Romeo & Juliet (an opera review post)

I realize we had a rough opening act with the opera this season, but that ship has sailed (pun totally intended and, if you don't get it, you haven't been paying attention), but they've come back strong with Romeo & Juliet.

Romeo & Juliet may be my least favorite of Shakespeare's plays. At least of the ones I've read. Which is more than a few considering I've taken whole classes about Shakespeare. Look, I have a degree in English; what do you expect? But even as a teenager, R&J pushed all of the wrong buttons for me. My entire response could (and pretty much still can) be summed in, "Stupid teenagers." Yeah, that's how I felt about it when I was 14 and reading it for the first time. It actually put me off of Shakespeare entirely for more than a few years. I do have more of an appreciation for the play at this point in my life than I did when I was in high school but, still, stupid teenagers.

None of which is to say that I can't enjoy a good production of the story. It's not a bad story, though I don't get all of those gushy romantic feels from R&J that seem to be so common. For one thing, Romeo is a cad, but I'm not going to get into that right now.

R&J is not a commonly performed opera these days. It's French and, evidently, French is out as far as opera styles go at the moment. Honestly, I don't understand why. Maybe I just don't know enough about opera and music to understand but, having seen it now, R&J didn't seem much different to me than other operas of its time period. SFO, though, hasn't done R&J in decades until now (which seems to me to be another example of what I was saying in my SFO post about Shilvock). It's weird to me, though, that this opera in particular would fall through the crack. Because pretty much everyone knows the story, it seems to me that this should be a great opera to keep in rotation because it should accessible to people exploring opera for the first time. Even though they have supertitles, it still helps to know the story ahead of time.

I think this was a pretty decent production of R&J. Except for the set. They went for something which was barely more than a bare stage. I was unimpressed. Especially in comparison to many of the SFO sets. This one was just... kind of nothing. The costumes were good, but I sort of think the costumes and the set should complement each other, but maybe that's just me.

The performances were great. Nadine Sierra, whom I've mentioned before, played Juliet, and she was perfect. As with all good R&J productions, Mercutio steals any scene he's in, right up until he doesn't anymore, and Lucas Meachem (whom I've also mentioned before) did just that. The other real standout performance was by Stephanie Lauricella as Romeo's page, Stephano. She had a great scene where she taunts Tybalt and the Capulets that was a lot of fun.

I wasn't as sold on the Romeo, though my wife says that Pene Pati was a great singer. I don't disagree with that, and I enjoyed him in the production of Rigoletto we saw him in (see, I've mentioned him before, too!), but he never really grabbed me as Romeo. As I said, Romeo is a cad, and Pati never came off as such. It's got to be believable when all of his buddies are making fun of him that Juliet is just his flavor of the week, but Pati never rose above lovesick, which is almost right but not quite. I mean, he's trying to "meet" another girl when he discovers Juliet. Maybe it's a problem of the writing, though. It's difficult for me to tell since it's in French.

All said, though, I thought this was a fine production, and I think it's a great introductory opera for anyone who wants to find out what opera is all about.

The Magic Flute (an opera review post)

Our second opera (you can read about the first one here) was The Magic Flute by Mozart. Yes, that Mozart. What? You didn't know he wrote operas too? He composed the operatic version of The Marriage of Figaro (based on the play by Pierre Beaumarchais), still one of the top 10 most performed operas worldwide.

But The Magic Flute is not The Marriage of Figaro and not as widely performed. I'm assuming that's because it's not as good, though it was very enjoyable. [I'll have more to say about Figaro in the next opera post.] Actually, there are parts of it that are downright hilarious, although it does have issues with the ending.

Basically, The Magic Flute is an allegory about the Freemasons (of which Mozart was one) and the Catholic church, represented in the opera as The Queen of the Night (now, if that doesn't tell you anything about how Mozart feels about the Catholic church, I don't know what will). The protagonist, Tamino, is initially aligned with The Queen of the Night but quickly switches sides once he discovers the reason and logic of Sarastro and the brotherhood he belongs to.

On the surface, it's a very cliche love story: young prince sees a picture of a beautiful princess, falls in love, and goes off to rescue her. The princess hears that a prince is coming to rescue her and immediately falls in love with the prince, sight unseen. There are places where it seems that Mozart recognizes the ludicrousness of the plot, but he uses the familiar trope to tell his allegory.

And that's all I'm going to tell you about the story. It's all online; you can look it up. I will say, though, that the ending -- which is one of those "everything inexplicably turns out okay in the end" kinds -- is what I would say is the weakness of the story. I'm sure it could be debated how it relates to the allegory of the opera, but I'm not going to have that debate in relation to the story itself, which I think suffers.

