AndyManshel.nyc

A dark opera explores the mind of a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; a pastoral comedy features earnest lovers, meddling gods and sheep puppets.

By Heidi Waleson

Jan. 26, 2021 2:29 pm ET

Operas directed especially for film have been an intriguing artistic byproduct of the Covid-19 pandemic, opening new interpretive avenues. A case in point is the movie of David T. Little’s “Soldier Songs,” created for the Opera Philadelphia Channel. The film makes this 2006 monodrama even more powerful than it was as staged theater. It is an immersive experience that takes the audience on a terrifying dive into the mind of a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder.

As directed and performed by baritone Johnathan McCullough, with a screenplay by James Darrah and Mr. McCullough, the veteran lives in an Airstream trailer marooned in an otherwise empty field. His home is an encampment, and all the details—the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag outside; the bleak, claustrophobic interior with a constantly operating coffee maker and a handgun on the table—scream isolation and tension. Mr. Little based the libretto of “Soldier Songs” on interviews with friends and family members who served in conflicts from World War II to Afghanistan. Their recorded spoken accounts serve as an essential element in its musical texture, along with the baritone solo part and a small, percussion-driven instrumental ensemble. In the film, the camera’s multiple perspectives add still more layers of meaning and sensation, and accentuate the violent, repetitive quality of the score.

The tight dramatic arc starts with a shot of the open field (there’s a distant booming sound that could be gunfire) before the camera zeroes in on the trailer and its occupant. We see what’s happening inside the veteran’s head as he relives his experiences. He plays at war—as a child with toy soldiers and as an adolescent obsessed with violent videogames—and then segues into the real thing, blasting Metallica “to keep me entertained” while driving a tank. Sometimes it’s now; sometimes it’s then; like the soldier, we’re never entirely sure. The trailer’s window becomes the tank window; burning toast creates a cloud of smoke that becomes a bomb explosion, as Mr. McCullough tumbles out the door in battle gear and cries “Somebody yell cut! This movie is out of control.”

Even quieter moments, like the song about the death-notification visit by two Marines, sustain the undercurrent of dread. In an extended sequence about how soldiers call incoming ordnance “steel rain,” the recorded spoken voices are intelligible at first, then pile on top of each other and dissolve into the noise in the veteran’s head as he crawls, again and again, through the field, fleeing invisible enemies. And that Chekhovian gun in the early scene? It reappears, but it’s an open question as to whether it gets used. At the center of the film, Mr. McCullough proves gifted as both actor and singer, his dead-eyed expression a chilling contrast to the anguish in his voice and the endless torment caused by the experience of war that the audience, thanks to his directorial skills, can feel too. Corrado Rovaris led the incisive seven-member instrumental ensemble.

***

After that, I certainly needed some comic relief, which was amply supplied by a new production of Jean-Joseph Cassanéa de Mondonville’s “Titon et L’Aurore” (1753) from the Opéra Comique. Paris is on lockdown, so the show had only one performance this month, with no audience—the singers and players supplied the applause for one another at the end. The video is available free of charge on Medici.tv through April 19.

This delicious bonbon is served up by director Basil Twist, famed for his work with puppets, with music direction by the great William Christie leading his period-instrument ensemble Les Arts Florissants. It’s a pastoral entertainment with lots of dances and a simple plot: The shepherd Titon and the goddess L’Aurore (Dawn) are in love; a pair of jealous gods, Éole (god of the winds) and Palès (goddess of shepherds), resolve to separate them. Happily, Amour (Love) prevails.

Mr. Twist’s direction and design reflect the airiness of the piece with billowing fabrics that evoke fire and wind, L’Aurore’s iridescent golden dress and Amour’s silver 18th-century court costume, all made vivid by Jean Kalman’s colorful lighting. Puppets are central in the numerous dances, beginning with the Prologue, when earthen statues are brought to life. As befits a pastorale, puppet sheep play a major role. Palès has a fleecy train and pair of sheep companions. Mr. Twist brilliantly builds the comedy, with new sheep for each dance, in the extended scene in which Palès tries to seduce Titon into infidelity. Her ovine companions stand up and dance, other sheep appear in tilting stacks, and still more romping beasts descend from the flies. You can’t keep from laughing.

