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Feb. 14th, 2011 10:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretLast Wednesday was a pretty great night. mithrigil and two of her friends grabbed rush tickets for Nixon in China at the Met for themselves, me, freeradical42, and Talia. Or rather, that was the plan, but we miscommunicated and ended up a ticket short. But it was no problem because I got an extra SRO ticket and managed to sneak into a seat behind freeradical42 for the second and third acts.
"Nixon in China" is a wonderful opera. The music is gorgeous, effortlessly ultramodern without losing any connection to opera history. The libretto gets the characters almost shockingly right at times, Chou Enlai's oracular pronunciations contrasting with Nixon's politically-motivated idealism. The singers were terrific. James Maddalena channeled Nixon like a medium conducting a seance, Kathleen Kim was a ferocious and powerful Madame Mao (Who am I kidding, I love everything I've ever seen Kathleen Kim in and that's unlikely to change anytime soon), the singers playing Chou Enlai and Pat Nixon were terrific. The production design had some fascinating ideas about time and space, especially a motif involving photography and the way we in the twenty-first century look at news as entertainment.
Unfortunately, these virtues were on display most clearly only in the first act. The second and third acts were plagued with execution problems, strange directorial lapses, and problematic images. A clever shuffle of images involving a staging of a Communist propaganda play was lost in the shuffle when the show didn't do enough to clearly mark shifts in character. The curtain went down awkwardly for a full minute for a scene change that lacked any music.mithrigil fulfilled her life long dream of watching Mao receive oral sex.
The big problem, I eventually concluded, was that this was a transplant production originally designed for a stage that lacked the Met's capacities. I talked about this withstarlady a few weeks ago in a hypothetical way, but it was glaring last night. The example we kept citing was the airplane, whose descent and ascent were silly and unimpressive. When you've seen spectacles of much greater power done regularly on this stage, when you know what is possible with the Met's elevators and turntable, you can no longer get away with an airplane designed for the Houston Opera. But we kept finding more and more places where if this production had been designed from the ground up for the space it occupied, it could have been dramatically more effective.
Still, it was beautiful music and a fascinating, thought-provoking story and I couldn't have asked for better people to see it with. We went afterward to a little cafe and decompressed and defrosted and yeah... it was a good night.
I want to spend a little time talking about what Nixon in China is trying to say about the way we view history, because it's a complicated subject and there was a lot for me to unpack and because I had difficulty separating the thoughts the show actually was trying to work through from the thoughts it ended up communicating because of directorial misconduct.
But the first word of Nixon's first aria is "News", and it's a startling and evocative moment. Nixon in many ways is the viewpoint figure, especially on this theme, the one who seems most clearly to be trying to figure out where his place in history is.
News. We have an expression these days "instant history". We speak incessantly of how somebody "made history today" with their action, whatever it might be. How does someone 'make history'? Are there things a person can do that do not make history? If Nixon had stayed home and not made his historic trip to China, would he have failed to make history?
News. That is what Nixon made in China, not history. When the cameras frame him getting off the plane and he freezes for a moment in time, when they frame him shaking hands with Chou Enlai on the ground and he freezes for a moment in time, he knows that he is making News. He knows that those images are going out across the world, that people are watching what he's doing Right Now. He is News. Which is an entertainment, of sorts. Literally, a snapshot of time in which the thing he is doing matters to other people in that snapshot of time. History is about the things that people in one snapshot care about what happened in another earlier snapshot. Nixon has little interest in that, at least not in the first act. As a politician he lives constantly in the moment. But the opera is certainly concerned not merely with News but also with History.
A thought I had very early on in the first act was that this story meant something wholly different to us in 2010 as compared to when it did when it was first staged, simply because... no, I will not say simply. But it felt vastly different because we lie on opposite sides of Tienanmen Square, from the rise of the Chinese industrial powerhouse. Adams's opera was a story of Communism and Capitalism striving toward something greater together, but today it's a story about how fast the story changes, how quickly Communism fell out of the picture. How important relations with China are, not because of Russia but because we are two great nations struggling to find out way through the 21st Century.
The opera's understanding of History is very, very personal here. He doesn't write of The United States in China, but of Nixon in China. A man on a personal mission of sorts. When the third act turns its attention rearward, it turns to Madame Mao's recollections of the revolution and Nixon's remembrances of the Pacific Theater. This is a fascinating contrast to the impersonality of News, with the actions of one group beamed across the world to millions. History is about individuals, news is about masses? Surely that's the opposite of what we would have intuited. Perhaps it's overly idealistic, but it's certainly a theory worth consideration.
And the weirdest contrast of all involves participation. The second act, what we might expect to work as a fulcrum, works with history and news in terms of the spectator as actor. We watch from the audience as Richard and Pat Nixon watch from the audience as a Chinese propaganda play is acted out. The themes presented disgust them, Pat Nixon is driven to act, she stands up and intervenes in the play. Out in the audience, we can only watch in bemused dismay. News acts in the now, allows us to alter its course. History acts in the then, gives us only one recourse to participate- reinterpretation.
