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Apr. 29th, 2011 10:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferretThere are 4 fandom tags among my AO3 fandom tags where I am the only author to have written fic for that fandom. I'm kind of proud of that. Only one of those fics was written for Yuletide. Two of the fandoms were tagged in the process of writing IOAWNAT fanfic, a fandom that has now swelled to 8 fanworks in the archive. Careful, too much more and we might be Yuletide ineligible. :P
Last night I finished out my NYCO subscription at Stephen Schwartz's "Seance on a Wet Afternoon", the first opera by the Broadway composer famous for "Godspell", "Pippin", and "Wicked". I'd seen some bad reviews, and I was not expecting much. But I actually enjoyed it a great deal. The show was chilly, subdued, distant, meditative and deeply fascinating.
I want to single out two moments in particular. One is the moment when Myra suffocates the young girl she has kidnapped. In a conventional narrative, this moment is climactic, a point of no return. Previously, Bill has believed that he can restore things to how they were before, that this can still turn out to be a comedy. Myra killing the girl ruins any chance of that. But the music was surprisingly undramatic. It was sad, quiet, and the moment of execution went almost without remark. And I said, "Wait a minute. This feels wrong. Why isn't this moment a bigger deal musically?" And as I thought about it, and watched the next scene, I realized that I'd been understanding the narrative wrong. The point of no return wasn't the murder scene. The point of no return was the creation of The Plan. With these characters and their situations, the death was fated from that point on. There was nothing Bill could do to stop it, because he's so wound up in Myra's fantasies.
But the viewer couldn't possibly realize that! When the kidnapping took place, we didn't know enough about the characters to understand what was driving them. So narratively Schwartz led us into a trap where we though we understood the story that was going on, but we really didn't. We thought we were watching characters walk off the edge of a cliff, but really we'd been watching them in freefall the whole time. I thought this was a really exciting dramatic trick on his part.
The other moment to single out is in the final scene. Myra has just apparently channeled Adriana for real, not fakery like her previous seances. Or at least, her previous seances had the appearance of being fakery, though it was deliberately unclear throughout the whole show if the ghostly appearances of Arthur were fakery, delusions on Myra's part, or real ghosts. But as Adriana in the final scene Myra knows things that Bill doesn't think she should know- it looks real, and forces reevaluation of all past scenes again. Maybe she wasn't faking it all along! And to aid the confusion of this reevaluation, Myra asks Bill "Did I really do it?" And he says "Yes." The question becomes, what 'it' are they talking about, the channeling or the murder? Or both? Are they talking past each other? Again, this line makes you stop and realize you haven't been watching the narrative you thought you were.
The music was... well, it was like an ambitious Broadway composer writing an opera. Lesser Bernstein is the closest comparison I have. There are parts of the musical vocabulary of opera that Schwartz was eager to be able to use. Recitative is probably the biggest difference between opera and musical theater, and while Schwartz didn't complete reject spoken dialogue, his use of standard recitative did make the show more immersive and less like a string of showstoppers with spoken dialogue leading you between songs the way Broadway can be.
There were no melodies here worthy of Puccini, as I think is always the hope when you engage a pop music guy to write an opera. Nor even melodies worthy of Wicked, really. Schwartz's focus on musical storytelling here didn't allow room for the kind of melody that takes you out of the show. Or maybe that's just an apology for his failure to write catchier tunes. But there were some nice arias anyway. One of the standouts for me was "To tell the truth", the police inspector's aria, which sparkled with trademark Schwartz wit. I listened to it and thought "Huh... he's managed to write a classic Broadway tune for operatic baritone." This was all things considered one of the best English language librettos I've seen. It actually took good advantage of the audience being able to understand the libretto.
The New York City Opera's on incredibly shaky financial footing right now, and it's even unclear whether there will be a season next year. But I have to say that if this is it for the company in its current form, they went out with an excellent season- Only Bernstein's "A Quiet Place" left me less than happy as I left the theater, and that was because the opera's overstuffing of themes made it impossible for an audience to understand. And I salute overambition, the 'glorious failure' I often rhapsodize about. I really hope NYCO can continue to put out excellent musical drama.