Standouts in the excellent cast include Gwendoline Blondeel, whose opulent soprano brings warmth and richness to L’Aurore, and Emmanuelle de Negri, a comically vicious Palès (listen to her snarl “haine”—hatred). Julie Roset is a bright-voiced Amour, especially able in the ornamented passages. As Titon, Reinoud Van Mechelen comes into his own in his celebratory final aria; Marc Mauillon could use a bit more vocal weight as the nasty Éole, but his revenge duet with Ms. de Negri is a high point. Mr. Christie’s orchestra sparkles throughout, and their speedy double-time repeats add to the show’s emphatic embrace of fun.

—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).

Now available to watch online, the Atlanta Opera’s in-person performances embraced Covid-19 restrictions as a creative challenge.

By Heidi Waleson

Jan. 20, 2021 1:21 pm ET

The Atlanta Opera has been one of the few American companies to perform live for in-person audiences during the Covid-19 pandemic. Last fall, using a custom-built, open-sided tent situated on a university baseball field and following rigorous coronavirus protocols, the company gave 17 performances of two one-act operas—Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” and Viktor Ullman’s “The Kaiser of Atlantis,” played on alternate days—as well as three concerts. The salaried Atlanta Opera Company Players—a dozen top singers who live in the Atlanta area—and the six members of its young artist program comprise the casts of all the company’s live and digital events.

Films of the live operas and concerts, plus some additional videos, are being distributed on the company’s new Spotlight Media platform , at various price points. “Kaiser,” which is available now, along with the “Mezzo Extravaganza” concert, demonstrates how imaginative direction can harness Covid restrictions for artistic effect.

Ullmann’s sardonic 60-minute opera, with a libretto by Peter Kien, was composed in 1943 in the Nazi “show” camp Terezín but not performed until 1975 (the creators were killed in Auschwitz). The circus-themed production is directed by Tomer Zvulun, the company’s general and artistic director, with scenic design by Julia Noulin-Mérat, costumes by Joanna Schmink, and lighting by Ben Rawson. It skillfully juxtaposes Holocaust references (mountains of discarded shoes) with the visual signals of our current plague era (masks and four movable booths with clear vinyl sides). Singers inside the booths wear no masks; outside them, other singers and circus performers, all masked, stagger through a seemingly toxic landscape. The despotic Kaiser’s reign has produced a land where life and death are equally meaningless. Drunk with power, he decrees a total war that will kill everyone, but Death, angry at not being consulted, goes on strike. As a result, the populace, afflicted by battle and disease, cannot die.

The vinyl barriers visually separate perpetrators from victims; the face coverings, like Death’s black-edged teeth, the Soldier’s sci-fi mesh visor, and the gas masks in the “Dance of the Living Dead,” make vivid costume pieces. Although masking results in slightly muffled vocal production, and it is not always obvious who is singing, Jon Summers’s skillful sound design and Felipe Barral’s creative camera work keep the audio balanced and the story clear. Mr. Zvulun’s sensitive direction leavens the nightmarish satire with humanity. Even the Kaiser (the mellifluous baritone Michael Mayes ), who finally leaves his booth and submits to Death in order to end the world’s agony, is strangely pitiable as he sings his lament of failure.

The luxury cast includes mezzo Daniela Mack, powerful and bellicose as the Drummer, tenor Alek Shrader as the plaintive Harlequin, and bass Kevin Burdette as the sepulchral Death, alternately taunting and soothing. As the Girl and the Soldier, Jasmine Habersham’s bright soprano and Brian Vu’s urgent baritone make the pair’s quick switch from enemies to lovers believable, and bass-baritone Calvin Griffin is skillful as the Loudspeaker, who has the unenviable job of telling the Kaiser bad news from outside his bubble. Four circus performers (including a knife-thrower and stilt-walker) and two dancers supply motion and color that make up for the distancing requirements of the staging, and the 12-member orchestra, led by Clinton Smith, proves adept at both the Kurt Weill-like edginess and the Mahlerian pathos of the score. “Pagliacci” will be available starting Jan. 22.

