TOSCA – REVIEW OF McVICAR’S LIVE FROM THE MET PRODUCTION

James Karas

After you have found the singers, the orchestra and chorus, a successful production of an opera requires a grand vision and scrupulous attention to details. The Metropolitan Opera has assembled everything for its new production of Tosca and the result is, not surprisingly a massive success despite numerous mishaps of which more below.

Let’s start with the singers. The title role is taken by Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva. She has a luminous voice and manages to give a truly dramatic performance as the jealous diva. She and her lover Cavaradossi (tenor Vittorio Grigolo) are youthful lovers who cannot keep their hands and lips off each other. Their duets and her solos are splendid examples of vocal delivery. Her “Vissi d’arte” may lack some of the sustained high notes and emotional breadth we ideally expect but it brought the house down. Her relish in killing Scarpia was delightful for those of us who love to see a creep put down for ever.

 

Vittorio Grigolo as Cavaradossi and Sonya Yoncheva as Tosca. 

Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera.

Grigolo brought youth and erotic intensity to Cavaradossi. His fine voice and physical agility make him ideal for the role. He was especially dramatic and moving in his “E lucevan le stelle” where the camera concentrated on his face poised from underneath. Everything was right about his singing and he brought the house down.

Baritone Željko Lučić sings the nasty Scarpia and he is splendid at it. Lučić has a resonant voice that he uses to fine effect to express his evil megalomania and cruel depravity. With the deep furrow between his eyebrows and his swaggering, authoritarian manner, he expresses a man who is used to getting his way. A superb performance.

The Metropolitan Opera Chorus has an easy night with singing basically only a “Te Deum” but the segment rises to absolutely thrilling heights. The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra conducted by Emmanuel Villaume rises to equal heights throughout.

Tosca has had a somewhat spotty history at the Met of late. After revving Franco Zeffirelli’s production of the 1980’s for a quarter of a century, General Director Peter Gelb hired Luc Bondy to do something different. It was a more or less a disaster not that there were not people who thought highly of it. For the current new production, Gelb retained Director David McVicar who has opted for a traditional, opulent production in line with Franco Zeffirelli’s.

McVicar and Set and Costume Designer John Macfarlane give traditional sets. The first scene set in the Church of Sant’Andrea della Valle features grand pillars and an imposing interior of a Baroque cathedral. Scarpia’s office is large, mostly dark with the painting of The Rape of the Virgins and suggestive of menace. The ramparts of Castel Sant’Angelo with the winged statute of the Archangel Michael hovering above is another example of operatic sets on a grand scale.

But along with the grand vision, McVicar pays attention to countless details that give the production an unexpected freshness. A few examples. McVicar humanizes the Sacristan (Patrick Carfizzi) be making him take snuff to calm his nerves and slightly mocking Cavaradossi. We like the Sacristan.

When Cavaradossi tries to kiss Tosca in the church, she pushes him away because they are in front of the Madonna. Then she points to a spot where the Madonna cannot “see” them and they smooch like the young lovers that they are. Tosca is burning with love, Cavaradossi tells us, and he is right and she proves it.

A scene from Act III of David McVicar's new production of "Tosca". 

Photo: Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

As Scarpia is ordering his henchmen to search for Angelotti in the church, several attractive women walk by and one of them looks longingly at him. This lecher has many women on the line. In his office with Tosca, he brags of his lust and of his preference for violent sex. The word has almost gone from common usage, but Scarpia is a rapist. When he tries to rape Tosca he grabs her breast and then her crotch. This is the gross conduct of a rapist and McVicar does not shy from showing his action graphically.

Cinema director Gary Halvorson showed many scenes from below giving extraordinary details that the audience at Lincoln Center did (could) not have witnessed. I have criticized and almost shown contempt for many of his efforts in the past. This time I have nothing but praise for him.

Few words about some of the debacles that the production faced. Jonas Kaufman cast as Cavaradossi bailed out and was replaced by Grigolo who has never sung the role before. Kristine Opolais quit as Tosca. Hello, Sonya. Conductor Andris Nelsons dropped his baton and James Levine was sent to pasture over allegations of sexual misconduct. Welcome, Emmanuel Villaume. Baritone Bryn Terfel phoned in vocal fatigue – what are you doing tonight Željko?