Last night I finished out my NYCO subscription at Stephen Schwartz's "Seance on a Wet Afternoon", the first opera by the Broadway composer famous for "Godspell", "Pippin", and "Wicked". I'd seen some bad reviews, and I was not expecting much. But I actually enjoyed it a great deal. The show was chilly, subdued, distant, meditative and deeply fascinating.
I want to single out two moments in particular. One is the moment when Myra suffocates the young girl she has kidnapped. In a conventional narrative, this moment is climactic, a point of no return. Previously, Bill has believed that he can restore things to how they were before, that this can still turn out to be a comedy. Myra killing the girl ruins any chance of that. But the music was surprisingly undramatic. It was sad, quiet, and the moment of execution went almost without remark. And I said, "Wait a minute. This feels wrong. Why isn't this moment a bigger deal musically?" And as I thought about it, and watched the next scene, I realized that I'd been understanding the narrative wrong. The point of no return wasn't the murder scene. The point of no return was the creation of The Plan. With these characters and their situations, the death was fated from that point on. There was nothing Bill could do to stop it, because he's so wound up in Myra's fantasies.
But the viewer couldn't possibly realize that! When the kidnapping took place, we didn't know enough about the characters to understand what was driving them. So narratively Schwartz led us into a trap where we though we understood the story that was going on, but we really didn't. We thought we were watching characters walk off the edge of a cliff, but really we'd been watching them in freefall the whole time. I thought this was a really exciting dramatic trick on his part.
The other moment to single out is in the final scene. Myra has just apparently channeled Adriana for real, not fakery like her previous seances. Or at least, her previous seances had the appearance of being fakery, though it was deliberately unclear throughout the whole show if the ghostly appearances of Arthur were fakery, delusions on Myra's part, or real ghosts. But as Adriana in the final scene Myra knows things that Bill doesn't think she should know- it looks real, and forces reevaluation of all past scenes again. Maybe she wasn't faking it all along! And to aid the confusion of this reevaluation, Myra asks Bill "Did I really do it?" And he says "Yes." The question becomes, what 'it' are they talking about, the channeling or the murder? Or both? Are they talking past each other? Again, this line makes you stop and realize you haven't been watching the narrative you thought you were.
The music was... well, it was like an ambitious Broadway composer writing an opera. Lesser Bernstein is the closest comparison I have. There are parts of the musical vocabulary of opera that Schwartz was eager to be able to use. Recitative is probably the biggest difference between opera and musical theater, and while Schwartz didn't complete reject spoken dialogue, his use of standard recitative did make the show more immersive and less like a string of showstoppers with spoken dialogue leading you between songs the way Broadway can be.
There were no melodies here worthy of Puccini, as I think is always the hope when you engage a pop music guy to write an opera. Nor even melodies worthy of Wicked, really. Schwartz's focus on musical storytelling here didn't allow room for the kind of melody that takes you out of the show. Or maybe that's just an apology for his failure to write catchier tunes. But there were some nice arias anyway. One of the standouts for me was "To tell the truth", the police inspector's aria, which sparkled with trademark Schwartz wit. I listened to it and thought "Huh... he's managed to write a classic Broadway tune for operatic baritone." This was all things considered one of the best English language librettos I've seen. It actually took good advantage of the audience being able to understand the libretto.
The New York City Opera's on incredibly shaky financial footing right now, and it's even unclear whether there will be a season next year. But I have to say that if this is it for the company in its current form, they went out with an excellent season- Only Bernstein's "A Quiet Place" left me less than happy as I left the theater, and that was because the opera's overstuffing of themes made it impossible for an audience to understand. And I salute overambition, the 'glorious failure' I often rhapsodize about. I really hope NYCO can continue to put out excellent musical drama.