The four divas of the Nov. 10 “Mezzo Extravaganza” concert— Jamie Barton, Daniela Mack, Megan Marino, and Gabrielle Beteag —manage to connect with their audience and each other despite occupying separate vinyl booths. Colorfully patterned dresses and chatty introductions help, as do the mostly light-hearted repertoire and the singers’ distinctive vocal and theatrical personalities. Ms. Mack stands out with her voluptuous yet penetrating timbre; she is mesmerizing in pieces ranging from a smoky zarzuela to Rossini’s comic girl power aria “Cruda sorte!” from “L’Italiana in Algeri.” Ms. Barton unleashes a torrent of chest voice and high drama for “O vagabonda stella” from Cilea’s “ Adriana Lecouvreur, ” a marked contrast to Ms. Marino’s lighter sound in a wistful rendition of the traditional Scottish song “ Loch Lomond. ” Ms. Beteag, though a bit more generic in her interpretations than the other three, gives a rousing rendition of the Witch’s aria from Humperdinck’s “Hansel und Gretel” with aplomb. For the final group, each mezzo tackles an aria from Bizet’s “Carmen,” demonstrating how many different interpretations are possible for this familiar character. I was particularly struck by Ms. Marino’s bleak, naked performance of “En vain pour éviter”; this Carmen sees her coming death with a fatalistic chill. Atlanta Opera plans to present “Carmen,” along with Weill’s “Threepenny Opera,” live in the tent in April. Any one of these mezzos could be its star.

Also on Spotlight Media are “Love Letters to Atlanta,” a series of affecting short films, each showcasing one of the Atlanta Opera Company Players singing a classic song in a famous Atlanta space. Engaging interviews with Mr. Zvulun draw out the singers’ stories and connections to the spaces and the songs—bass Morris Robinson, for example, recalls his father telling him how “we” (that is, Black people) once had to enter the Fox Theater via exterior stairs that led to the balcony. Mr. Robinson then fills that theater’s space with “The Impossible Dream.” In her film, Ms. Barton does the same with an eloquent rendition of “Georgia on My Mind”; in his, Mr. Burdette talks about tradition at the vast Atlanta Civic Center Auditorium, once the home of the Metropolitan Opera tour. His song is “If Ever I Would Leave You.” For now, these international singers are not able to leave, and their home company is smart to embrace and showcase them.

—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).

This year’s Prototype Festival features six boundary-pushing operas, most of which can be enjoyed at home.

By Heidi WalesonJan. 13, 2021 5:07 pm ET

The annual Prototype Festival (through Jan. 16), produced by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE, always explores new territory in chamber opera theater. This year’s iteration, restricted to digital content due to the Covid-19 pandemic, has, paradoxically, gone even further than usual. The festival’s six presentations headily push boundaries in media, composition, content and geography. They are also available to a much wider public than Prototype’s small theaters can normally hold, and all but one (“Modulation,” which costs $25) are free of charge.

For “Modulation,” the 2021 festival’s world-premiere commission, 13 composers—seven of them women, almost all of them people of color—created a series of short films, accessed through an interactive website. On the home page, vocalist Carmina Escobar’s breath-centered music invites the user to select among three lighted doors; these lead to new pages, each a collection of films about “Identity,” “Fear” or “Isolation,” all themes germane to the current moment.

The pieces are as diverse as their creators, and they communicate their personal and political messages with clarity and verve. In “Identity,” Juhi Bansal’s “Waves of Change” juxtaposes melismatic singing in Bengali, a cello solo, and footage of a woman on a surfboard to evoke a sense of boundless freedom. Another “Identity” piece, Paul Pinto’s “Whiteness: Blanc,” uses snappy spoken text and the exponentially multiplied image of the artist’s brown face for a seriocomic exploration of the answer to the question “Where are you from?” “Fear” includes Yvette Janine Jackson’s “Fear Is Their Alibi,” in which a soprano sings a slow blues to an ominous bassoon accompaniment as an animated black line becomes a house, a hand, and a boot that viciously crushes the rest of the line into a helpless black puddle.

There are more noteworthy works behind the “Isolation” door. In Bora Yoon’s expansive “The Life of the World to Come,” bits of Purcell, drumming, the sounds of wind, birds and water, and recorded speech from George Floyd and Greta Thunberg, among others, are layered into a polemical but powerful incantation about the death of the Earth. At the other extreme is the simplicity of Raven Chacon’s haunting “La Indita Cautiva,” a somber captivity ballad. Jimmy López Bellido’s “Where Once We Sang” is the most conventional. It’s an aria, sung by mezzo Sasha Cooke with piano accompaniment, that laments the closing of opera houses and the silencing of live music-making due to the pandemic.