As I mentioned in my last opera post, one of the things opera can suffer from is performers who just stand and sing, and this performance had issues with that as well, though not as bad as in Lucia di Lammermoor. Sarastro tends in this direction though, with him, it could be on purpose as he's supposed to be a very serious and solemn character. That said, the lead Paul Appleby, as Tamino, also tended to just stand and sing. I have to say that he was quiet boring as the male lead.

However, in the performance we saw, the female lead was played by Nadine Sierra (you might remember from the first opera post that she was fabulous as Lucia in that opera), and she was, again, brilliant. She's definitely someone I'm going to be keeping my eye on.

The true gem of this show, though, was Efrain Solis as Papageno, the Queen's bird catcher. No, I don't know why he's a bird catcher.

That's Papageno on the left and NOT Nadine Sierra as Pamina.

What I do know is that he was hilarious. Completely. Papageno is the comic character of the piece as The Magic Flute is a comedy, and Solis pulled it off perfectly. He is not a stand-and-sing kind of guy. I would go back to see this again just for his performance.

One other thing: this was actually performed in English, which my wife and I didn't know going in, so that was a pleasant surprise. Of course, we went to a performance that had translations happening (basically subtitles), so they actually became distracting since we didn't need them.

I liked this one better than Lucia, and I liked Lucia, so that's saying something. Next up:

The Barber of Seville

We Went to the Opera! (a local color post)

This is a view from the very top of the balcony down to the stage during the intermission and set change. Yes, it is a long way down.

(Sorry, this is the only picture that came out well enough to post it. There just wasn't enough light to get good shots.)

We went to the opera, my wife and I. Twice, actually (and have a third trip coming up next week). When I say we went to the opera, I don't mean that we went to just some opera performance, I mean that we went to the San Francisco Opera. It's the second largest opera company in the States, so it's not some two-bit production. As we learned last time, the full stage area (including backstage) is more than 10 times the size of our house!

Yeah, that's not small. Our house is, but that stage is still pretty ginormous.

There's a lot I could say about the two trips, too much, now, for one post. For instance, we had car picnics on the way down both times so that we could make it on time. Finger foods, good finger foods, like bits of cheese and apple and olives and tri-tip. My wife fed me (and herself), and I drove, and we talked and had a lot of fun. The second trip, we were also invited to a wine and cheese tasting before the performance with a talk from the chorus master. That's the guy who teaches the chorus their parts. He's been there at the San Francisco Opera for quite a long time.

I could also tell you about the completely rude guy with OWDS who interrupted the presenter during the pre-show presentation about the opera. It was actually the dude (and, yes, he was an old, rich, white dude) and two women, and all three of them had flaming cases of OWDS, though the dude had it the worst. I suppose, though, the San Francisco Opera is a common meeting ground of people with OWDS. That guy really deserves his own post, although I probably won't actually get around to doing that.

There's a short review of the first opera we saw below. I'll do a different post for the other show.

Before I get to that, though, I want to make one specific general opera comment:
The problem with opera is that it is often just people standing and singing. As my wife says, it's difficult to do a lot of movement when you're trying to sing, especially the kind of singing that opera singers do. And, yet, this is not a problem for all opera performers. And, I think, it probably didn't used to be a thing at all. Opera, once upon a time, was performance for the common man. It was the equivalent of going to the movies. I'm pretty sure that opera used to be much more lively and performative, but gentrification has made it much more accepted to just stand and sing.

Lucia di Lammermoor
Gaetano Donizetti

This opera suffered much from the stand-and-sing issue, especially among the male performers. Mostly, they didn't even bother to summon up any facial expressions. Nicolas Teste as Raimondo was the worst. He was about as flat as a piece of paper. He's one of the main characters and, yet, he often felt like he belonged in the chorus, because he had about as much animation as them. He could certainly sing, but there was no emotion in it, and he rarely moved at all. Nadine Sierra, the female lead, however, was the exact opposite. She was expressive and animated. A performer in all senses of the word. She made the show worth watching, especially how creepy she was in the post-murder scene where she goes off the deep end. Sierra is what more opera performers should aspire to. Opera is not just singing; it's also acting.

The issue with this particular production of this opera was the director. His interpretation of it was to "modernize" it, which would be fine... if he had actually done that. What he actually did, though, was to produce the same period piece that it's supposed to be (with the women wearing big period dresses and all of that and the whole thing in a castle-ish setting) except that the men get to wear suits and some of them wave guns around. It creates a horrible muddle. It did not give the "near future" vibe it was supposed to give at all. Not even close.

Still, it was an enjoyable experience. overall. The singing was, as to be expected, amazing, and, actually, Nadine Sierra was good enough on her own to make the show worth watching even with the other issues of this production.