Thursday 30 August 2012

An Electrifying Performance

Sorry, the little guy in red with the horns made me do that baaaaad pun in the title.  I'm referring to the powerful production of Elektra by Sophokles at the Stratford Festival.

Elektra makes you realize that such famous plays as The Trojan Women and Oedipus the King are not typical of all Greek tragedy.  Perhaps those two are performed so often because they come closer to our modern notions of theatre, particularly as both contain strong doses of what today is called  "dramatic action".  Elektra is a much more ritualistic piece in which there is no dramatic action in the modern sense except at the very beginning and the very end.  In between there is an ongoing portrait of stasis.  Elektra, trapped in the household of her mother and stepfather, only grieves the death of her father and looks forward to revenge.  She is confronted by her sister Chrysothemis twice, and continues grieving.  She has a tense debate with her mother, Clytemnestra, and continues grieving.  The entry of the Old Man announcing the (untrue) death of her brother Orestes gives her more to grieve, and she continues grieving.  Only when Orestes finally arrives and executes judgement on Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthos does Elektra move from grieving to exultation, as the play ends.

So how do you make such an apparently motionless play come to life?  Director Thomas Moschopoulos found some very imaginative solutions which were directly rooted in what is known about the performance practice of the ancient Greek theatre.  He had his chorus stay outside the arena for much of the play, putting them very much in contact with the audience.  Their singing depended on short and often-repeated simple melodic tags which took on a hypnotic air.  Chorus and characters often chanted to a strong rhythmic accompaniment, clapped or beaten with hands on tables or feet on floor.  This chanting gave a tremendous variety of tone colour to the play.

Perhaps most powerful of all was the director's insistence that the play is not a melodrama in which good triumphs over evil.  The special genius of this production was that the views pro and con at every step of the road were clearly and fairly presented to us.  We in the audience were left in the end with a feeling that Orestes' revenge murder of his mother and stepfather was as questionable a crime as their murder of Agamemnon, whose murder of his other daughter Iphigenia was in turn equally morally questionable.  No certainties here, except for knowing who died and at whose hand.  Each of us had to make up his or her own mind about which, if any, of these deaths could be accounted as morally justifiable.

What a contrast to our advanced North American ideas where truth and justice always have to declare themselves within the span of an hour-long TV show or a 2 1/2 hour movie!

All the members of the cast and chorus were impeccable, but the one you remember at the end of the performance is Yanna McIntosh as Elektra.  I've seen her give several memorable performances at Stratford in the past, but this one trumps them all.  The sheer variety of tone, expression, and physicality that she brings to 100 minutes of nonstop mourning is a textbook lesson in itself, and the truthfulness with which it all springs from Elektra's desperate situation makes it memorable in the extreme.  This goes to the top end of the shortlist of memorable Greek tragedy performances I have ever seen!

Wednesday 22 August 2012

Dramatic Contrasts

Two more plays at the Shaw Festival this week, two plays that could hardly be more different from each other if they tried!

In the afternoon, Ibsen's masterpiece Hedda Gabler.  Ibsen has a reputation as a very dark, gloomy writer, but this production didn't go all the way down that road.  The stage was set in a heavy style that evoked the Victorian era without duplicating all the massive layers and piles of ornamentation that were typical of well-to-do homes in that time.  But it was brightly lit, and there was more bright light streaming in through the rear wall that was a scrim rather than a solid wall.

Nor did the performance decline into gloom and doom.  The play ends there, yes, but there was plenty of life and energy along the way, with sparks flying in many scenes -- literal sparks as Hedda burned the manuscript.  All the actors contributed plenty of zip and go to the proceedings.  If anything, Patrick McManus as George Tesman was perhaps too bright, positive, energetic for the ineffectual husband that helps to drive Hedda to desperation.  Jim Mezon contributed an powerfully creepy performance as Judge Brack.  But all were dominated, and rightly, by the powerful, nuanced performance of Moya O'Connell as Hedda.

Thanks to the subtle, thoughtful direction of Martha Henry, Hedda often placed herself at a distance from the other characters, emphasizing her emotional distance from the people around her.  The general brightness of O'Connell's manner as Hedda conveyed an impression that she was mad, and becoming more and more insane as the play went on.  I'm not sure this is what was intended by director and actor, because it does effectively change the whole dramatic viewpoint of the playwright.  But it made for a fascinating, powerful performance.

