Lots of food for thought this week, music-drama-wise.
The production of Bohème from Bern on Tuesday marked a whole new direction for opera, even more than did the Traviata in Zurich last year. Both productions broke out of the confines of the opera house and took to the streets, and after these two pioneering productions (and the experiments in live broadcasting of stage productions in London to giant screens in public places) the future of opera is assured, thanks to new technologies and, much more importantly, people in theatreland who are excited by their vast potential of possibilities.
Meanwhile, in Blackpool, there has been a short run of Evita, and we had booked for the matinee, today being our 43rd wedding anniversary. I have been sneering at Andrew Lloyd Webber for years, aided and abetted by knowledgeable barytons familiers anglais des scènes européennes, whose musical education we had to eat bread and cheese for for 15 years to fund, but the score for Evita is quite Puccini-like in many respects, such as in the use of little leitmotives which serve to give thematic unity.
There was nobody famous in the cast. Eva (Rachael Wooding) comes from Doncaster; Perón (Mark Heenehan) from New Jersey; and Magaldi (James Waud) from nowhere, this being his first professional role (where has he been?) Che (Seamus Cullen) is a seasoned performer of, er, rather pop-py stuff and Gospel, but boy, can he act! He has the gift of attracting the audience's attention before the spotlight finds him.
Any production of Evita has to fight the echoes of the film (possibly the best thing Madonna ever did), and you see the similarities in the costumes and the hairstyles - not because this production copied the film, but because both it and the film strove for authenticity in the detail and arrived in the same place. But film is film, and stage is stage, and creating the illusion within the confines of a small box without a front, in real time, is what makes theatre more demanding, and, I think, more satisfying.
Rachael Wooding's Eva was a tremendous piece of character acting, at least equal to Madonna's Eva. The ambiguities in Maria Eva Duarte's life as Evita (were her concerns for the poor and for women's suffrage genuine, or was she a cynical manipulator?) are important to the drama, and an actor has less than two hours to create a compelling picture of a poor girl with ambition who rose to be the darling of a troubled nation. Ms Wooding pulled it off. Madonna didn't, quite.
To start with the only negative comment: the Latin sung by the ensemble sounded terribly English, what with all those un-Italian diphthongs, but in all other respects they were terrific, with a precision in their movement which many an opera chorus could learn from (these people have to dance and act as well as sing).
Robin is far too young (and snobby) to have noticed the close connections between ALW and Puccini, and he won't discuss it, because he knows best (of course. And why? Because that's how he was brought up to think.) He says ALW is worthless. I say ALW is doing exactly what Puccini did -stagecraft, melody, heightened emotions, music theatre, the rest.
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