Despite all of those mishaps, this proved to be a thrilling performance on the big screen in every respect from vision to detail, to singing and to a grand afternoon at the opera.

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Tosca by Giacomo Puccini was shown Live in HD from the Metropolitan Opera on January 27, 2018 at the at the Cineplex VIP Don Mills Shops at Don Mills, 12 Marie Labatte Road, Toronto Ontario M3C 0H9 and other theatres. Encores will be shown on February 17, 26, 28, March 3 and 11 2018 at various theatres. For more information: www.cineplex.com/events

THE CRUCIBLE – REVIEW OF HART HOUSE PRODUCTION

James Karas

Arthur Miller’s The Crucible is the type of play that you can know by heart and yet react as if you had never seen it before when you watch the next production. You want to know what the director and the cast bring to the production but when you watch the play you get absorbed in the plot as if have no idea how it will end.

The Crucible, for those who have never seen it, is about the witch trials in Salem, Massachusetts that took place in the spring and summer in 1692.   A few hysterical girls’ accusations of witchcraft turned into a hunt for a satanic conspiracy to overthrow the theocracy of the little town. There is no shortage of witchcrafts but Miller was living through the McCarthy witch hunt of the 1950’s when he wrote the play which premiered in 1953.

Melissa Taylor as Elizabeth Proctor, Jon Berrie as John Proctor. 

Photo: Scott Gorman

The current production at Hart House Theatre directed by Michael Rubinstein has a fine cast and an imaginative and highly effective take on the play. Rubinstein and his production team set the play in a dark and forbidding milieu at the edge of civilization. Trees are visible and we know that there and beyond lie more darkness, the unknown and the ominous.

The production opens in the forest with some children dancing furtively and aware that what they are doing is, at the very least, not permitted. The scene is not in the play but an addition by Rubinstein.

The forest or the edge of civilization is always visible. The scenes in the homes of Reverend Parris, John Proctor, the Salem meeting house and the cell in Salem jail are only indicated. Some of the characters are usually visible in the background, in the darkness of the forest. The play takes place in specific places but also everywhere in the hysterical minds of most people who see Satan everywhere and want to eradicate him.

John Proctor (John Berrie) is the tragic figure of the play. He is a struggling farmer married to Elizabeth (Melissa Taylor). She is described as cold and sniveling and her husband committed the crime of lechery with their servant Abigail Williams (Courtney Lamanna). John and Elizabeth grow during the play from a bickering couple into people who see the evil around them, accept their fate and do not lose their humanity. Excellent performances by Berrie and Taylor.

Reverend Parris is a small minded, paranoid, hell-and-brimstone preacher. He thinks there is a conspiracy to have him thrown out and he is in constant desperation. Anthony Botelho plays the Reverend well as he fidgets, interrupts people and shows us that Parris is a small and evil man who does not have a single Christian virtue and possesses all the vices of fanaticism and superstition.

 

Thomas Gough, Nicholas Koy Santillo and David John Phillips. Photo: Scott Gorman

The truly evil person is Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth (David John Phillips). He has a perfect vision of Satan who is a precise operator so skillful that he can possess the soul of people and control them completely. He must be pursued and expunged mercilessly and hanging people engaged in witchcraft, i.e. possessed by Satan, is a sacred duty. Phillips displays all the self-confidence and arrogance of a man with power but without humanity in a frightful portrayal of the man of God in pursuit of God’s enemies.

The decent people of the town who are caught and destroyed in the maelstrom of hysteria are portrayed well by Thomas Gough as Giles Cory (his wife reads books). Tom Anthony Quinn as Francis Nurse and Marilyn Willock as Rebecca Nurse. They place weights on your chest to force a confession. If you confess to being a witch, you lose your property. If you die without confessing, your children inherit your land. And there is the town’s version of Donald Trump in Thomas Putnam (Tomas Ketchum) who is ready to grab whatever acreage is or is not available.