Then, in the evening, Present Laughter by Noel Coward.  This comedy is one of the most typical of Coward's popular work, and one of the most effective.  It's generally agreed, and was once confirmed by Coward himself, that the hero (Garry Essendine) is Noel Coward.  For sure, Essendine gets all the best drama-queen moments in the show (or almost all) and therefore gets a fair share of the laughs.  But it's really important to remember that this is very much an ensemble piece, and that many of the laughs depend on the others scoring points off Garry.

With one exception, all of the company played together very effectively as an ensemble, and everyone got his or her fair share of the laughs.  Especially effective was the deadpan comic timing of Mary Haney's comebacks as Garry's secretary, Monica.  Corrine Koslo as Miss Erikson (the housekeeper) was a bit hard to understand (due to her very realistic Scandinavian accent) but her facial expressions and body language more than made up for it.  Claire Jullien as Liz, Garry's estranged wife, also did a splendid job of neatly shooting holes in Garry's pretensions and trimming him down a notch at a time with surgical precision.

In that pivotal central role of Garry, Steven Sutcliffe gave a magnificent account of the aging matinee idol whose every moment is lived so stagily that he has totally lost his grasp on reality.  Sutcliffe was always just one notch below "too much", a distinction which many other actors have failed to observe in this role.

The exception: somewhere between director David Schurmann and actor Jonathan Tan, the decision was made for Tan to play the aspiring playwright, Roland Maule, as a maniacal dervish running nonstop at approximately 500 rpm.  Some of the confrontational nature of the interviews between Roland and Garry was substantially altered as Garry was no longer trying to rid himself of an accusing voice of conscience but merely to escape unharmed from a pre-homicidal lunatic.  It created a certain amount of fun for the audience, but quickly became tiresome, and I don't feel it served the rest of the company well.

The art-deco set was magnificent, and so were the costumes -- half the fun of this play is to see all the different dressing gowns the designer can put Garry into!

So there you have: one intense drama, with a fair number of comic moments, and one zany comedy with a few serious moments.  Both effectively directed, both finely acted, and both definitely classics of twentieth century theatre.  Gotta love the Shaw Festival!

Sunday 19 August 2012

Three Utterly Different "Conventional" Plays

If you haven't caught on yet, then I have to tell you bluntly that I prefer a classic play to almost anything experimental, and I would rather hear a well-turned phrase than any amount of gutter language.  These are matters of purely personal taste, and hence very unprofitable for argument.

To put it even more clearly, George Bernard Shaw is one of my favourite playwrights.  I've now put myself thoroughly to the bad with a large portion of the theatre community, and the theatre-going public, because Shaw has become very unfashionable in both camps!

At any rate, for those with the courage and perseverance to dig a bit, Shaw still possesses ample rewards.  Yes, his plays are very talky -- that's unarguable.  But in all that talk lies concealed the real reason for my admiration: Shaw was the unexcelled master of all masters at creating humour by demolishing the expected outcome of any situation.

So, while many dismiss him as a "conventional" playwright, that term should be handled with much more caution because Shaw's primary purpose is always the undermining of "conventionality" in all its forms.

That's my preamble.  This post deals with the first three plays I saw at the Shaw Festival this year:

[1]  The Millionairess (George Bernard Shaw)
[2]  French Without Tears (Terence Rattigan)
[3]  Misalliance (George Bernard Shaw)

All three will be dismissed by many as conventional.  But, in my opinion, only the Rattigan play is truly so.  In a way, it plays like a forerunner of Neil Simon.  The author takes a situation involving relatively normal everyday people and milks it for comedic effect by highlighting differences among the characters' personalities.  It's funny. But it's a bit slow to lift off the ground in the first act (a flaw in the writing, it is the work of a young and relatively undeveloped writer) and the best of the fun comes after the intermission.  The dependably strong and tight company of the Shaw Festival perhaps worked a bit too hard at trying to make Act 1 "go" but later settled in and gave a fine ensemble performance in which everyone's contribution was essential, and the whole in the end was certainly greater than the sum of its parts.  Fluff, to be sure, but amusing and well-executed fluff all the same.

Misalliance is an earlier Shaw play (1909) and he was still more than half a political pamphleteer at this stage of his career.  Alas, this is one of the plays where the dramatist didn't keep the orator under enough control.  Polemics take over from dramatic action from time to time.  But when the dramatist got into the saddle, the fine art of undermining expectations was going full throttle.  All the best laughs in Misalliance (and there are many) come from this kind of reversal of convention.  With the setting of the play brought forward into the 1960s, the company exploited these opportunities to the full.  Only Ben Sanders I felt overplayed his part.  In his hands the effete aristocrat Bentley Summerhays became a shrieking drama queen, too far over the top for the rest of the show's good.

