Reviews

In this era of universal dramatic entertainment, at the drop of the hat, on your phone even, with superbly high technical values, the opera is so expensive and has such a limited audience that the art form has had to cast about for what to do, and what to do is usually the same thing we did last time. There is a tiny portion of the repertoire that can be done again and again, put butts in seats almost always, and still turn the red to black in the budget. Almost. Those fifty or so operas, the “chestnuts,” are approached with the expectation that, if well-executed, what will surprise us is the SET DESIGN.

Hence the impetus to find some new stuff to do.

So we have to cultivate young composers and librettists and occasionally produce, if even in a limited way, new work.

I am a playwright and have been tapped for the opera. I wrote two opera pastiche plays (operetta skeleton plays with the “greatest hits” arias performed by the singers) that were performed in the Young Artist Program here at Seattle Opera in the 1990s, and one youth opera with composer David Hanlon produced by Houston Grand Opera’s Opera to Go program in 2013 that was subsequently performed in many youth venues in Texas.

Most traditional opera follows the “boy meets girl” format for physiological reasons. The operatic voice is a glorious artificiality that most of us can listen to for only so long without howling.

There are distinct excellences in range for males and females, called the “fach,” and they can be reasonably enjoyed for a few numbers, but to listen to all one thing for two and a half hours doesn’t usually keep the audience. 

What subjects are suitable to sing about? An opera is, after all, a play, and needs to be about something with a story.

Given that the art form flourished and had its greatest peak in the 17th to late 19th centuries, up until the invention of the gramophone, then the radio, and up to today’s music-on-demand wherein people no longer had to assemble in a concert hall to have the music but could have it at home on a machine, we must consider the lifestyle available for all these songs.

What did women do in those eras? Mostly they were wives and mothers, occasionally nannies, servants and shop women of some sort, nuns, as well as the unmentionable, courtesans. 

In order to get the female voice on the stage at all -- and some of the most glorious opera repertoire is for females — it was necessary to construct stories that would accommodate reasonable portrayals of their lives.

Usually love stories!

So here we are, at the beginning of the fifth century of opera-making, and we have the possibility of writing operas that are not mostly love stories. 

And these young artists have all done exactly that! It is a brilliant approach to the art form, and such great inventiveness to concoct dramatic narratives that could well employ the heightened reality of this style of vocal performance.

Caccini’s Ghost, Music by Jeremy Berdin, Libretto by Grace Ward

Opera is a natural theme for meta-opera. Here the creative team explores the story of a woman composer and her aging father, a court composer for the Medici family, for whom, in the end, she apparently ghostwrote, as well as her daughter, who history records entered a convent. What that was about we cannot tell from the scant historical record, but she is brought in as a voice. It left me wanting more. 

This is a perfect subject for an opera, in that Caccini was one of the greatest composers of 17th century art song. Every young singer has to go through this repertoire, so we knew who the composer was. Here is one of my favorite recordings of  a song that was in the top 40s of published art song hot off the press, sung in drawing rooms all over Europe as soon as the ships from Italy could dock elsewhere.

The Meeting House, Music by Carolyn Quick, Libretto by Raya Tuffaha

Here a woman who witnessed the Salem Witch trials as a child, and saw her twelve-year-old best friend executed for being a witch, returns to the court room and interacts with her younger self. It was poignant.

Celestial Bodies, Music by Max Mary, Libretto by Ozzy Wagner

Something goes wrong on a space flight, and as the astronaut experiences his last moments, descending into madness before death, a person appears in the space capsule with him and helps him through these final moments. 

A Spring Like This, Music by Nehemiah Jones, Libretto by Gabriella Garcia

In the 1950s, a blight killed about 90% of American chestnut trees. Here a young tree awakens from the winter to find herself almost the sole survivor of her species and mourns the loss of everything. Here is a nice article about the trees:

https://mossyoakgamekeeper.com/wildlife-conservation/wildlife-habitat-management/the-american-chestnut-is-there-hope-this-giant-will-return/

It was a brilliant summer day at the Seattle Center, and it was hard to coax myself into letting go of such perfection for two hours in the gloom of a windowless building. But these artists made it worth while.

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In traditional Europe, when a young person desired to be a painter or sculptor, he would apply at the studio of a Master. He would sharpen pencils, grind ochre, and clean the place up. He would start with piece work, receiving instruction on one thing, producing that thing repeatedly as part of the cottage industry, then move up. Bit by bit, he would learn the craft, and, at the last, be able to make a portrait, paint a landscape, throw a pot, and eventually set himself up in business. Yet everything produced in that studio bore the mark of the style of the Master.

Every production of Bryan Willis bears the imprint of this Master.

He studied playwriting at NYU, then received a Guggenheim award to study at the Royal Court theatre in London. He spent many years in New York City. I first met Bryan in about 1994 at a production of the now-defunct Theater Schmeater. I was then a budding playwright with The Immediate Theatre, gadding about town and getting to know people. I asked why he had moved back, to Olympia, where he grew up on a pony farm. He said that New York actors put a pause at the top of every line and it was killing his work, whereas the West Coast acting style doesn't. 

So here we are, thirty years later, and I am sitting in the audience watching Bryan’s baby and thinking, this is a Master’s studio. All of Bryan’s productions have a baseline level of competence below which they never fall. It always pulls together into a cohesive whole. It is always subtle, like the Pacific Northwest. It is Realism.

Realism is not easy. In many ways, if you have not mastered Realism, you have not mastered the art of playwriting. Learning to tell a story in this medium is very difficult. The lines have to carry the thought, emotion, and aesthetic structure within recognizable types of characters and do it while maintaining control of the audience’s attention for the duration. It is not like fiction with one narrator — it is many narrators. 

