‘10 Days in a Madhouse,’ ‘Simon Boccanegra’ and ‘Doppelgänger’ Reviews: Insanity and Humanity

Opera Philadelphia’s Festival O featured a triumphant world premiere about Nellie Bly’s work exposing the conditions at a 19th-century asylum, as well as a production of Verdi’s convoluted love story; director Claus Guth and tenor Jonas Kaufmann staged a gripping performance of Schubert’s ‘Schwanengesang’ (‘Swan Song’) at the Park Avenue Armory in New York.

Heidi Waleson 

Sept. 25, 2023 at 5:48 pm ET

Kiera Duffy PHOTO: DOMINIC M. MERCIER

Philadelphia

Opera Philadelphia’s groundbreaking Festival O notched another triumph on Thursday with the world premiere of Rene Orth’s “10 Days in a Madhouse,”staged at the Wilma Theater. Using reporter Nellie Bly’s 1887 exposé of the conditions at the insane asylum on Blackwell’s Island (now Roosevelt Island) as a source, Ms. Orth and librettist Hannah Moscovitch trenchantly explore how female insanity has been used both as an operatic trope and as a way to label and control non-compliant women.

Ingeniously, the opera’s narrative runs backward, starting with Day 10: A haze of choral fragments embedded in an acoustic and electronic orchestral texture evokes the disordered mind of The Madwoman/Nellie (Kiera Duffy) until she cries “Let me out!” Over the next 90 minutes, we see and hear, in reverse, how she got to that point, with the music and text gradually reassembling into a recognizable story. Incomprehensible bits of text come together as “What time’s the boat?” This is the repeated plea of Lizzie (Raehann Bryce-Davis), locked up because of her grief over the death of her child, not insane but delirious from untreated typhus. Dr. Blackwell (Will Liverman) keeps asking Nellie the same series of questions; early in the opera, her vocal slides make us doubt her sanity, but as the evening progresses, and her delivery grows more confident, we see how he has been gaslighting her from the beginning. Electronic effects and beats are skillfully used throughout to unmoor the narrative from rationality. During Day 1, the “madwomen” stage a subtle acoustic rebellion, interrupting a forced hymn-singing session with “Let my people go”—by Day 10, such agency is impossible. 

Raehann Bryce-Davis and Ms. Duffy PHOTO: DOMINIC M. MERCIER

Director Joanna Settle and set and lighting designer Andrew Lieberman created a sinister, claustrophobic environment: The set was a wide column with a hallway through its center, the orchestra arrayed on top of it, and the characters appearing and disappearing around its shadowy edges. Faustin Linyekula’s choreography helped situate the action in the realm of the disturbed; Ásta Hostetter and Avery Reed’s drab gingham dresses for the women added to their sense of hopeless confinement. Ms. Duffy’s pure soprano, trying in vain to cut through the confusion, was a vital contrast to Ms. Bryce-Davis’s opulent, anguished mezzo; Mr. Liverman gave Dr. Blackwell a subtle, predatory edge; his leaps from baritone into falsetto and the scenes in which he waltzed with Nellie “to soothe” her were especially creepy. As the Nurse/Matron, Lauren Pearlphysically embodied the institution’s sadism; the nine-voice women’s chorus and the 12-member orchestra shone under the leadership of conductor Daniela Candillari. 

Verdi’s “Simon Boccanegra” has a bewildering plot—a stew of political strife and a 25-year time gap on top of the usual operatic devices of false identity, jealousy, curses and revenge—but it boils down to the love of two fierce men for a long-lost child. Opera Philadelphia’s production, which was imported from the Opéra Royal de Wallonie in Belgium and opened on Friday at the Academy of Music, unfortunately emphasized the opera’s chaos and macho elements instead of its heart. Gary McCann’s set, an arrangement of concrete pillars, a glass ceiling, and monumental sculptures, had a Fascist Art Deco look, shifting the period from the 14th century to the 1930s. Fernand Ruiz’s costumes tried to have it both ways, with the men sporting Renaissance-style cloaks over their 20th-century suits and the Doge’s soldiers clad in metal armor. Laurence Dale’s static direction, along with John Bishop’s colored lighting and the aimless revolutions of the set, created uninformative stage pictures rather than illuminating the story. 

Quinn Kelsey and Ana María Martínez PHOTO: STEVEN PISANO

The singers worked hard to infuse the evening with Verdian feeling. Baritone Quinn Kelsey captured the ambivalence of the titular corsair-turned-Doge, displaying both power and lyric tenderness toward his newly discovered daughter, Maria (she is known as Amelia), and even an inclination toward peace-making. As his antagonist Jacopo Fiesco, Amelia’s grandfather, bass-baritone Christian Van Horn proved a potent match for him—bearing a grudge, but honorable in his way. The evening’s best scene was a duet in the final act, when the dying Boccanegra revealed Amelia’s identity to Fiesco, and the two old men clung to each other, suddenly finding their common humanity.

The rest of the characters felt like pawns in the game. As Maria/Amelia, Ana María Martínez’s soprano was loud and metallic, without warmth; Richard Trey Smagur’s beefy tenor stressed the aggressive tendencies of Gabriele Adorno, her lover and Boccanegra’s enemy. Baritone Benjamin Taylor brought subtlety to the villainous Paolo Albiani, who betrays and poisons Boccanegra. Corrado Rovaris’s conducting was lovingly textured rather than propulsive, and the final scene, which had Amelia, Fiesco and Adorno standing motionless as the dying Boccanegra was slowly towed offstage by the ghost of his long-dead lover (Amelia’s mother) felt interminable instead of cathartic. 

***

New York

“Doppelgänger,” which opened at the Park Avenue Armory last weekend, is a gripping work of site-specific theater. Director Claus Guth, working with tenor Jonas Kaufmann, staged Schubert’s “Schwanengesang” (“Swan Song”), a collection of the composer’s final lieder, as the last meditations of a wounded soldier dying in a World War I army hospital. Set designer Michael Levinetransformed the Armory’s vast drill hall into a multi-bed ward. The military patients and their six nurses, in uniforms by Constance Hoffman, became part of the story through movement—alternately organized and chaotic—directed by Sommer Ulrickson. Mathis Nitschke created interstitial music for Helmut Deutsch, the evening’s superlative pianist, as well as a soundscape of drones, crashes and explosions that unified the 90-minute performance. 

The production of ‘Doppelgänger’ at the Park Avenue Armory PHOTO: MONIKA RITTERSHAUS

Over the course of 14 songs, Mr. Kaufmann sang and acted the soldier’s inner journey toward his impending death. In the bleak “Kriegers Ahnung” (“Warrior’s Foreboding”) he seemed solitary and invisible to the nurses; as the cycle progressed, and his character sang of love, desire, alienation, and the loss of hope, the other performers became expressions of his interior world—whether menacing him, admiring him, or carrying his bier in a funeral procession. Urs Schönebaum’s expressive lighting was a crucial part of the environment: At the conclusion of “Abschied” (“Farewell”), a seemingly jaunty song of departure, a bank of floodlights blazed out from the end wall, stopping the singer in his march to the exit. Mr. Kaufmann’s eloquent singing didn’t shy away from roughness when it was warranted; even his tight high notes conveyed a man in extremis, making the pure lyricism he brought to “Ständchen” (“Serenade”) all the more touching. With Mark Grey’s sensitive sound design, one forgot about the necessary amplification, and this march to the grave felt surprisingly, and harrowingly, intimate.

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).