I find the fate of Reverend John Hale almost as tragic as that of Proctor. He is a man of his time, of course, and believes that witchcraft and Satan are real and must be pursued and obliterated vigorously. He soon realizes that the hysteria of the girls is a fraud and the enthusiasm of the persecutors unfounded. He tries desperately to save people’s lives but he can do nothing about it. Nicholas Koy Santillo gives us the transformation and desperate attempts of Hale to bring humanity and reason to Salem in a fine performance.   

I was transfixed by the production and waited until the final scene of the performance as if I had never seen the play before.

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The Crucible by Arthur Miller continues until February 3, 2018 at Hart House Theatre, 7 Hart House Circle, Toronto, Ont.  www.tickets.harthouse.ca 416 978-8849

LEAR - REVIEW OF SUPERB PRODUCTION BY GROUNDLING THEATRE COMPANY

Reviewed by James Karas

The Groundling Theatre Company has staged a nuanced, moving and superb production of Shakespeare’s King Lear. The title role is played by a woman (Seana McKenna) and thus the play is called simply Lear.

Director Graham Abbey has found in Seana McKenna one of Canada’s best actors to play Queen Lear. She delivers a powerful performance, with meticulous inflection, intonation and dramatic depth. When she curses her daughter Goneril by invoking the goddess to: “into her womb convey sterility. / Dry up in her the organs of increase” and finishes with the curse that one day “she may feel how sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child” I found the words more terrifying because they are by a mother to her child.  Lear’s descent into madness is developed with painstaking detail and McKenna emerges as an outstanding and memorable Lear.

Colin Mochrie, Diana Donnelly and Seana McKenna. Photo: Michael Cooper 

Colin Mochrie, the Fool, has a broad face that looks comical as befits a jester but he can also turn serious when he delivers acute barbs at Lear. A refreshingly comical-serious Fool. A blonde Deborah Hay and a red-haired Diana Donnelly make a well-matched pair of evil doers as Goneril and Regan. Their greed, ambition and egocentrism stand out and they are indeed thankless and merciless children.

Cordelia (Mercedes Morris) comes out as somewhat bland compared to her brutal sisters but I suppose there is not much one can do with quiet virtue.

Jim Mezon gives a notable performance as the Earl of Gloucester. He is decent, generous and loyal but easily deceived and not very bright. The latter qualities bring (about) his downfall and in the end he becomes a tragic character that almost parallels Lear’s life.    

Alex McCooeye, tall, and lanky, plays the snake-like, treacherous bastard Edmund while Antoine Yared plays the virtuous Edgar. Abbey eschews flourishes and soliloquies like Edmund’s “Thou, Nature, art my goddess” are delivered in a relatively low key.

The play is done in the intimacy of the Harbourfront Centre Theatre on a small acting area flanked by the audience on each side. The set by Peter Hartwell consists of a raised area with a desk that has a number of moveable planks that can be used to create a flat playing area or tossed around to emphasize dramatic moments. The intimacy of the theatre and the pace set by Abbey work extremely well in accentuating every move and every line of the play. Meticulous attention pays off.

 

Mercedes Morris, Colin Mochrie and Seana McKenna. Photo: Michael Cooper

The playing area, as I said, consists of a raised platform and this created a small problem in the final scene when Lear carries in Cordelia in his arms. It is the famous “Howl, howl, howl!” scene. McKenna could not possibly lift Morris and quite rightly drags her in on a sheet. The problem arises when she has to lift Cordelia’s body a few inches from the floor onto the playing area. Lear is almost chanting the heart piercing cry “Howl,” a highly dramatic moment, while trying hard to roll Cordelia’s onto the playing area. A few awkward moments that beg for a solution.

The costumes by Peter Hartwell were 19^th century or thereabouts tails and cravats or black uniforms of uncertain description.

In all, however, this is a superb production of a very difficult play and it provides a great night at the theatre.

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Lear  by William Shakespeare in a production by Groundling Theatre Company continues until January 28, 2018 at the Harbourfront Centre Theatre, 231 Queen’s Quay West, Toronto. Ontario. www.groundlingtheatre.com

A DELICATE BALANCE – REVIEW OF SOULPEPPER’S DELICATE PRODUCTION

Reviewed by James Karas

Director Diana Leblanc takes her cue for the current production of A Delicate Balance, for Soulpepper from the title. She gives a sensitive, low-keyed and delicate handling of Edward Albee’s 1966 play which presents a number of people whose personal lives are precariously balanced and who live in a world that is affected by terror and the plague.

