Culture, Digested: Bridgerton: The Opera
I rearranged a whole leg of my trip to Germany to see a Janáček opera. I don’t see Janáček performed much in the States, usually my only hope to see his work is on a trip to Central Europe. When I saw that I was supposed to be in one city while The Excursions of Mr. Brouček to the Moon and to the 15th Century was going to be staged in another, I canceled reservations and bought train tickets to see it.
My language for writing about music is incredibly impoverished, but the words that come to mind when I listen to Janáček are arboreal. Verdant. Fecund. I’m overwhelmed with the sense of the forest, of scurrying and mildly menacing creatures emerging from the dark overgrowth.
Anyway, the adaptation was terrible, and I went hours out of my way just to be disappointed.
Not that anyone goes to see operas for the plot, but the story of Mr. Brouček is that a man gets drunk and accidentally visits the moon and then when he gets back he stumbles around 15th century Prague until he finds his way back to the bar he knows and loves. It’s weird and absurd, the music is delightful, and there is plenty of opportunity for playful staging.
Instead, the Staatsoper went with the easy and the popular, by trying to turn the opera into a political statement by having him travel in time to 1968 instead. Instead of stumbling into the battle against the Holy Roman Empire, it’s the invasion by the Soviets Mr. Brouček must find his way around. This is a decision that does not in any way make sense for the work, switching up a battle lost for a battle won, trying to make some sort of weird revolutionary statement with an opera about a drunk lost in time. It wasn’t about finding something resonant about these different moments in time – the 15th century battle, the late 19th century moment when the opera was written, and the 1968 failed uprising. It was about ramming a couple things together in order to be “relevant” and “provocative.”
As I grumbled with my friend about how bizarre and inappropriate the staging was, she found the correct diagnosis for the problem. “He’s just trying to do what the Komische was doing fifteen years ago.” Berlin’s Komische Oper had done similar anachronistic adaptations of older work, skipping back and forth in time, setting Mozart in Weimar, turning Handel operas into lesbian romps with all women casts. The adaptations were fun and lively, but more than that they were thoughtful. There was a logic behind the decisions to move the operas through time, and the people involved put in the work to adapt the work.
Our culture feels moribund, stuck in the ideas of two decades ago, unable to think through anything else. The ideas that felt fresh in the first decade of this century are now stultifying. I don’t know if we can blame Baz Luhrmann exactly, but it seems like his Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge, were powerfully influential in the way they created a mélange of eras and influences and references to bring contemporary audiences into a kind of immediacy with work that could seem dusty and worked over. It felt fresh and of the moment, but now everything is like this. From Hamilton to Dave Malloy. Everything has racially blind casting. Every woman from the past gets yassified into an empowered girlboss. Everything exists within a dozen eras at once. Everything references a million other works like a Tumblr account maintained by an Adderall addict. Everything is fucking Bridgerton.
I went to St. Ann’s Warehouse last week to see the very hyped up adaptation of The Cherry Orchard, rewritten by Benedict Andrews to make the cast British and to make the politics contemporary, but still somehow existing in its original turn of the 20th century Russian setting. The cast carried it through and made it worthwhile, but it still suffered from this decision to skip along the surface of the last hundred or so years. Maybe “decision” is the wrong word, as this approach seems to be about not making decisions, not pinning a work down, not committing fully to any one angle or interpretation. It was more adroitly done than the opera, but still the play felt hampered and deadened by its temporal incoherence.
The play’s ideas about inheritance, property, class, and family can be easily transferred to the contemporary setting of a widespread housing crisis. And that’s kind of where this new adaptation stops, with some allusions to AirBnBs and landlords. But it misses out on its anxiety about who or what is going to inherit the future, and whether those generations phasing themselves out made any meaningful contribution to the way things work or if we all just fucked it up and we deserve to disappear without a lasting legacy. Were we thoughtful stewards or did we squander it all?
At one point in The Cherry Orchard Pyotr, a perpetual student and aspiring revolutionary, stands up and gives a dramatic speech about the billionaires ruining our society and the apathy of the masses. With a sly nod to “government efficiency” the audience burst into applause as a recognition of the reference. It’s cheap, really. Anytime the audience confuses agreeing with a character with thinking this is good, it brings the work down. And Pyotr remains more audience stand-in – a socialist with a PhD, gee I wonder why that would work well in Brooklyn – than a faithful rendering of the character in the original work. This Pyotr is more crowdpleasing than complicated, there to get the applause lines rather than unsettle us with his eagerness to remake a world that makes him uncomfortable.
Composers and writers as subtle as Janáček and Chekhov deserve more thoughtful engagement, something other than ramming them into an ill-fitting but easily consumable box for the creative classes.
Recommended:
Speaking of the problems of adaptation, The Discordia Review’s take on The Handmaid’s Tale both book and TV show is quite good.
Emily Colucci looks at the failed attempts to render Donald Trump in art. (When I see the hated Colorado portrait of Trump I can only think that it looks like an adult Augustus Gloop?)
I watched Vengeance is Mine last night and holy fucking shit.
The vibes in the New York movie theaters are absolutely vile, especially at Metrograph. Irony poisoned fuckwits. So, bringing this back:
Culture, Digested: Stop Laughing at Old Movies
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A friend recently went to see The Piano Teacher in the theater. If you don’t know it, a) you should watch it, but b) an accurate description of it would be the opposite of camp. It’s an excruciating …
I’m reading Returning to Reims right now, and Eribon is really good at articulating the politics of class and poverty. He described how the French working class turned far right when the left politicians purposely dissolved ways for their electorate to define themselves positively. He also says that a part of this process involved becoming the technocrat “we’re all in this together” left, at the expense of an antagonistic, class conscious identity. The technocrat left won’t stop trying to “bossify”. We’ve lost the ability to even define our goals in non-corporate terms. You’re a boss, I’m a boss. We’re all a boss and our ideological enemies are always conveniently placed to hinder the left becoming the force for positive identity that it used to be.
I twinge when I see a production that is being advertised as a reinvention, but I see your point that operas and plays from centuries ago *could* be re-set in interesting ways with careful thinking about the time and place the work was composed, the story it tells, and the potential for a setting in a different time and place that could enhance our consideration of it, rather than distract from it (as the majority of such productions do now). But too often the artistic director thinks that taking something "ripped from the headlines" will make do - contemporary references that the intended audience will very easily get, even if it doesn't make any sense. Such as doing Julius Caesar with a Trump lookalike. Or this: https://apnews.com/article/mozart-opera-ai-yuval-sharon-detroit-860d6f5e2408fca7600c4f52620e21da