Prototype offers two in-person audience experiences. “Ocean Body,” by composer-singers Helga Davis and Shara Nova with filmmaker Mark DeChiazza, is an alluring 15-minute installation at the arts center HERE. Four viewers at a time can experience the film, which is spread over four screens. On a shell-covered beach, the two women, linked by the strings of their sculptural corsets, sing about constriction, connection and freedom; the experience of hearing the score while surrounded by ocean images offered a fleeting sense of open-air liberation. By contrast, “Times³” (“Times x Times x Times”) by composer Pamela Z and theater artist Geoff Sobelle felt oddly claustrophobic. I opted to listen to this 30-minute sonic evocation of Times Square in the actual Times Square, which Prototype suggests as an option, not a requirement. Samplings of voices talking about rocks, rivers, geologic time, Native Americans, theater marquees, and the subway felt flattened by the dismal scene around me: some mopey Elmos and Disney characters and a few selfie-takers wandering among the pulsating digital advertising signs and the bits of leftover confetti swirling in the chilly wind. It would have been better to listen at home and imagine the place.

Three digital U.S. premieres complete the lineup. The strongest is “The Murder of Halit Yozgat,” composed by Ben Frost and Petter Ekmann, a chilling piece of political theater. Rehearsals for the opera’s world premiere in Germany were shut down in April by the pandemic, so Mr. Frost created a filmed version of the staging that shifts its point of view as frequently as the opera does. It is based on a real event: the 2006 murder of a young man in his Turkish immigrant parents’ internet cafe in Kassel, Germany. No one was convicted in the killing, though a neo-Nazi terror cell claimed responsibility; Forensic Architecture, a London research agency based out of Goldsmiths that investigates human rights violations through pioneering techniques, later created a reconstruction of the crime, based on police documents and other testimony, focusing on the mysterious presence of a German intelligence agent.

In the two-hour-long opera, the scene is reconstructed seven times. Each time through, the seven singers—three women and four men—switch roles as the five witnesses, the victim and his father, without regard for gender, age or ethnicity. In the first several iterations, the string and percussion ensemble, led by Florian Gross, is loud and pounding; the all-white, schematic set rotates, stagehands move the walls, as the singers’ words, in German and English, emerge randomly from the din: “I’m calling about the Passat.” “You’re no good to me dead.” After a brief spoken explanation, the reconstructions become slower and less chaotic; the accompaniment thins, and walls and set pieces are permanently removed. In the last one, the singers shiver against an aural windscape in dim light and finally scurry away, leaving only the dead body, and no real answer, behind.

“Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists,” by composer Valgeir Sigurdsson, seen in a video of a staged 2014 performance at the Reykjavik Arts Festival, was vaguer. Based on a book by A Rawlings, the 60-minute piece inscrutably pairs the study of sleep and dreams with the study of the life cycle of butterflies and moths. The production, by VaVaVoom Theatre and Bedroom Community, directed by Sara Martí, gets its punch from the look of the show (the threads that ensnare the male singer/sleeper; a gorgeous, woven chrysalis) rather than the music, although I liked the striking contralto range of Ásgerdur Júníusdóttir, one of the two female singer-scientists.

“The Planet—A Lament,” a collaboration between the Indonesian director Garin Nugroho and the Papuan composer-singer Septina Rosalina Layan inspired by Pacific Islander indigenous traditions, is in some ways the most immediate and visceral Prototype offering. In a stage-performance video, Ms. Layan, the 14-voice Mazmur Chorale and five dancers enact a purification ritual for a despoiled world. The harmonies of the choral lamentations are unusual, but their feelings spark immediate recognition, as do Joy Alpuerto Ritter’s stomping choreography and Anna Tregloan’s sets and costumes, which incorporate trash and indigenous weaving. Art, the show seems to say, will play a central role in resurrection, even with all we have lost or destroyed.

—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).

Short pieces from 20 Irish composers, a serial space opera and a trio of works inspired by famous diaries.

By Heidi Waleson

Dec. 28, 2020 2:42 pm ET

With opera gone digital due to the Covid-19 pandemic, fans can experience voices, composers and opera companies they might never otherwise have heard. The Irish National Opera commissioned short (five- to eight-minute) pieces from 20 Irish composers. Recorded in Dublin’s Gaiety Theatre with the RTÉ Concert Orchestra and filmed in a lively variety of styles, the resulting “20 Shots of Opera”, available free, is an exhilarating jaunt through up-to-the-minute lyric creativity. Unlike the experience of losing yourself in the lengthy grandeur of more traditional operas, you absorb these intimate quick takes like jolts of recognition.