The most successful for me were the women.  Catherine McGregor as Mrs. Tarleton was the conventional nouveau-riche wife of the Sixties to perfection, so when her reversals came she managed the considerable feat of undermining her entire character without stepping out of it.  As the dangerous and seductive Hypatia Tarleton, Krista Colosimo struck a wide variety of emotional and dramatic notes.  And Tara Rosling as Lina Szczepanowska was simply magnetic in the role of the mysterious woman who drops into the life of the Tarleton family with shattering impact (this is a multi-level pun for those who haven't seen the play; after you go you'll get it!)  Her every line was punched out with a mittel-Europa accent that in no way obscured her words or her feelings.

This brings me to The Millionairess, which I thought the most successful by far of the three.  As a script, it is unquestionably that.  It was 25 years since Misalliance and Shaw had successfully dismissed the pamphleteer.  He'd also learned to dispense with a long introductory exposition scene.  The Millionairess hits the ground running, and keeps right on going nonstop.  The other two plays are very much ensemble pieces, but this one stands or falls by the title character.  And I would simply say that Nicole Underhay was born to play this role.  I couldn't have wished for a more effective interpreter of the complex and multi-faceted richest woman in the world, Epifania Ognisanti di Parerga Fitzfassenden.  (How in heaven's name did Shaw dream up these names????)  Underhay was abrasive (very), abrupt, energetic, articulate, elegant, and vulnerable by turns -- and yes, the script does call for all of these qualities and more besides.  She also manages to make ever-new the resounding delivery of her 13-syllable name each time she introduces herself to a new character (she always omits "Fitzfassenden" because she hates her husband). 

The real amazement is that she makes you care for her, and care about what happens to her.  How can this be possible when Epifania (etc. etc.) is on the face of it such a disagreeable person?  The simple answer is the masterly way Shaw shows us how all the other people in her life, one way or another, are simply not adequate to keep up with her immense physical and psychological energy (until the Egyptian doctor appears).  As she expresses her continual frustration at being trapped among people who are not her equals, Underhay's performance is a genuine tour de force.  Although all the rest of the cast were equally effective, I have to mention the wonderful parade of bemused looks on the face of solicitor Julius Sagamore (played by Kevin Bundy) when this tornado comes roaring into his life in the opening 30 seconds of the play.  Every time she undercuts his expectations, he comes up with another splendid variation -- a textbook display of "101 faces that express puzzlement".

So: three very good productions of three very entertaining scripts, one of which is (for my money) truly a great play.  Two more from the Shaw coming in a few days, and then I'm taking a bit of a layoff (unless I find something else to take in....)

Thursday 16 August 2012

Breathtaking Final Weekend Part 2

Saturday night at the Festival of the Sound: it used to be the height of rarity for the Festival to do a concert with orchestra, but it's becoming a little more common.  You can fit a chamber orchestra of 25 or so players onto the stage of the Stockey Centre without undue cramping!

This one started with Bach's D Minor Concerto for two violins, with Moshe Hammer and Yehonatan Berick as the two soloists.  Both of them played magnificently at brisk speeds, with Hammer sounding a touch more romantic in his use of vibrato.  In itself this is not a bad thing (to me), but when combined with an ensemble playing mostly without vibrato it can sound a bit odd -- but only a bit, this is not a big deal except to the Great Experts who have anointed and sainted Authentic Performance so that no other form is permissible.  I have a word of advice for them, but I'm far too polite to put it in print!

Next up was the Festival Winds ensemble with the rarely-heard but beautiful Wind Serenade by Dvorak.  This is one of the last, and surely one of the greatest, works composed specifically for the "harmonie", the German name for an ensemble of 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, and double bass.  To this basic group Dvorak added a 3rd horn, and a cello, giving a warmer sound to the overall group.  And there were few things Dvorak loved more than writing glorious chordal passages for horns in 3 parts, so he obviously put the third horn in with that possibility in mind too!  Since it was the Festival Winds, there's no real need to comment on the quality of the performance -- these gents have been playing together for so many years that everything they do meshes seamlessly and is played with great flair and musicality.

After the intermission, there came several presentations to retiring Executive Director Margie Boyd.  The 25-piece orchestra then took over the stage, with Jamie Sommerville conducting, for the magical 40th Symphony (G Minor) of Mozart.

