Beyond the Bathrobe
By James Jorden
It’s the laziest of journalistic tropes to lead off with “this guy I know says…” but in this case the guy in question has provided me with what I consider a really handy peg for a first column on opera stage direction. Anyway, this guy—who’s in his 70s now, a retired opera record pirate, but, more to the point, one of the survivors from the 1950s golden age of the Met standing room line—he’s got a “line” expression for just about every operatic experience imaginable.
So: this guy. His initial reaction to practically any news of innovation in opera production is to shrug and mutter, “Aah, Caruso in a bathrobe!” That’s not just an epithet: rather it’s shorthand for a story that, like all the most entertaining and evocative operatic anecdotes, is almost certainly apocryphal. It goes like this:
Enrico Caruso is just starting out as a singer, and he is so desperately poor that he can only afford one dress shirt. On the day that he sends out his laundry, he just sits in his room in a bathrobe, because he can’t get dressed to go out. One laundry day, there’s a message from the theater: Puccini is in town only for today, and he’s in the market for a new tenor.
“But it’s laundry day…” Caruso begins.
“Never mind, put on your bathrobe and get down here!”
So, Caruso puts on his bathrobe, shambles across the piazza, goes out onstage and wows the composer, who casts the disheveled demidivo in La bohème, and thus is born a star.
My interlocutor’s homespun point—that Caruso singing in his bathrobe is sufficient for operatic greatness, or, to put it another way, if you’ve got a Caruso on the bill, you don’t need a Luc Bondy—conveniently raises a broader question, which is: what is the value of stage direction in opera?
Why should we care so much about theatrical values in an art form which, for a significant fraction of the audience at least, is regarded primarily as a musical experience—and for a hefty subset of that group, as being solely “about” vocalism? And if opera must be staged, shouldn’t the production’s role be equivalent to that of a groom at a wedding, i.e., necessary, to be sure, but only to balance out the composition in the cake-cutting photos?
As music critic at the New York Post and on my blog parterre.com, I’ve addressed these questions from time to time. In fact, for several years, a regular feature on that blog has been the “Regie quiz,” dervived from the German term for stage direction. Working from only a few photos of an outré production from some (generally) European opera house, the readers try to guess the identity of the opera.
It’s flippant, I know, but it’s not meant to belittle the work of directors who envision opera differently. (Belittlement may be reserved for latter-day purveyors of what may be called “classic Eurotrash,” the photos of which invariably stump the panelists: Is that haggard figure in the leather trench coat supposed to be Don Giovanni? Wotan? Eliza Doolittle?)
This blog will give me (and I hope, you) a chance to venture past both trench coats and bathrobes to discuss what works and what doesn’t work in modern stage direction. I’m hoping your opinions are at least as strong as my own!
Tags: classical music, enrico caruso, eurotrash, franco zeffirelli, leather trench coats, luc bondy, puccini, regie, standing room
Related posts
Tags: classical music, enrico caruso, eurotrash, franco zeffirelli, leather trench coats, luc bondy, puccini, regie, standing room
October 24th, 2010 at 1:11 am
Scary to be the first here! This is a wonderful idea, and I hope it gets the amount of response it deserves.
A disclaimer in advance. For me, opera, when it works, is the most powerful form of theater western civilization has ever devised. But that means I automatically respond to it as theater, not as a concert in fancy clothes, and a performance by a bunch of posturing canary birds just gives me a headache, no matter how pretty the singing was.
As I see it there are several major difficulties with the whole problem of “regie” – or more properly speaking, people’s reactions to it.
First, directing opera – or in fact any kind of theater – can be hellishly difficult. Anything can undermine it, from sudden budget cuts to technical glitches to clueless singers throwing their weight around to a maestro who absolutely refuses to go along with the timing necessary for your ideas. Rehearsal schedules are usually totally unrealistic, and a director is incredibly lucky if 75% of what was intended actually shows up in some recognizable form onstage. Yet people judge as though everything that appears were fully intended. Well, OK. “Never apologize, never explain.” But still …
Second, very few people can see opera direction itself. They can like or hate the sets or costumes, or various gestures or moments, but they can’t see when performers are going against the whole grain of the production, or failing to realize key character points or essential moments. And they also can’t see when a production is just skating across the surface, refusing to engage with the real issues the work raises. As long as the performance goes along with their preconceived notions, they’re happy and think somehow the direction was good – when it may really have been crappy. (I.e., bad blocking, futzed focus, clichéd choices, etc.)
Third, opera, unlike conventional theater, is still partly burdened by the canard of the “composer’s intent.” Shakespeare would be incomprehensible if we pronounced the language the way he heard it, and almost certainly would not work for a modern audience if we used only the level of technical stagecraft available in his day. (Not to mention the orange-sellers yelling in the pit.) Few Shakespeare productions today make much attempt at any kind of historicity, and audiences are perfectly happy. Yet people still labor under the illusion that the exact way Donizetti would have visualized the theater – terrible lighting, bad sets, totally non-historical costuming, audiences having a nice chat between arias, acting that was totally hit-or-miss and for most people today revoltingly stylized – somehow sets a standard that must absolutely be applied today. (What they usually really mean is that this is how they saw it with Milanov or whoever in 1953 and it must NEVER change!)
Shakespeare is actually a pretty good example. People have been doing him in stripped-down, modernized, reinterpreted productions since the 1930s or earlier, and it’s now understood that a reconceptualized version of Troilus and Cressida, for example, may have plenty that’s valid and interesting to say about the play. Why can’t the same thing apply to Aïda?
So kudos again on the idea, and I hope to see lots of smart discussion.
October 25th, 2010 at 6:02 pm
I am delighted to see such a forum and think it is long overdue. As a transplanted American who has lived in Paris for the last few decades, I have seen the European opera scene transformed and energized by the simple idea of hiring important stage artists to create a new vision of a familiar work.
Important American directors, like Robert Wilson and Peter Sellars, have worked in Europe for decades and have inspired countless young people to rethink what opera can be. Opera has lost its elitist image and enjoys a higher profile as a result. A good discussion of this movement – sometimes inspired, sometimes not – in America is long overdue.