In the opening comedy, “Mrs. Streicher” by Gerald Barry, the best-known of the composers, a tenor sits at a table ranting furiously about servants and laundry, with interjections from a tuba. The text is from Beethoven’s letters. Several pieces explore separation: In Éna Brennan’s “Rupture,” a soprano duels with her inner, critical voice; in Hannah Peel’s “Close,” two women have an awkward first in-person, socially distanced date. One powerful group of works looks at death: In Alex Dowling’s “Her Name,” a sweet-voiced choirboy mourns his mother; Michael Gallen’s “At a Loss” is a large-scale diva turn, as the soprano awaits news of her mother’s death; Andrew Hamilton’s “Erth Upon Erth” is a wordless howl, starting with a woman’s mouth in close-up and ending with her zipped into a body bag on a gurney.

Operas made just for film can inspire highly creative visuals. “Verballing” by David Coonan employs black-and-white animation. A female police officer, getting schooled in how to question a murder suspect, sings just one word—“Yeah,” repeated higher and higher. The instructions appear only in type, and as the tension mounts, the background dissolves so that her white face floats in a sea of darkness. In the hilarious “A Message for Marty (or `The Ring’)” by Conor Mitchell, two sisters call out an ex (who dumped one of them by text); the jittery cellphone picture, the tacky costumes, and the escalating fury, plus a snippet of Wagner, is opera extremism in modern dress. 

Most of the pieces are for women’s voices, exploring different timbres and expressivity. I was struck by the fierce intensity of mezzo Naomi Louisa O’Connell in Emma O’Halloran’s “The Wait,” and the simple, folk-like cadences of Benedict Schlepper-Connolly’s “Dust,” a lament for the natural world, poignantly sung by Michelle O’Rourke. And the insidiously floating and twisting soprano line of “Libris Solar,” sung by Claudia Boyle, made me want to hear something longer from composer Jennifer Walshe.

***

https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

Back in the early months of lockdown, director Kristin Marting, composer Kamala Sankaram, librettist Rob Handel and the arts center HERE experimented with digital opera in their 10-minute Zoom piece, “All Decisions Will Be Made by Consensus.” The team has further developed their technique with “Only You Will Recognize the Signal,” dubbed a “serial space opera,” which was released over seven weeks in live, 10-minute episodes and is now available as a 70-minute stream through Feb. 17, 2021; pay what you wish. “Signal” has background video, designed by David Bengali. The close-up images of six singers (a seventh is only heard), performing from separate locations, are occasionally superimposed on one another. Ms. Sankaram’s ingenious score, with its urgent, repetitive vocal motifs and electronic accompaniment, builds tension and sustains interest over this much longer, more sophisticated story line, while Mr. Handel’s text offers tragicomedy with a light touch.

On a luxury spacecraft, five travelers, immigrating to a distant planet, awaken prematurely from therapeutic hypothermia. Alone in their pods, they frantically relive the histories—which include one another—that they were trying to escape, as the ship’s computer, Bob (baritone Christopher Burchett ), works ineffectually to solve the problem. (Unlike the malevolent HAL of “2001: A Space Odyssey,” Bob has an unthreatening human presence and a soothing voice.) As we learn more about each of these troubled people, the jittery musical language mirrors their chaotic pasts and, it turns out, uncertain future. Mezzo Hai-Ting Chinn is splendid as Fennel, the central traveler; Paul An, Adrienne Danrich, Joy Jan Jones and Jorell Williams add layers of richness in solos and ensembles; and Joan La Barbara has an ethereal turn as another spaceship’s computer with some disturbing news. The show is dubbed “Season 1”; I look forward to “Season 2.”

***

On Site Opera’s live productions have geographical context—like “The Secret Gardener” in an actual garden. Its latest project, “The Beauty That Still Remains: Diaries in Song”($120 for the complete set), creates an emotional landscape for all of us confined to our homes. Three sepia-toned, handwritten diaries arrive in the mail. Each looks like a relic, dug out of an attic or an archive. You follow an internet link to an audio recording, and the first-person account on the pages becomes a haunting voice, the dead speaking from the distant past. 

