Arabella (an opera review post)

All right, so, remember back to my review of Elektra where I said that it kind of put me off Strauss and that that might not be fair? Of course, you don't, which is why I put in a link so that you can go back and look. As it turns out, it wasn't fair. Not that I like Elektra anymore than I did at the time, but I thoroughly enjoyed Arabella, one of Strauss' comedies, a romantic comedy. A romantic comedy with those Shakespearean kinds of mistaken identities going on.

And the music was much better.

Not to do a plot synopsis (because you can look that up if you want to know what it's about), but I'm going to give you a little of the set up... because it's funny, and you can probably figure out where some of the humor in this piece will come from once I tell you.

Count Waldner has come down in the world, and he and his family are living out of a swanky hotel. Which may not sound like he's doing too terribly, but that means he's had to sell off his ancestral home and, evidently, he's behind on what he owes to the hotel, too. Through the course of the opera, we learn that he has a gambling addiction; maybe not the actual original source of his family's financial woes, but he's certainly not helping anything.

The count and his wife have two daughters, but daughters are expensive to bring out into society, so they have raised the younger daughter, Zdenka, as a boy, at least as far as the rest of the world is concerned. Which includes Zdenka's best friend, Matteo, who believes Zdenko (notice the spelling difference) is his bro. The count and his wife are trying to marry Arabella off to some rich suitor so that they can get some money out of the deal. Of course, Arabella wants none of that; she wants to marry for love.

To complete matters, Matteo is in love with Arabella, whom he used to "date," or whatever you'd call what they did, but Arabella is over him and has no interest in him. However, Zdenka is in love with Matteo, who thinks she's a boy.

I'm sure you're getting the picture.

And I haven't even mentioned the guy who shows up in love with Arabella after only seeing a photograph of her! But that's handled relatively believably, so it wasn't a problem.

For once, I wasn't really impressed with the set. It was interesting in its versatility, as they used the same main two set pieces (large pieces!) in different configurations to make the different rooms and things, but it all seemed a little too elaborate to me for something that could have been much less so. I mean, if there was ever an opera that could have gone for a minimalist set design, this was it. Basically, the set overwhelmed the preforms, especially since most of the time there are only one or two people on stage.

The cast was good, especially the father and the daughters. Richard Fink (Count Waldner) was delightful as the card-obsessed, gambling dad who was constantly trying to figure out where he could get some money and get back into the game. His expressions were great, meaning he was a good actor on top of being a good singer.

Ellie Dehn (Arabella) and Heidi Stober (Zdenka), both of whom I've mentioned from other operas, were great and worked well together. Great sister chemistry, even with one of them dressed as a boy. Which kind of makes me wonder, now, how old Zdenka was was supposed to be, considering that she's referred to as a "boy" in the opera and Arabella is only at the age of being presented to society (so I'm kind of thinking that Arabella must be something like 16 or 17?). And Matteo is a soldier and trying to woo Arabella, so I'm thinking he must be around 20? But his best friend is still referred to as a kid, basically. And, well... Well, that would be telling.
Boy did I digress...

Anyway! Dehn and Stober are great together. And great individually.

What this opera did for me for sure was change my opinion on Strauss. At least as a composer. My thoughts on him as a person are bit more conflicted, but that's a story for another time.

Manon (an opera review post)

Before I get into the review, let's have some background.

One of the ways my wife and I are able to afford the opera is that we sit in the cheap seats. The San Francisco Opera House has multiple balconies, and we sit allll the way at the top. Well, close enough. We also buy season passes, because that's much cheaper than buying show by show. Because up at the top is so far up at the top, for certain performances, they have screens that lower for the upper balcony and they broadcast close up shots of the performers for those of us too far away to see faces. It's way better than having to use "opera glasses" the way people used to have to do, though we still see those from time to time.

The screen provides some advantages to sitting up at the top. Occasionally, we get to upgrade our seats (for free) and move down to lower balcony. In front of the screens. So, yes, we're closer (much) to the stage and what's happening and don't really need the screens to see what's going on, but you don't get close ups of the performers faces with your eyes alone.

All of that to say that Ellie Dehn was excellent as Manon, and I know because we were up at the top and had the benefit of the screens and were able to see her facial expressions throughout the performance. And, sure, opera is about the singing -- she sang great -- but it has to also be about the acting or there's no life to the performance, and Dehn was amazing.

And I only bring up any of this because one of the things my wife and I do on our drive back home after the opera is look up reviews of that opera to see how the reviews compare to what we thought. Generally, reviews for any given opera are pretty similar, either everyone loved it or everyone hated it, but reviews for Manon were mixed, and they all seemed to center around Dehn. Either the reviewer thought she was great, or the reviewer thought she was flat and lifeless, which made me wonder if those particular reviews were just unable to see how expressive she was.

Maybe where you sit at an opera is more important than I previously thought?
Or maybe those reviewers went on an off night for her? It's hard to tell with live theater.
Whatever the case, we thought she was great.

Michael Fabiano, as Chevalier des Grieux, was also great, but I would say he was not quite as good as Dehn. [That's them above.]

I also really enjoyed David Pershall as Lescaut, Manon's cousin.

The set for this one was interesting. It used a combination of reflective surfaces (including Lescaut's shiny pants in act one) and shadows to lend atmosphere. Mostly, it was a minimalist set design, but the frequency of the large shadows of the actors on the wall behind them made it seem as if there was more on the stage than there really was.

But the real strength of this opera, for me, was the story. Because of the necessity of music, opera stories tend toward, let's say, straight forward and tend to have one dimensional characters. It's difficult to get more involved than that when your entire piece is around two hours long and it takes a six minute (or more) song to deliver a brief dialogue that would only take a few seconds to speak. The characters in Manon, though, were suitably complex even while dealing with what could be seen as a typical tragic love story. It was engrossing.

Of course, it was also long. Three hours. AND they cut out the ballet sequence; I have no idea how long it would have been with that. By the way, did you know that the origin of ballet is within opera? Well, it is.

I really liked Manon. It's not my favorite because the music wasn't quite compelling enough for that, but I would gladly watch it again, which is something I'm finding is a measure of how much I like things.