Indeed there are many delicate balances that the characters have to face some of which cannot be maintained and that is where the drama of the play lies.

Tobias (Oliver Dennis) and Agnes (Nancy Palk) are wealthy, live in a fine house, and belong to a club. But that is just the surface. Agnes fears becoming insane as she gets older and she has to maintain a number of delicate balances so she can keep her cool composure and self-control. She has an alcoholic sister, Claire (Brenda Robins) whom she hates, issues with her husband’s erstwhile infidelity, lack of intimacy with him after the death of a son and a crazy daughter, Julia (Laura Condlin).

 

 Oliver Dennis, Kyra Harper, Laura Condlln, Brenda Robins, Nancy Palk, and Derek Boyes 

Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann

 As if that were not enough, their best friends Harry (Derek Boyes) and Edna (Kyra Harper) arrive to stay with them because they are simply terrified. We don’t know of what but they are eventually accused of bringing the terror or the plague to the house of Tobias and Agnes.

Tobias, a gentle man, tries to balance the obligations of friendship with his daughter’s vehement objections to Harry’s and Agnes presence not just in her parents’ house but in her bedroom. She is a mess herself having been married and separated four times (quadruple amputation, they call it) and now staying with her parents again who must balance parental obligation with a desire for a quiet life.

There are more delicate balances in their imbalanced world that seems to be on the verge but we are not completely certain on the verge of what.

Oliver Dennis plays Tobias superbly. He wants to be a good friend to Harry and Edna, a good husband, a good father to Julia and a good brother-in-law to the eccentric, erratic and frequently drunk Claire. He breaks down completely in the final scene when he tries to express his friendship with Harry and finds that there are limits to it and he tells his best friend he wants him to stay but asks him to leave.

 Laura Condlln, Oliver Dennis, Derek Boyes, Nancy Palk, and Kyra Harper 

Photo: Cylla von Tiedemann

Boyes and Harper must walk the fine line between being frightened into leaving their home and both politely and impudently asking for shelter with Tobias. They feel entitled to it as a debt of friendship while admitting that they would not welcome Tobias and Agnes under similar circumstances. Boyes and Harper walk that line with marvelous delicacy.

Laura Condlin as Julie is a spoiled brat who chooses losers for husbands and runs to her parents when she divorces them. Condlin is appropriately histrionic in the role.  

Brenda Robins is the crazy Claire who drinks, lies on the floor and brings out an accordion to cause havoc. She is comic if you ignore her sharp tongue and her desire to kill her sister if not everyone else.

The play is done in a theatre-in-the-round style with a set by Astrid Janson. The benefit of that is that we are all close to the living room of Tobias and Agnes. The negative is that there is very little scope for set design. There is a couch and a bar (they all drink a lot) but it is impossible to indicate the wealth and posh décor that money can buy.

Leblanc insists on low tones, on maintaining the veneer of upper crust politeness and then allowing the emotional eruptions to take their effect. A brilliant approach to a difficult play     

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 A Delicate Balance by Edward Albee opened on January 18 and will play until February 10, 2018 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 55 Tank House Lane, Toronto, Ontario. www.soulpepper.ca  416 866-8666.

RITA, SUE AND BOB TOO – REVIEW OF ROYAL COURT THEATRE PRODUCTION

James Karas

Rita, Sue and Bob Too was written by Andrea Dunbar when she was 19 and was first performed in 1982. It has now been revived at the Royal Court Theatre in London in a fine and intriguing production.

Rita (Taj Atwal) and Sue (Gemma Dobson) are 15 year old girls who are babysitting Bob’s (James Atherton) children. On his way to taking them home, he stops his car in an out of the way place and has sex with both of them. The sex is consensual but the only conclusion to be drawn is that Bob will be arrested sooner or later and spend some serious time in prison. We wait for the event that will precipitate his arrest.

Sue and Rita continue having sex with Bob alone or together and there is no sign of the police.