The series, directed by Eric Einhorn, with pianist Howard Watkins as the sensitive accompanist, has its own dramatic arc. It begins with Leoš Janáček’s “The Diary of One Who Vanished,” a straightforward, fictional drama of a farm boy who falls in love with a Roma girl and leaves his family for her, sung in an English translation. The doodles in the diary match the plaintive youthfulness of Bernard Holcomb’s tenor; the buildup of anxiety in the first group of songs gives way to the seductive allure of Vanessa Cariddi’s mezzo, and a magical trio of background voices. 

In Dominick Argento’s “From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, ” we are in the real world: The writer’s musings, seen in her tiny, crabbed handwriting, are overlaid by the listener’s own knowledge of Woolf’s books, her life and her suicide. Argento’s eloquent settings turn the prose into poetry; Ms. Cariddi captures its intimacy and introspection, and its sense of random fragments that coalesce to form a whole. Finally, in Juliana Hall’s “A World Turned Upside Down,” taken from the diary of Anne Frank, the immortal teenager’s slender voice is shrouded by global catastrophe. It begins with the gleeful giggles of a 13-year-old, and Cristina Maria Castro’s soprano seems to grow up as the entries get more somber and the sense of claustrophobia and doom overtakes the young author.

—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).

A filmed production from the Los Angeles Opera spotlights the work of an 18th-century Black composer; the Boston Camerata offers a clumsy filmed staging of the Purcell classic.

By Heidi Waleson

Nov. 18, 2020 12:49 pm ET

It turns out that pandemic times offer opportunities for new discoveries. The Los Angeles Opera, having canceled its scheduled fall 2020 performances, instead mounted a small-scale, filmed production of “The Anonymous Lover” (“L’amant anonyme”)by the underappreciated 18th-century Black composer Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges. The show, streaming without charge through Nov. 29, neatly accomplishes several goals: work for members of LA Opera’s young artist program and its sidelined orchestra; a new staged opera experience for its audience; and a concrete response to the calls for racial justice that have swept arts organizations along with the rest of the country.

Bologne was born in Guadeloupe in 1745, the son of an aristocratic plantation owner and an enslaved woman. Sent to France at an early age to be educated, he quickly gained fame as a fencer, violinist, conductor and prolific composer. He met Haydn, and probably Mozart. Of his six operas, only “L’amant anonyme,” which had its premiere in 1780, is fully extant. An opéra comique with spoken dialogue and extended dance sections, its vivid music transcends a wafer-thin love plot. Léontine, a widow, has sworn off love after a bad marriage. Valcour, her closest friend and confidant, secretly loves her and has been anonymously courting her with help from her crafty servant, Ophémon. Naturally, everything works out in the end.

The backbone of the opera is a series of bravura arias for Léontine—think Fiordiligi in Mozart’s “Cosi fan tutte”—as the heroine gradually shifts her position from “Never again” to “Yes, I will.” Tiffany Townsend proved equal to the role’s challenges with a powerhouse soprano and expressive presence. Tenor Robert Stahley brought an ardent sweetness to Valcour; baritone Michael J. Hawk was a comical Ophémon. Léontine’s friend Dorothée is a spoken role; here, Alaysha Fox made a strong impression with an interpolated aria from an earlier Bologne opera, “Ernestine,” which, while weighty for this comedy, showed off her velvety soprano. Mezzo-soprano Gabriela Flores and countertenor Jacob Ingbar were charming as the uncomplicated young lovers Jeannette and Colin, whose wedding celebration supplies the stimulus for the denouement.

LA Opera devised some ingenious solutions for the current limitations on live performance. The show was produced at the Colburn School, across Grand Avenue from LA Opera’s usual home in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The orchestra, ably conducted by James Conlon, recorded its music in advance; the singers heard it through earpieces. With no audience, director Bruce A. Lemon Jr. could use every corner of the school’s raked concert hall for his staging. To keep appropriately distanced, the singers performed much of their music in separate areas of the hall, with screens behind them; artfully superimposed camera shots with exaggeratedly colorful lighting (lots of green, pink and purple) by Pablo Santiago made them appear to be together. Hana S. Kim’s set and projection designs (including some spooling background paisley) and Misty Ayres’s colorful costumes (flowered dresses for Léontine and Dorothée; patchwork for Ophémon) suggested a cozy, playful environment, a sort of limbo rather than an attempt at a realistic location. Updated English dialogue by Mr. Lemon and dramaturge Ariane Helou provided continuity.