That is a problem I am having with fiction. Too many narrators.

Bryan Willis is able to imprint other playwrights with this most difficult style and to keep the whole shebang of the scene going in Olympia. Young playwrights should hang out in Olympia and be in his orbit to learn the greatest faculty of playwrighting while those of us in this generation are still working and at it all the time.

I should mention John Longenbaugh, whom I met when he did reviews for, what, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer? Prehistory of Seattle theatre goes back a ways, and I was out of town for a decade and engrossed in healthcare for the past few years.

Now, about the play, it is about a house and four generations of a family who live in it, and it is beautiful. The admission fee includes a themed cocktail, excellently prepared by the host, and so apropos. 

Chairs are the theatre seats, the living room is the stage. The actors are all pros and can carry the language. You have to have cut your teeth on Shakespeare — then left — to be able to stand there and hold that language aloft for two hours. All of us in the room went to theatre school. It is what we did instead of money. So we know what they are up to.

I have been so engrossed in entering the gorgeous new work world of healthcare. Then Covid hit. I worked 16-hour days on the Eastside, day after day, sleeping in the car, showering at the gym, and eating at the organic grocery store. I made the hourlong drive to Tacoma three days a week, but the rest of the time, the workplace owned me. It is hard to remember how to be. When I am in Olympia, it is as if awakening from a dream. As James Agee once wrote,

"Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well-beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am."

It is so refreshing to remember . . . who . . . you . . . are. We are the theatre. 

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Here’s coming at you with internationally commodified Italian coffee, which began right here in Old Town Seattle. 

Let me apologize for the long hiatus since my last review. I would complain of nothing but work, work, work and the vicissitudes of life, with a couple of moves thrown in. What is it with rent? Two hundred a month more than pre-COVID, and so much demand I can hardly get into anything in town. I am hunkered down in SOUTH Tacoma when I am not at the boat, and, more often than I care to admit, sleeping in the car between double overnight shifts at work, and that is not a good recipe for theatre.

My friend Rose Cano is one of the authors of this piece, a theatre artist with such an exemplary track record for four decades that, whatever may be, the piece can be counted on to be thrilling. I don’t know David Nyberg other than meeting him the once last night, but I know he has good taste in collaborators. 

How to approach the subject of people in Pioneer Square in a musical? That was the dramaturgical challenge of the night, and the answer was, slyly. 

Part of the answer was the space itself, the ur-Seattle built so low it flooded and was built over by the present municipality, with the bones of its predecessor still nestled beneath it. I haven’t done the Underground Tour, and have been needing to. Now that I have successfully gotten there, I can get there again. http://www.undergroundtour.com/about/history.html

The initial plan was to park my car at the Tukwila Transit Center, take a bus to the boat, then a bus to the show, but as I made my way to the Light Rail platform, it occurred to me that the train stops in Pioneer Square, just a couple of blocks from the venue, and aren’t there numerous bars, restaurants, and other venues of comestibles to help me while away the extra hours?

So jump on the train and avoid all that nasty, expensive Pioneer Square parking. I managed to find the Merchant Saloon and have a cocktail before the show. That is a nice way to start a show, although unnecessary, in this case. This show began with a visit to the Speakeasy and a round of drinks already in progress, so I recommend you plan on that, and possibly go easy with the first drink. Just saying. https://merchantscafeandsaloon.com/

The show itself was topical, well-produced, enthusiastically acted, and well-directed. The band was stunning and the singing, Cara Mia! It is not easy to do a musical in this post-HAMILTON era, especially with a recondite subject. How to tell the story of Pioneer Square when it bridges vast chasms of culture, from the Duwamish Nation to the 19th-century settlers to the modern corporate to the homeless to the night club scene and the arts? You have to craft each particular segment and jump from disparate moment to disparate moment. Some of these moments will be more well-received than others. This is especially the case in the situation of new music. So my hat’s off to this creative team for this piece. 

https://www.beneath-the-streets.com/about-4?fbclid=IwAR2sPbzwyz_iw223pPoYrc2FyT7gpNdO9ESrErMYguPMvmqyN7SI_0P1oyE

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There is a sense of scale in theatre, like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. This show is too big, that is too small, but that is just right. There is something to be said for all of them, but it is a relaxing pleasure when you find yourself in the right hands. You are going to be okay. 

That is where we are with Christmastown — it is just right!

First, the ticket price includes an artist level of $10 that allowed a middle-aged playwright-ish working at high school student wages to pony up and go. Maybe after I pay off my car or something I will go up to the next level, and certainly shelling out $7 plus tip for a glass of wine that cost them $1.72 was part of the evening’s overall expense, but I could absolutely get there for a $10 ticket. I can’t always make the $35 show. Sorry.

Then there is the script, always the focus of the playwright. That is one of the things that was just right. It had the premise of a film noir private detective in a place called Christmastown on the hunt for clues to what happened to “Big Red,” the mysteriously missing Santa Claus. The romp takes us through every cliché in both film noir and the secular Christmas folklore of America, including 34th Street, Rudolph, the classy dame, and plenty of vamping about at gunpoint. It is a workmanlike thing that should just be produced, because it gets the job done.

With a set that cost ~$20 and was probably in someone’s garage, the cast of four strong players cleverly shuffling about with roles and properties, and the directing strong and inventive within the range of effective and usual business that moved the show along, the practically sold-out house, on a Wednesday night, even, left by 8:30 with an air of contentment, not entirely used up, and ready for the next phase of the evening, a late dinner, drinks, conversation. Nearby establishments had emptied out a bit from the dinner rush and no doubt offered seats for the elegant comestibles we thrive on in these works. It is good. The second show started at 9, crowds were already lining up when I left — hope was in the air.

https://www.seattlepublictheater.org/

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