I don't know. A lot of this was actually very confusing to watch, but these are some ideas I had about it.
mithrigil and two of her friends grabbed rush tickets for Nixon in China at the Met for themselves, me, freeradical42, and Talia. Or rather, that was the plan, but we miscommunicated and ended up a ticket short. But it was no problem because I got an extra SRO ticket and managed to sneak into a seat behind freeradical42 for the second and third acts."Nixon in China" is a wonderful opera. The music is gorgeous, effortlessly ultramodern without losing any connection to opera history. The libretto gets the characters almost shockingly right at times, Chou Enlai's oracular pronunciations contrasting with Nixon's politically-motivated idealism. The singers were terrific. James Maddalena channeled Nixon like a medium conducting a seance, Kathleen Kim was a ferocious and powerful Madame Mao (Who am I kidding, I love everything I've ever seen Kathleen Kim in and that's unlikely to change anytime soon), the singers playing Chou Enlai and Pat Nixon were terrific. The production design had some fascinating ideas about time and space, especially a motif involving photography and the way we in the twenty-first century look at news as entertainment.
Unfortunately, these virtues were on display most clearly only in the first act. The second and third acts were plagued with execution problems, strange directorial lapses, and problematic images. A clever shuffle of images involving a staging of a Communist propaganda play was lost in the shuffle when the show didn't do enough to clearly mark shifts in character. The curtain went down awkwardly for a full minute for a scene change that lacked any music.
mithrigil fulfilled her life long dream of watching Mao receive oral sex.The big problem, I eventually concluded, was that this was a transplant production originally designed for a stage that lacked the Met's capacities. I talked about this with
starlady a few weeks ago in a hypothetical way, but it was glaring last night. The example we kept citing was the airplane, whose descent and ascent were silly and unimpressive. When you've seen spectacles of much greater power done regularly on this stage, when you know what is possible with the Met's elevators and turntable, you can no longer get away with an airplane designed for the Houston Opera. But we kept finding more and more places where if this production had been designed from the ground up for the space it occupied, it could have been dramatically more effective.Still, it was beautiful music and a fascinating, thought-provoking story and I couldn't have asked for better people to see it with. We went afterward to a little cafe and decompressed and defrosted and yeah... it was a good night.
I want to spend a little time talking about what Nixon in China is trying to say about the way we view history, because it's a complicated subject and there was a lot for me to unpack and because I had difficulty separating the thoughts the show actually was trying to work through from the thoughts it ended up communicating because of directorial misconduct.
But the first word of Nixon's first aria is "News", and it's a startling and evocative moment. Nixon in many ways is the viewpoint figure, especially on this theme, the one who seems most clearly to be trying to figure out where his place in history is.
News. We have an expression these days "instant history". We speak incessantly of how somebody "made history today" with their action, whatever it might be. How does someone 'make history'? Are there things a person can do that do not make history? If Nixon had stayed home and not made his historic trip to China, would he have failed to make history?
News. That is what Nixon made in China, not history. When the cameras frame him getting off the plane and he freezes for a moment in time, when they frame him shaking hands with Chou Enlai on the ground and he freezes for a moment in time, he knows that he is making News. He knows that those images are going out across the world, that people are watching what he's doing Right Now. He is News. Which is an entertainment, of sorts. Literally, a snapshot of time in which the thing he is doing matters to other people in that snapshot of time. History is about the things that people in one snapshot care about what happened in another earlier snapshot. Nixon has little interest in that, at least not in the first act. As a politician he lives constantly in the moment. But the opera is certainly concerned not merely with News but also with History.
A thought I had very early on in the first act was that this story meant something wholly different to us in 2010 as compared to when it did when it was first staged, simply because... no, I will not say simply. But it felt vastly different because we lie on opposite sides of Tienanmen Square, from the rise of the Chinese industrial powerhouse. Adams's opera was a story of Communism and Capitalism striving toward something greater together, but today it's a story about how fast the story changes, how quickly Communism fell out of the picture. How important relations with China are, not because of Russia but because we are two great nations struggling to find out way through the 21st Century.
The opera's understanding of History is very, very personal here. He doesn't write of The United States in China, but of Nixon in China. A man on a personal mission of sorts. When the third act turns its attention rearward, it turns to Madame Mao's recollections of the revolution and Nixon's remembrances of the Pacific Theater. This is a fascinating contrast to the impersonality of News, with the actions of one group beamed across the world to millions. History is about individuals, news is about masses? Surely that's the opposite of what we would have intuited. Perhaps it's overly idealistic, but it's certainly a theory worth consideration.
And the weirdest contrast of all involves participation. The second act, what we might expect to work as a fulcrum, works with history and news in terms of the spectator as actor. We watch from the audience as Richard and Pat Nixon watch from the audience as a Chinese propaganda play is acted out. The themes presented disgust them, Pat Nixon is driven to act, she stands up and intervenes in the play. Out in the audience, we can only watch in bemused dismay. News acts in the now, allows us to alter its course. History acts in the then, gives us only one recourse to participate- reinterpretation.
I don't know. A lot of this was actually very confusing to watch, but these are some ideas I had about it.
Nixon
Date: 2011-02-15 12:11 am (UTC)I am the official blogger for Portland Opera. I hope you will take a minute to browse what we we have going on in the great Pacific Northwest! http://www.portlandopera.org/blog/operaman/
Re: Nixon
Date: 2011-02-15 12:29 am (UTC)