married.

Martha Henry appears as Lady Bountiful, a rich widow given to herbal medicine and the mother of Squire Sullen and Dorinda. She has saved more people than doctors have killed, we are told.

We have a French Count (Evan Buliung), an Irish priest posing as a Frenchman (Michael Spencer-Davis), a highway man named Gibbet (Victor Ertmanis), and Boniface (Robert King), the amusing inn owner. There are servants and travelers to fill the stage and carry us through the numerous turns in the plot.

From left: Bethany Jillard as Dorinda, Lucy Peacock as Mrs. Sullen, Colm Feore as Archer and Gordon S. Miller as Scrub in The Beaux' Stratagem. Photo by Michael Cooper.

The result is highly enjoyable. Shara and Feore are excellent as the swaggering beaux. Wentworth has the juicy role of the cynical husband who hates his wife, loves her money and adores drinking. Peacock does an excellent job as a wife seeking escape from a bad marriage and provides cogent commentary on the non-existence of divorce laws.

King as Boniface gets the laughs as does his wily daughter Cherry played well by Sara Farb. Spencer-Davis is very funny as Folgard the priest.

Cimolino had his work cut out in keeping the large cast moving through some complicated plot twists and getting out the funny and literate aspects of the play. He wisely chose not to even attempt to have the cast struggle with English accents. It would have been very annoying to listen to a good part of the cast torturing the text with their attempts at an accent. 

Restoration and Eighteenth Century comedies are not exactly Stratford Festival staples and one is quite happy with a delicious taste of one of them.

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The Beaux’ Stratagem by George Farquhar continues in repertory until October 11, 2014 at the Festival Theatre, Stratford, Ontario. www.stratfordfestival.ca

THE PHILANDERER - REVIEW OF SHAW FESTIVAL PRODUCTION

Reviewed by James Karas

The Shaw Festival’s production of The Philanderer has a climactic beginning, a rousing end and, unfortunately, a not a very exciting middle.

Shaw tells us that when the play opens “a lady and a gentleman are making love to one another in the drawing room of a flat.” Put the brakes on your hormones if you are envisioning something wild. This is circa 1893 and the gentleman, the philandering Leonard Charteris, is “dressed in a velvet jacket and cashmere trousers;” the lady, Grace Transfield, is in evening dress and the two are “seated affectionately side by side in one another’s arms” on a sofa. Those are Shaw’s instructions.

Director Lisa Peterson will have none of that. As the lights are about to go on in the Festival Theatre, we hear the lady and the gentlemen moaning passionately with pleasure and probably in the throes of orgasms. The two are wearing very few clothes, they are on the floor and Grace asks Charteris, “are you happy” and he replies “in heaven.” Indeed.

Fast forward to the final scene. Shaw wrote two endings to the play. In the original ending, the marriage of Julia and Dr. Paramore is on the skids after four years and they will seek a divorce in South Dakota. Divorce is not available in England, you see.

He wrote an alternate and more conventional ending where Julia accepts Paramore’s marriage proposal and Grace regrets not being brave enough to kill Charteris.  There is no South Dakota and no divorce.

The latter ending has been used in the published editions of the play and in most productions. Peterson has chosen the original conclusion of the play where Julia and Charteris will not marry but they end up in each other’s arms. In this production, they do so with considerable enthusiasm and begin the journey toward where we started with them in the opening scene.

And that is s long way around to stating my reaction to the rest of the play which is largely negative. Much of it is the fault of the play but Peterson failed to find the formula for action and interaction to give life to Shaw’s lines. We got mostly “the seated affectionately side by side on the sofa” level of performance instead of imaginative, lively, dynamic and funny exchanges.

Gord Rand as Charteris, Marla McLean as Grace and Moya O’Connell as Julia can do a much better job than they in fact perform. For example, when Julia crashes into the flat where Grace and Charteris are having their ardent tête-à-tête, there should be howls of laughter. It barely works.

Michael Ball as Joseph Cuthbertson and Ric Reid as Colonel Craven are standard fatherly figures from comedy, sensible, nonsensical and necessary for the plot. Jeff Meadows as Dr. Paramore helps with the sub-plot about a new disease which in the end does not exist.

The sets by Sue LePage are quite unrealistic and impressive.  The first scene is set in the flat that looks classy without being Victorian. The library of the Ibsen Club for the second scene has glass walls and is splendid.

The third act in Paramore’s dining room looks like it has the remains of Greek temples but it is impressive none the less.

The Philanderer has many references to Henrik Ibsen not the least of which is the fictitious Ibsen Club where the second act takes place. So far so good but when you list The Spirit of Ibsen in the cast (played by Guy Bannerman) and you have the great playwright sing a song you have lost me.

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The Philanderer  by Bernard Shaw continues in repertory until October 12, 2014  at the Festival Theatre, Niagara-on-the-Lake, Ontario. www.shawfest.com.