{"id":7610,"date":"2012-09-30T02:06:57","date_gmt":"2012-09-30T06:06:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/?p=7610"},"modified":"2013-01-31T23:50:09","modified_gmt":"2013-02-01T03:50:09","slug":"plonk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.musicalamerica.com\/mablogs\/?p=7610","title":{"rendered":"Plonk"},"content":{"rendered":"

By James Jorden<\/strong><\/p>\n

Of hundreds of juicy anecdotes in Ken Mandelbaum\u2019s indispensable volume<\/a> Not Since Carrie: 40 Years of Broadway Flops<\/em>, one stands out perhaps a little more than the others. It\u2019s about a show called Reuben Reuben<\/em> which closed out of town in 1955. This was a through-composed absurdist piece by Mark Blitzstein, and Mandelbaum reports that on the opening night of the show over 300 audience members walked out of the Shubert Theater in Boston. <\/p>\n

One of the walkouts spotted the composer in the lobby and asked if he had anything to do with the show in question. When Blitzstein said he\u2019d written it, the man punched him in the jaw.<\/p>\n

Now, why exactly am I repeating this story? Well, it\u2019s because it illustrates how I felt seeing Bartlett Sher\u2019s production of L\u2019elisir d\u2019amore<\/em> at the Met on opening night a week ago. I literally wanted to punch Sher in the face.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t of course, partly because I didn\u2019t happen to run into Sher but mostly because that kind of behavior can lose a critic his credentials. But I wanted to.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

This wasn\u2019t the worst opera production I\u2019ve ever seen. But it was perhaps the most infuriating, because Sher had the time and money to do something clear and definite with what is after all not one of the more complicated pieces in the repertoire. Instead he chose to squander those resources on obfuscation and pseudointellectual posturing. In other words, the Met just spent something like a million dollars so Sher could act like he is smart. The problem is, he\u2019s not, and the production is a disorganized mess.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s the problem: in Sher’s mind, it\u2019s apparently not enough for L\u2019elisir <\/em>to be a romantic comedy. It has to have an Issue. Now, any Issue will do, apparently, and so he latches on to the political. The opera, he says<\/a>, is about the Risorgimento, the grassroots movement for Italian unification that spanned most of the 19th century. Now, what about this particular opera suggests there is some kind of implicit nationalistic message lurking behind the farce plot?<\/p>\n

Well, the opera was written in the 19th century, to start with, and there are some soldiers in it, and there was an occupying army in Italy in the 19th century that also happened to be made up of soldiers. And, as if that isn\u2019t enough\u2026 well, actually, that is<\/em> enough, because that\u2019s all that Sher\u2019s got.<\/p>\n