Don't Let the Director into the House!

Well, it seems to be a trend—every opera that we’re destined to see this season at the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in High Definition is going to have a superb cast, a terrific chorus, a marvelous orchestra, interesting glimpses of backstage work, and occasionally revealing and funny interviews with opera stars, who turn out to be surprising real and interesting people. In short, well, let Jaime tell it…

“I’m thoroughly enjoying myself,” said he, “I get it now, what you and everybody else have been telling me….”

Listen, even if you have the three hundred bucks or so to sit in a good seat in the Metropolitan Opera in New York, will it be the same as seeing it in a movie theater? Can you eat popcorn at the Met? Or drink wine, as Jaime was doing? Can you see it filmed from different perspectives? And by the way, I know nothing about film, but the operas feel just the same as a movie—and well-done ones at that.

So—I have just told the good news.

Thd bad news?

It seems that everything we are going to see is set in the 1930’s.

Right—it may be too early to declare a trend, since it’s only been two Saturdays—hence two operas—that Mr. Fernández, his mother Ilia, and I have hopped into a cab and gone to the movies / opera. OK—that “hop” in the last sentence applies to nobody, since the youngest members of the team are status post-chikungunya: we creak—at best—into the cab. And Ilia?

Rather a more involved process, which starts when we hail a cab, arrive to the house, and discover—wait, there’s nothing, or rather no one, to discover.

The first car drives up behind the cab.

Ilia appears, waves at me, and disappears.

Second car!

Ilia reappears, starts towards me, stops, turns, disappears.

Cars three and four!

Ilia reappears, shawl now over her arm, but without her cane….

So Ilia is appearing and disappearing with the frequency of Banquo’s ghost, and with about the same effect, and the cars behind the taxi? Well, the cars are waiting with perfectly tranquility! The drivers, however….

So she appears, and stops to kiss Sitara, and pat her cheek, and tell her, “ay, qué linda, nena!” and then approaches the gate, to the near-Wagnerian score being playing for her entrance and hoped-for departure, and then she turns around—AGAIN—to kiss Sitara and tell her something.

This is all slightly nerve-rattling, since Ilia has severe arthritis and chikungunya: if that’s not shot with the same gun twice, what is? So we laboriously have Ilia—less than five feet tall physically, mile-high determinationally—teetering on the door ledge of the taxi, when she announces that she needs time to breathe. Logical—since stopping inward and bending her hip towards the seat and trying not to bash her head—well, all that takes breath! Who can’t see that?

Well, it’s a male driver, so Ilia, raised in a time of rigid social code, addresses him thus: “¿Cómo está usted, señor?” We then drive five minutes to the theater, during which we chat, and during which the driver has now become m’hijo, or my son.

OK—that’s the setting, at least for us. But the settings for the first two operas we have seen?

I can only think that the two directors of the two operas fall into that category of gentlemen-not-scoring-high-in-the-heterosexuality department—I’ m a washout there too, so no offense intended—who find the 1930’s the most glamorous decade of all time. Because why in God’s name would you cast Macbeth, Shakespeare’s 1608 masterpiece funneled through Verdi, in that decade?

The problem was evident from the beginning, because the three witches? It turned out to be the entire Met chorus, who occasionally partitioned themselves in to three sections. Was the sound glorious? Very much so, but should it have been? And aren’t we talking about a feudal, pre-modern society? So how can there be thanes in the thirties, to say nothing of England invading Scotland, which in the 30’s was part of Great Britain? Oh, and then we have things like Macbeth singing, “hand me my sword!” and what does he get? A machine gun!

“I think they’re doing this to appeal to younger audiences, to make it more ‘relevant,’” speculates Ilia. But I tell her—my young self-defined “Niggah” son has as much idea about the thirties as he does Scotland in whatever century this is supposed to be set in. So unless you update to today, and have internal strife within the sub-cells of the Taliban—well, it’s pointless.

