Tag Archives: Opera

The Light Side Of The Moon

photo by Mark Frohna

by Jeff Grygny

Milwaukee Opera Theater should be a lot more famous than they are. With modest funding, boundless imagination, and a vast love of opera, this mighty little company, under the inspired direction of Jill Anna Ponasik, has been staging some of the most innovative theater in town, year after year, reliably delivering that heaviest (and snootiest) of all high art forms in bite-sized, audience-friendly shows that are light, playful and, as far as this non-opera person can tell, musically excellent.

Last Friday, in the biggest winter storm of the year, a full house showed up for Rusalka, Antonin Dvorák’s most popular opera, produced in collaboration with Danceworks Studio Theater. (They first performed the show in 2023, now it’s remounted with new choreography.) It’s one of those doomed magic girl fables that were all the rage at the turn of the last century: Ondine, Les Sylphides, Swan Lake, Coppelia, and of course The Little Mermaid (see also Edgar Allen Poe and everything Gothic). Russalka has all of these in its lineage, though, as it’s based on Slavic lore, in an Eastern European mood.

Rusalkas are water spirits, known for their wild unruly hair and their proclivity for tickling people, sometimes to death. (I imagine generations of Slavic parents scaring their kids with stories of the invisible beings that tickle you while you’re swimming, then dragging you under.  The name “rusalka” apparently has nothing to do with the Rus, the tribe that gave Russia her name, but comes rather from the Latin name of an ancient festival of roses, held in springtime, the only time when the rusalka could leave the water, climb trees, and sing to the moon.) This typically dark fairy tale has one such spirit falling in love with a young prince and asking a witch to make her human, at the cost of her voice. Unlike the Disney version, this does not go well, and everybody ends up dead or miserable. But they sing beautifully.

Yet the show is anything but a downer. Ponasik, working with writer/performer Jason Powell, slices the 3 hour opera down to a very palatable 90 minutes, cutting scenes and characters, down to the heart of the story, A troupe of energetic dancers, choreographed in process with Danceworks’ Christal Wagner, populates the stage with a menagerie of strange and delightful creatures, each seemingly with stories of their own. This both lightens the mood and creates a universe for the story to live in.

photo by Mark Frohna

The moon is not a character in the original opera. “Mesiku na nebi hluboke”, known as “Song to the Moon,” is the most popular piece from Rusalka:  it’s the heroine’s “I want” song: praying to the all-seeing orb of the night to tell her love about her love for him (a favorite trope of the old heteronormative world). In this version Powell, clad in a white jump suit, fills the gaps in the story with witty Seuss-flavored verse and narrates in the beneficent, avuncular person of the Moon. He cheerfully confesses to “moon-splaining” the plot; later, his dialog spoofs a certain male infatuation with the sound of their own voice.

Three wood nymphs, sung by Tabetha Steege, Erin Sura, and Brennan Martinez, are the show’s power trio: they sing the operatic equivalent of shredding guitar every time they come onstage. Their three-part harmonies are like a shot of adrenaline to a comatose heart. Tim Rebers’ Prince is a slacker schlub who brings Rusalka to the palace, then quickly jilts her for a human girl known only as “a foreign princess,” here comically portrayed as a selfie-shooting influencer.

The show makes the most out of it’s tiny budget: Lighting Designer Colin Gawronski creates a artful palette of shifting atmospheres without grabbing attention; the costumes are ingenious and expressive: Rusalka’s sequined gown is practically it’s own character, glittering like her own watery nature even as she mourns her fate. In the title role, Saira Frank brings poise and poignancy without ever veering into bathos. Occasionally, the chorus slips into the generic happy/sad emoting that art of a certain period is prone to, but they add lots of little gestures and interactions that give them personalities: at one point, for instance, the witch Jezibaba’s familiar spirits take on the attributes of creditable wolves. For accompaniment, Music Director Ruben Piirainen mans the piano heroically, while Erin Brooker-Miller on concert harp adds the exquisite moods and grace notes in Dvorák’s lush score. They sound so full, you never miss the orchestra.

In anthropological terms, Rusalka, Jezibaba, the Wood Nymphs, and the moon himself are called “metapersons:” non-human beings whose actions play outsized roles in human fates, both for good and evil. Such beings are part of virtually every culture that’s ever lived—until modern times, taken out by the one-two punches of monotheism and scientific explanation. Yet we feel them still, and stories like Rusalka connect us with a very human, very un-modern way of living in the universe; surely part of their attraction for early modern artists, who could see the ancient ways melting away before them.

Once she’s alone, a spirit with human feelings, abandoned by her human love and her metaperson community, Rusalka forgives her prince in a final polished gem of an aria. Is this a story of a lost world, left behind by progress? Or of how humans, in rejecting their ancestral mythologies, are leading to our own doom? Or of the Freudian overtones of female adolescence in a patriarchal society? Or maybe it’s about the temptation of breaking with your provincial culture for a wider cosmopolitan milieu? If this particular show has any clear message, it’s “Girl, forget that boy; it’s better here where it’s wetter.”

photo by Mark Frohna

Milwaukee Opera Theater and Danceworks’ production doesn’t really say. What they give us is a reworked story, presenting its problematic aspects in brackets, as it were, turning the fascinations of an old, sick Europe into a beautiful fable, passing a cultural treasure to the next generation to shape to it’s own needs,  before they get lost in the junkpile of digital content.

