SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL OPERA  REVIEW
 

Bernstein, A Quiet Place: Soloists, Jayce Ogren (conductor), New York City Opera, New York City, 12.11.2010 (BH)

 

Music: Leonard Bernstein

Libretto: Stephen Wadsworth
Conductor: Jayce Ogren

Production: Christopher Alden

Set Designer: Andrew Lieberman

Costume Designer: Kaye Voyce

Lighting Designer: Aaron Black

Supertitles: Kelley Rourke

 

Cast:

Funeral Director: William Ferguson

Bill: Michael Zegarski

Susie: Judith Christin

Analyst: Jonathan Green

Doc: Jake Gardner

Mrs. Doc: Victoria Livengood

Dede/Jazz Trio: Sara Jakubiak

François/Jazz Trio: Dominic Armstrong

Junior/Jazz Trio: Joshua Hopkins

Sam: Louis Otey

Young Sam: Christopher Feigum

Dinah: Patricia Risley

Miss Brown: Mary Ragan

Young Junior: Adam Burby

Joshua Hopkins as Junior

 

Of the many thoughts provoked by New York City Opera’s handsomely mounted production of Leonard Bernstein’s A Quiet Place (1984), the overwhelming one was sheer admiration for the company for staging the New York premiere—incredible as that may seem. Yes, the opera is a strange bird: the intelligent libretto, by Stephen Wadsworth, may be a little too erudite for its own good, as if penned by Woody Allen and John Cassavetes. Yet when coupled with Bernstein’s moody, crystalline music, audiences may feel more comfortable feeling anxiety or discomfort, or even weeping outright, coming face-to-face with a bit of emotional rawness.

The structure is also challenging. Bernstein took his one-act piece, Trouble in Tahiti, and grafted it onto Act II as a sort of flashback—but there are other flashbacks as well, as the composer struggles to tell the story of Junior and his tortured development. Junior, the pivotal character wrenchingly sung and played by Joshua Hopkins, is (some might infer) a metaphor for the composer himself (although Bernstein didn’t suffer from the same crippling dysfunctionality displayed here). Hopkins found both vocal verve and emotional risk: how many operas require male characters to do a strip-tease?

Louis Otey (Sam) and Patrica Risley (Dinah)

 
The story opens with a car crash—or more specifically, the funeral afterward—and a mysterious woman wandering around among the sober guests. Christopher Alden’s funeral parlor is pitch-perfect: bland walls in that dull pinkish color that Crayola used to call “flesh,” with a bank of windows at the right to admit a blaze of daylight. (Lighting designer Aaron Black makes even more of that blaze in the final act.) Gradually we discover more about the victim, those guests, and the woman, and slowly put the pieces together to come to a portrait of a family deep in emotional hot water. It is not an easy puzzle to assemble.

As Dinah, the crash victim (and Junior’s mom), Patricia Risley had oceans to sing and act, and did so with confidence to spare. For some, just watching her breeze through “What a Movie!” was probably worth the entire evening. As her conflicted husband Sam, Louis Otey was in handsome vocal form all night, making the most of some piercing scenes when he discovers what Dinah has written in her diary. Scarcely less impressive were Sara Jakubiak as Junior’s sister, Dede, and Dominic Armstrong as François—they and Hopkins combined to create the sophisticated jazz trio that appears in Act II. Overall, the enormous cast and chorus, smartly clad in costumes by Kaye Voyce, gave their ensemble all, every single one grappling with Bernstein’s eclectic, difficult score.

The orchestra, adroitly led by Jayce Ogren through a thicket of Bernstein’s mammoth chords and abruptly changing rhythms, showed no signs of bewilderment or fatigue—more reassuring news for those who have worried about the future of the company. In his printed program comments about the score, Wadsworth mentions Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta, noting that each work grows from a small cell of material—albeit in Bernstein’s case, his wildly variegated approach—incorporating jazz, popular music and stretches of atonality—effectively disguises this simplicity.

Andrew Lieberman’s versatile set—so spot-on effective for the Act I funeral—might have benefited from just a few more tweaks to be a convincing household in Act II. But then he and Alden made a crafty move in Act III, lifting off the ceiling and transforming the room into a playground. A bank of lights at stage right exposed everyone onstage to a powerful glare, heightening the revelations that coalesce into the touchingly intimate final scene.

New York City Opera’s cleanly mounted production made me wonder why this show took so long to arrive here, although such musing may be rhetorical. Like some of Bernstein’s other work, A Quiet Place seems simultaneously imperfect and yet utterly invaluable. Any director would probably be a bit taken aback by the difficulties of delineating the characters and their complex relationships, coupled with the equally daunting musical demands. But the newly invigorated company is being led by General Manager George Steel, who also functions as the Artistic Director, and he has clearly risen to the occasion, along with everyone else involved. If this is a sample (and next spring brings a triple bill of John Zorn, Morton Feldman and Schoenberg, plus a new opera by Stephen Schwartz), we should be endlessly grateful.

Bruce Hodges

Pictures © Carol Rosegg