When Liszt proclaimed that any work of the orchestra could be completely reduced, in all its essentials except assorted tone colours of instruments, to the piano, Mendelssohn immediately set him straight by saying, "Well, if he can play the opening of Mozart's G Minor Symphony on the piano the way it sounds in the orchestra, then I'll believe him!"  Mendelssohn was absolutely correct.  The Symphony has a string-dominated opening that sounds at once nervous and quietly apprehensive, but on a piano the rapidly repeated pairs of notes would simply sound overwhelmingly angry.

Sommerville's entire performance was edgy without being tense, and fast without being rushed, and full of subtle nuances that rightly brought the entire audience to their feet at the close.

Sunday afternoon's concert was a musical party in honour of Margie Boyd.  Like any good party, it was free (all the musicians donated their services in her honour) and like any good party it went on and on, with a great variety of music to be heard.  I'm sorry I had to slide out at the second intermission to begin the long trek home to Woodstock -- I'm sure I missed some great stuff!  But what I did hear was all terrific, from Denis Brott's Beethoven Cello Sonata to Russell Braun's Largo al factotum and on from there to Pirates of Penzance excerpts rewritten for the occasion and sung (?) by the inimitable Mary Lou Fallis and Peter McGillivray.  Nor would it do to forget the lovable jazz meister duo of Gene di Novi and Dave Young.  But there was so much more that I could never do justice to all of it.

All I can say is that if you love classical music and you've never been to the Festival of the Sound you are missing a real treat!

Next up: quick switch to theatre, I'm seeing 5 plays at the Shaw Festival in the next week, starting this afternoon!

Tuesday 14 August 2012

Breathtaking final weekend Part 1

Sorry about the long absence, dear readers!  The final weekend of the Festival of the Sound for 2012 was everything you could have wished (except for lack of sun) and more.

Friday was a typical Festival weekday with three concerts, but "typical" ended right there as the quality of these three performances was superlative even by Festival standards!  At noon we got a supremely musical reading of the Sonata in G, D.894.  I dearly love the Schubert Sonatas and wish we could hear more of them, more often.  Janina Fialkowska was perhaps a shade too brisk for my liking in the finale, but otherwise her choices of tempo were ideal.  With all four movements of this "symphony for the piano" containing marvellous Schubertian melodies, the need to make the piano sing is paramount.  Many pianists have trouble doing this, but Fialkowska's playing had the singing quality in spades!

Also on hand were the Festival Winds, up to their usual standards in Mozart's Wind Serenade KV.388 -- lovely, relaxing Mozart, not highly dramatic, but very enjoyable indeed.

In the afternoon we heard Trio Hochelaga in two works.  Rachmaninoff's Trio Elegiaque # 1 is certainly the work of an 18-year old prodigy, but just as certainly it works -- the passionate climax hits me right in the emotional gut every time I hear it.  He may have been emulating his mentor Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio, but Rachmaninoff went one better in the heavy use of the low strings and the bottom half of the keyboard -- the dark, brooding sound of this music is unforgettable.

Trio Hochelaga then went on to a sunny, warm-hearted reading of Schubert's magnificent Piano Trio in B flat Major, D. 898.  Every second of this delightful piece came beautifully to life in their able hands.

The evening concert featured the Elmer Iseler Singers, frequent visitors to the Festival, actor R. H. Thomson as narrator, and Gene di Novi and Dave Young in a jazz segment that ended the program.  As always, when diNovi and Young are at hand, you know you're going to have fun.  These two veteran jazz-meisters, with their infectious grins and schoolboy sense of fun, inevitably make an audience fall in love with them and with their music-making!  The Iseler Singers were plainly having fun working with them too!

In the earlier part of the program, there were some striking modern works, but for me these faded into insignificance beside the ineffable beauty of Healey Willan's Our Lady Motets.  These unaccompanied choral masterpieces are plainly of the 20th century, yet at the same time they have a timeless quality that places them firmly in the line of choral singing stretching clear back to Gregorian chant.

And finally, the opening work on the program was the rarest bird of all.  It's not often that you get a chance to hear Vaughan Williams' Serenade to Music in its original form for 16 vocal soloists.  The Iselers are one of the very few choirs in Canada that could dare this feat and pull it off, since the music demands nothing less than 16 professional singers of the highest ability (a perfect description of the group who sang the first performance in 1938).  The Serenade has to be accounted one of the most perfect marriages of Shakespearean poetry with music, and to hear it this way -- with the sensitive piano accompaniment of director Lydia Adams adequately compensating for the missing orchestra -- was a beautiful privilege.

I'll have to continue later with the concerts of Saturday and Sunday -- this post is getting totally out of control!