Giasone

This is the week for operas in bars.  Rather an intriguing concept.  If you want a new audience, go where the audience is; although, I suspect that it is more complicated than that.  Giasone is at Le Poisson Rouge which was long ago know as the Village Gate.  It is a fairly large room, very dark, with food available but tricky.  There are tables at the front of the room with half their seats facing away from the stage and then seats in rows where you either have to get food at the bar and carry it to your seat or mark your seats and sit at the bar.
The table seats are more expensive.


Giasone or Jason, in English, is a very early opera by Francesco Cavalli.  This is the story of Jason and Medea as you have never heard it before--no killing of the children and Jason and Medea end up with--oh, I supposed I should not spoil the plot for you.  It has a full cast of gods and goddesses, Jason is sung by a woman, Alinda the maid is sung by a man, some of the gods are children.  You really can't tell what is what if you don't see it or listen with a libretto in hand even though it is sung in English.  


This a very clever production.  The singers were marvelous; several have performed with the New York City Opera.  Two children played Cupid and Apollo and were incredibly accomplished although they did have children's voices which do not project well.  The staging amusing and effective.  The set, mostly composed of a fabric backdrop rather abstractly painted, worked well.


The audience loved it, and so did I.

The Select (The Sun Also Rises)

The New York Theater Workshop has done several plays based on other works.  Now it is Hemingway's turn.  This is the story of Jake who can't perform sexually (war injury--never spelled out) and Lady Brett who loves him but has sex with other men and the drinking and the drinking and the drinking they all do and one of the greatest final lines in all of literature.  


Hemingway was the epitome of the tough guy expecially the tough guy with a stiff upper lip, but Mike Iveson who played Jake Barnes was rather winning.  The other cast members were terrific as was the set.  costumes were very well done except for the Banana Republic shirt.  The sound design, while clever, distracted a little.  A waiter would come, pour air, a pouring sound was heard, and the actor picked up a glass with liquid in it.  Cute but showy.  And I liked it more than it irritated me.


This was a long production--it told me more than I needed to know.  I got that they drank a lot--I didn't need to be told so often that they were "tight" and could have skipped several of the scenes.  Theater is different from the novel.  Following the source too closely etiolates the theatricality of the play.


But I still liked it and would recommend that you see it if you are in NYC at the moment.  There is that lovely final line.

Griselda by Antonio Vivaldi

Griselda, the title character of the opera by Vivaldi, is one of those women too good to be true.  After three long acts of mistreatment by her husband whom she steadfastly loves and never, ever criticizes, she is allowed to return to his good graces.  Hardly the image you want your daughter to emulate especially since in real life such returns to grace tend to be exceedingly temporary.

Peter Sellars in his pre-opera talk enters declaring, "This is a turkey tonight; this is a catastrophe."  He then explains that we have to understand Venice in 1735, Bocaccio's Decameron, the Black Plague, and the importance of the castrati.  Which is asking rather a lot of the audience especiallly when one also needs to understand a little about Peter Sellars and the concepts behind this production.

 Sellars observed that no one presents their true feelings.  The king loves Griselda as he mistreats her to test her character.  The audience represents the citizens of his kingdom who have never accepted the commoner Griselda as their queen.  The king's best friend tries to seduce Griselda.  The princess, secretly the daughter of the king yet engaged to him is in love with another.  And so on.  And on.

The story, in its day, was  wildly popular and there are many, many operas based on it. Vivaldi's with a libretto by Goldoni which was sophisticated for its time had a great success. One can see Griselda as a Christ figure.  He was also mistreated by his father, rejected by the crowd and betrayed by a friend.  So whole we tend to see the docile acceptance of abuse, others may see the nobility of remaining true to one's self regardless of misfortune.

Morningside Opera

Down the stairs and into a small back room at Jimmy's No. 43 (a bar) was a group of tables and an audience of perhaps fifty people to see The Judgment of Paris, a 1703 opera by--well actually four composers (and probably more, but four at the moment) who wrote musical settings for this.  One version was lost, but the Morningside Opera was determined to present the other three.


Which was a complication because I had a teleconference at the time it was supposed to start.  Not really a problem, I thought, I will sit in the car, miss the first opera and watch the other two.  Alas, they weren't doing three operas, they were doing a pastiche of all of them.  My noble husband managed to switch our tickets to a later performance.


Now about the opera which was performed by a cast of unknowns (they ran out of programs, a sure sign of unexpected success).  There is a listing of the cast at the Morningside  website, however, as well as a New York Times Review with the cast listed (Sept 2, 2011, C 3).    Paris is charged with judging which of three Goddesses is the most beautiful and awarding the golden banana to the most beautiful.  Paris sings, "When each is undressed, I'll judge of the best" and they disrobe to a rather modest limit.  The music of Eccles, Purcell and Weldon is lovely. Each singer had a rather straight aria and a "character" aria.  Juno, for example, did a bit as a dominatrix.  Very funny.  The performances were charming and clever.  It was a lot of fun.