And in fact, updating to today is pointless because Montalvo has no clue with what’s going on in the world, since he believes in the Illuminati—that ultra-secret group of extraordinary rich and powerful people who are poised to take over the world. So the news? Forget it!

What does Montalvo understand? Well, he gets the essential idea of…OK, which version do you want? His version, referring to Lady Macbeth, might go something like, “this ball-busting bitch who’s trying to stick it to her husband….”

Next we come to yesterday’s opera, Nozze di Figaro, by Mozart, set in the late 18^th century. And where were we again? In Spain, which, said the director, was rife with class conflict.

Yeah? Well, I agree, but I had to ask Mr. Fernández when the Spanish Civil War started: he said 1936. OK—I had thought it was earlier, but anyway, that’s not the point. And what is?

Well, I fled to Wikipedia to get my facts straight—and what’s happening? The page is taking too long to open, so I’ll wing it, and hope no one pounces out there….

This is opera bufa, and that means—I strongly suspect—that someone will be the buffoon. And if the buffoon happens to be the Count Almaviva, well—isn’t that all the richer? But what happens when the Count is updated to the 1930’s, but villagers are all singing praise to him for abolishing the feudal practice of allowing the Count enjoy every bride—yes, in that way—before the husband does?

More to the point, one of the crucial figures is the Countess, who knows her husband is unfaithful, loves him still, is tormented by whether he is plotting an affair with her maid, the soon-to-be bride of Figaro. And a lot of the tension in the part arises from the chasm between social classes: reduce the chasm, reduce the tension.

“I think they’re doing it to save money on costumes,” reported Ilia, who has now been hoisted / heaved into her second taxi of the day, and is now busy chatting with Tisiana, the five-year old daughter of the female driver.

“I love female taxi drivers,” says Ilia, and it must be true, because Ilia has hopped directly into the informal, calling the driver, “mamita” and then quizzing Tisiana about the name of her school. This Tisiana is unable to provide, since she goes with her mother and her elder: they’re in charge of such affairs.

“No, no, m’hija,” says Ilia, who stopped being a social worker some decades and who also didn’t. So she is telling Tisiana that she has to know the name of her school—“always find out for yourself, m’hija—never rely on anyone else! That’s what I learned when I was your age, and here I am….” So this lesson has to be reinforced, which is why Ilia brings out a dollar bill and passes it to Tisiana.

“Well, we’ll have to wait and see what happens to Carmen—referring to, well, yes, Carmen, but the Carmen of the opera—when she comes around in a couple of weeks…” said Ilia, as she launches into the difficult task of not resisting gravity but instead controlling it wisely: that is, getting out of the cab.

I suppose we will. But it’s unnerving to walk into a theater and have to wonder—where will Mimi or Rodolfo or Musetta be today?

More than unnerving—it’s also disrespectful. To the composer, who went to a lot of trouble to write an opera and set it in the period he wanted: shouldn’t his wishes be respected? Anybody out there want to repaint the Mona Lisa into modern clothes? So why are we treating Verdi less well than Da Vinci?

It’s also a dis to the audience. You think I cannot relate to a story as old as mankind itself—a ruthless woman, blind ambition, a man trying to assert his masculinity to satisfy his wife, guilt, shame?

At its best, a reinterpretation can bring something new—and valuable—to the stage. But too often, it ends up like this, from Opera News about a 2012 production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare:

Cesare's political intrigue and manifest eroticism could easily have been given heightened contemporary relevance, but directors Leiser and Caurier worked their updating of the opera with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. The scenes dealing with sexuality were, for the most part, embarrassingly primitive, the nadir being Tolomeo's simulated masturbation while leering at a nude female picture in a magazine centerfold.   

Guys? I’m with my mother-in-law, for God’s sakes. And if I want to see someone masterbating….

OK—you be the judge. Check out the historically correct—and wonderfully sung—‘Sull Aria below. And then check out the clip of Cecilia Bartoli—also singing wonderfully—but appearing as a devil with the horns shifted 90 degrees. Oh, and wearing a dirty cloth sack over her head.

I rest my point…..