 Gemma Dobson (Sue), James Atherton (Bob) and Taj Atwal (Rita) .Phoyograph: Tristram Kenton

We meet Sue’s Dad (David Walker) and Mum (Sally Banks) and they are seriously unsavory, working class people who use foul language as a matter of course. Mum may have some redeeming features, but calling them Neanderthals is not too far off the mark. You get some idea of the pleasant atmosphere in Sue’s home.

Bob is married to Michelle (Samantha Robinson) an attractive, intelligent and sympathetic woman with perhaps a lower sexual drive than Bob’s. She is suspicious about his outings and becomes certain that he is cheating on her when she finds condoms in his pants.

Where is the police?

The police never come and I will not spoil the outcome of the play by revealing the ending. The explanation for the treatment of the situation comes from the author’s personal experiences. She was raised in a situation similar to that of Rita and Sue. She became pregnant three times by different men while still a teenager, became a heavy drinker and died in 1990 at the age of 29.

There is a resolution in the play but an unexpected one.

 

Taj Atwell as Rita, Gemma Dobson as Sue and James Atherton as Bob.

Atwal and Dobson speaking in a Yorkshire accent are convincing teenagers who are looking for a way out of their ugly life. They have hopes and dreams within the limited opportunities of having sex with a much older married man. By jumping to the current atmosphere of sexual abuse of women by men in authority from Donald Trump down we are missing the point of the lives of the teenagers and the choices that they make.

Atherton as Bob rationalizes his conduct by the fact that sex with his wife is infrequent and unsatisfactory. He is fine with having sex with the teenagers provided they do not tell each other of what is going on. His rationalization is as thin and as inexcusable as that of any predator of today’s crop or those of the past.

The set by Tim Shortall consists of a few chairs which are moved around to represent the car, Sue’s home and a store where the girls and Michelle work. Simple and effective.

Kate Wasserberg directs meticulously and effectively.       

A very interesting play that combines the autobiographical and the imaginary. In 1982, when the play opened, were things that different that no one called the police or is this peculiar to the poor, working class milieu of Yorkshire. I don’t know but I admit that I kept looking for the police that never came.

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Rita, Sue and Bob Too  by Andrea Dunbar, in a production by Out of Joint, Octagon Theatre Bolton and the Royal Court Theatre runs until January 27, 2018 at the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, London. England. https://royalcourttheatre.com/

THE BIRTHDAY PARTY – REVIEW OF PINTER’S PLAY IN LONDON

Reviewed by James Karas

Harold Pinter wrote The Birthday Party, his first full-length play, in 1957 and it was staged for the first time in 1958. Thus the current revival at the London theatre named after him can properly be classified as a bow to the sixtieth anniversary of The Birthday Party.

I can’t resist the temptation to refer to the reception the play got when it was produced at the Lyric Hammersmith in 1958.  The critic for The Daily Telegraph opined that The Birthday Party is “one of those plays in which an author wallows in symbols and revels in obscurity” He then tried to end his review on a happy note for Pinter: “Oh well, I can give him one word of cheer. He might have been a dramatic critic, condemned to sit through plays like this.”

 Zoe Wanamaker and Toby Jones. Photo: Johan Persson 

Harold Hobson gave the play and Pinter a resoundingly positive review in the Sunday Times and stated that “Deliberately, I am willing to risk whatever reputation I have as a judge of plays by saying that The Birthday Party....and Pinter, on the evidence of his work, possesses the most original, disturbing and arresting talent in theatrical London.”

The current production directed by Ian Rickson with a superb ensemble of actors confirms Hobson’s opinion not that any confirmation is needed.

The Birthday Party is theatre of the opaque or the absurd. Nothing is what it seems at first blush or on final consideration. Meg (Zoe Wanamaker) and her husband Petey (Peter Wight) are a conventional couple living in a boarding house in some seaside area. They have a boarder called Stanley (Toby Jones) who is unshaven, unkempt and erratic and decidedly of uncertain provenance. He says he was a former concert pianist but he could just as well be a homeless bum.

Two men come to stay in the boarding house but they are quite inexplicable. In well-tailored suits, apparently well-mannered, they accuse Stanley of betraying the organization.