In the moonlight, it all appears as a lovely, sad dream.

Danceworks Performance MKE in collaboration with Milwaukee Opera Theatre present

Russalka

Music by Antonin Dvorák

Playing through February 23

https://danceworksmke.org/concerts

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A Glimpse of Eternity

photo by Mark Frohna

by Jeff Grygny

The ensemble, clad in blue jeans and black T shirts, barefoot and glittering with gold jewelry, stands in a circle around the grief-struck hero. As the last sunlight filters through the stained glass windows of Calvary Presbyterian Church, ancient instruments play solemn music. One player pours water from a ceramic bowl into their neighbor’s bowl, and so on, until the water has completed its way around. It is a powerful embodiment of shared sorrow.

Thus Orfeo resolves to go to the land of the dead to rescue his lost lover Euridice, in a daringly unconventional performance of L’Orfeo, the world’s first great opera, composed by Claudio Monteverdi and first performed in 1607.  The enterprising folks of Milwaukee Opera Theatre have gathered a consort of Renaissance instrument players, collaborated with local sacred music collective Aperi Animam, and created a new English translation of the Italian libretto. The result is an original and conceptually daring work; a pure aesthetic experience unsullied by the demands of commercial entertainment.

Opera was originally conceived as a re-creation of Greek tragedy as described in Aristotle’s Poetics. L’Orfeo is clearly an early effort in what was later to bloom into the glorious emotional excess of grand opera. Musically, there is only one recognizable “hook,” and though the story involves high tragedy and supernatural adventure, the score consistently rings with the cheery pomp of a baroque court. Director/translator Daniel Brylow stages the opera as an initiation into the mystery of Orpheus. The action is stylized, with the feeling of a ceremony enacting a story that has been re-enacted for countless generations. The singers move with stately steps and slow, symbolic gestures. Their faces are passive masks, revealing only the most universal emotions. It’s like looking at a series of ancient friezes: the Elgin Marbles depicting the blinged-up patrons of a biker bar.

photo by Mark Frohna

As is customary with MOT, some of the characters are gender-switched. Jackie Willis sings the title role of Orfeo (pronouns: he, his) with dignity and subtle feeling, exerting all his musical power to win entry into Pluto’s realm. As Apollo, Nicole McCarty’s voice bursts in like sunlight suddenly flooding a dark room. But this is a staged recital, not musical theater, and music takes precedence over characterization and drama.

There’s deep history behind the the show’s culty vibe (which is similar to MOT’s last collaboration with AA, the goth/gnostic spectacle Utterance).  The figure of Orpheus, the musician with magical powers, has always been connected to mystery religions with secret rites and heterodox metaphysics. Some scholars trace their origins to orgiastic cults of Thrace that involved an obscure deity named Zagreus and predate recorded history. That cult evolved into the bacchanalian worship of Dionysus, where it became associated with Orpheus because of its themes of death and rebirth. Later, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods, the rites were reassigned to the god Apollo and linked to Neoplatonist mystical concepts of reincarnation and immortality. Then, in the Renaissance, after Cosimo de Medici commissioned the first European translations of Plato, Neoplatonism and Greek mythology became all the rage once more, inspiring countless artists, musicians and poets. So yeah, that’s a lot of history. And from that we get L’Orfeo.

The new English translation by Daniel Brylow and Joseph Krohlow (which was helpfully projected on the walls to facilitate our understanding),  reveals just how much the libretto invokes Renaissance philosophy. Without getting too deep into the weeds, Neoplatonists taught that the body is the prison of the soul, and through purification and virtue, we can return to our true eternal source in the One beyond the world of change. In this version of the story, Orfeo, just as in the mythic account, turns, sees Euridice, and loses her. But soon after he returns in sorrow to the world of daylight, the god Apollo appears and rewards him with eternal life among the gods, along with Euridice—just as the ancient Orphic cult promised its initiates.

Ritual is one thing for the believer and quite another for the casual audience. At its best, this production illuminates the transcendental metaphysics of its source material and, while it is too stylized to evoke any deep emotional catharsis, it could very conceivably serve as a kind of meditative therapy for the grief that fills our world. But despite all the love and labor that it clearly displays, it begins to feel like a staid church pageant after about the two-hour mark. Nietzsche wrote of the aesthetic struggle between Apollonian rational order and chaotic, visceral Dionysian energy. This L’Orfeo takes Apollo’s side with great integrity—but it’s hard not to wish for just a hint of Thracian revelry to spice the dish.

Milwaukee Opera Theatre and Aperi Animam present

L’Orfeo

Music by Claudio Monteverdi

Libretto by Alessandro Striggio

English translation by Daniel Brylow and Joseph Krohlow

Stage Director: Daniel Brylow

Music Director: Jackie Willis

https://www.milwaukeeoperatheatre.org/

https://www.aperianimam.com/