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Oct. 31st, 2017 08:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretAdes's The Exterminating Angel was actually quite good, so my dread was unwarranted! It was weird and creepy and unsettling and at times, really moving. It did metatheater/meta-opera in subtle, clever ways. It had really striking and effective music, particularly in the drum-heavy study-in-dynamics that was the second Act overture. It was faithful in spirit to the original film, but intensified by its operatic treatment, as I noted Ades has failed to do in the past.
The Exterminating Angel has a wonderful surrealist, symbolist premise- a wealthy dinner party in Franciscan Spain begins after a night at the opera. Inexplicably almost all of the servants find excuses to leave before the party, but the hostess soldiers on, until at the end of the night, the guests gradually realize that for reasons they can't explain, they are physically unable to leave the house. Time passes, urgently, and the desperation to leave increases, but nothing changes. The guests are driven to a variety of ever more brutal and shocking stratagems before their ultimate, ambiguous release. Oh, and by the way, for surrealism bonus points there is a bear wandering around the house at various points, too.
It's a straightforward premise but it's unwieldy for an opera in some ways- the large for an opera cast of important ensemble roles that has to stay on stage the whole time was cut back from the cast of the film, but is still tricky to balance. Even at the end, there were a couple of characters we didn't have a great handle on. There's a lot of simultaneous action, which was occasionally, though not typically, hard to follow. And the passage of time is so crucial to the story. I was saying to Jon, who went with me, that on film you can achieve a lot of time passage effects in the editing room with cuts and trick photography, but on stage, the only tool you have is Ades's music. But Ades's music works brilliantly toward this end. As night fades into morning, and into further indefinite passages of time that cause the guests to lose track of time, Ades's music guides you through these ambiguous transitions. Time stretches out, becomes a medium on which the drama unfolds. Effective stagecraft enhanced these motions- the looming gateway to the outside and most of rest of the set was on a turntable that erratically, slowly spun, presenting constantly differing angles on the action.
The Exterminating Angel has a wonderful surrealist, symbolist premise- a wealthy dinner party in Franciscan Spain begins after a night at the opera. Inexplicably almost all of the servants find excuses to leave before the party, but the hostess soldiers on, until at the end of the night, the guests gradually realize that for reasons they can't explain, they are physically unable to leave the house. Time passes, urgently, and the desperation to leave increases, but nothing changes. The guests are driven to a variety of ever more brutal and shocking stratagems before their ultimate, ambiguous release. Oh, and by the way, for surrealism bonus points there is a bear wandering around the house at various points, too.
It's a straightforward premise but it's unwieldy for an opera in some ways- the large for an opera cast of important ensemble roles that has to stay on stage the whole time was cut back from the cast of the film, but is still tricky to balance. Even at the end, there were a couple of characters we didn't have a great handle on. There's a lot of simultaneous action, which was occasionally, though not typically, hard to follow. And the passage of time is so crucial to the story. I was saying to Jon, who went with me, that on film you can achieve a lot of time passage effects in the editing room with cuts and trick photography, but on stage, the only tool you have is Ades's music. But Ades's music works brilliantly toward this end. As night fades into morning, and into further indefinite passages of time that cause the guests to lose track of time, Ades's music guides you through these ambiguous transitions. Time stretches out, becomes a medium on which the drama unfolds. Effective stagecraft enhanced these motions- the looming gateway to the outside and most of rest of the set was on a turntable that erratically, slowly spun, presenting constantly differing angles on the action.