There is menace lurking at every turn of the play and constant jockeying for power and dominance. The two men, Goldberg (Stephen Mangan) and McCann (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) exert some real violence, they engage in blind man’s bluff and the pervasive feeling is that of fear, menace and uncertainty.

 Stephen Mangan, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor and Toby Jones. Photo: Joan Persson 

We are not sure if anything that the characters say is true or if they are recollecting facts or fantasizing about the past.

A woman called Lulu (Pearl Mackie) appears and we are never sure what her role is in relation to the characters.

Petey seems to be quite sane. He arranges the deck chairs on the beach and there is no suggestion that he is nuts. There is a birthday party of sorts but Petey does not stay for it. As for the sanity of the others, we can never be sure.

The set by Quay Brothers is the realistic eating area of a kitchen with a table, chairs and a sofa.

Rickson and the fine cast capture all the ambiguities, shifting realities and underlying menaces and fears of the play superbly.   

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The Birthday Party by Harold Pinter continues until April 14 2018 at the Harold Pinter Theatre, London, England. www.atgtickets.com.  Box office: 0844-871 7627.

CELL MATES – REVIEW OF HAMPSTEAD THEATRE PRODUCTION

James Karas

Simon Gray was a prolific playwright who wrote a few good plays and many mediocre ones. Cell Mates was produced in 1995 directed by Gray and may have been ready for a decent run until the star, Stephen Fry, walked out after a few performances. The play had not been performed again until Hampstead Theatre picked it up last year for a production directed by Edward Hall.

It is an interesting situation based on fact. In October 1966, George Blake escaped from London’s Wormswood Scrubs Prison and flew to Moscow. He had been a double agent spying for the Soviet Union and Britain and was sentenced to 42 years in prison.

His escape was engineered by a petty criminal with some literary talent, an embittered Irishman named Sean Bourke. Bourke had help from Russian agents and he was lured to Moscow by Blake where he stayed for a number of years against his will.

 Geoffrey Streatfeild, left, as Blake and Emmet Byrne as Bourke. Photo Marc Brenner

Blake, played by Geoffrey Streatfeild, is reserved, diffident, elegantly dressed and the image of the English gentleman. He is also a traitor who does not think much of human life. He knows of the millions that have been butchered by the Communists but he is ready to rationalize everything with the hackneyed metaphor that if you want to make an omelet you have to crack some eggs. It is all in support of the creation of “the country of the future” he tells us several times and that country of course is the Soviet Union.

Sean Bourke (Emmet Byrne) is a petty criminal who drinks too much and tries desperately to get out of Moscow but his “friend” Blake who owes his escape to him tells him that the KGB wants him to stay there.

Blake and Bourke are fascinating characters and the situation is of great interest but Gray does not quite bring it off. The two Soviet KGB men are out of a B movie. Viktor (Danny Lee Wynter) and Stan (Philip Bird) are menacing by profession but making Viktor sound like a poor imitation of Peter Lorre goes over the top into banality.

The leave-stay scenario with Bourke runs out of steam and when he starts singing “Danny Boy” and “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” with the housekeeper Zinaida (Cara Horgan) you know that Gray is struggling for things to say.

 

Danny-Lee-Wynter, Philip-Bird, Geoffrey-Streatfeild, and Emmet-Byrne. 

Photo-by-Marc-Brenner

Blake wants Bourke to believe that the KGB men are cold blooded killers and they will not hesitate to snuff him if he disobeys them. What is difficult to believe is that despite that type of atmosphere both men have bulky tape recorders (it’s 1966) and they are recording their thoughts and their plans. Are they completely stupid?

The set in the first scene consists of a Spartan office in the prison that Blake occupies as the prison literary magazine and in the second scene it is an ordinary flat. From then on, the men are housed in a well-furnished apartment in Moscow with a housekeeper and plenty of champagne and vodka.

I will not divulge the ending because despite its shortcomings, the play is worth seeing. Streatfeild and Byrne do a fine job and Hall deserves to be credited with doing a good job with them. The KGB men with their bad Russian accents need some fine tuning even if they look as if they are straight from Central Casting.       

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Cell Mates by Simon Gray continues until January 20, 2018 at the Hampstead Theatre, Eton Avenue, Swiss Cottage, London, England. https://www.hampsteadtheatre.com/