The show gave full weight to the opera’s numerous lively dance numbers, performed on the stage by Andrea Beasom and Daniel Lindgren. Ms. Beasom’s charming choreography featured some witty physical commentary on the difficulties of remote partnering. (After motioning each other away, they donned masks and gloves for closer contact.) Mr. Lemon brought the whole cast onto the stage for the festive finale, a circling, distanced dance that promised connection in a time when that is hard to achieve.

On the opposite coast, the Boston Camerata devised a staged and filmed production of Purcell’s “Dido and Aeneas”. It is available for streaming ($10-$50) through Nov. 29.

Produced at the Longy School of Music of Bard College in Cambridge, Mass., the production, directed by Anne Azéma, with lighting and media by Peter Torpey, is an awkward combination of stage performance and film. The singing and playing take place inside the concert hall, without an audience, and the directing is minimal and rather clumsy. The singers sometimes appear in cutaway exterior shots, such as a garden, but the juxtaposition is confusing rather than evocative. The show’s principal issue, however, is recording. When the opera was streamed to a high-definition television and to high-end stereo speakers via a digital audio converter, the small instrumental ensemble of string quartet and harpsichord sounded aurally present, but the voices were remote and echoey, and the text was largely unintelligible. The problem was less severe in a laptop’s flatter audio environment.

As Dido, Tahanee Aluwihare displayed an attractive mezzo and acted the character with generalized unhappiness; tenor Jordan Weatherston Pitts sounded pretty rather than terrifying as the Sorcerer. Luke Scott was a solid Aeneas, and Camila Parias made a good showing as Belinda. Students from the Longy School filled out the cast and served as the (masked) chorus. The instrumental ensemble, led by Ms. Azéma, started out stiffly but became more rhythmically flexible as the opera progressed. Opera’s move to the digital world is clearly full of pitfalls. Projects like this one demonstrate how hard (and expensive) it is to do well.

—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).

Two original productions from the Royal Opera House, performed live before small audiences and viewable on the company’s website, offer a stirring reconnection to opera as it was.

By Heidi Waleson

Nov. 4, 2020 1:58 pm ET

Listen to this article7 minutes00:00 / 07:051x

Since government money subsidizes much of their activity, some opera houses in Europe were able to offer live performances this fall, with in-theater audiences small enough to conform to safety protocols. London’s Royal Opera House devised a series of programs that use minimal stage forces to protect the artists and crew. The series opened with two ingenious original productions. Each was performed once in the opera house for a live audience, filmed, and is now available to stream for a fee on the company’s website.

“4/4,” curated by Oliver Mears, ROH’s director of opera, juxtaposed four short dramatic vocal works of dizzying variety in a two-hour, intermission-free program designed by Antony McDonald (available through Nov. 16). The opener, Adele Thomas’s staging of Handel’s “Apollo and Daphne,” did not hold back in depicting the cantata’s scenario of attempted rape, pitting Jonathan McGovern’s aggressive Apollo (sporting a bright red codpiece and gloves) against Alexandra Lowe’s resistant Daphne. Christian Curnyn’s astute conducting traced the characters’ development and kept raising the threat level. It only subsided as Apollo sang his final trancelike aria of regret while sifting through a pile of laurel leaves. Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” is a far gentler piece. With her voluptuous soprano, Masabane Cecilia Rangwanasha brought urgency and dreamy sorrow to this recollection of a happier past. She wore a proper Southern matron’s attire with white gloves and pushed a baby carriage; when she arranged four towel dolls on a bench to enact a backyard family gathering, the moment felt especially sad. (Mr. McDonald directed; Patrick Milne conducted.)

Directed by Deborah Warner and conducted by Richard Hetherington, Benjamin Britten’s “Phaedra,” a 20th-century interpretation of the baroque solo cantata, kicked the evening into high dramatic gear. Mezzo Christine Rice, wearing a blue work shirt on a starkly lighted stage, ferociously plumbed the character’s adulterous passion for her stepson through paroxysms of guilt, lust and despair, and the slow, chilly denouément of her suicide. Then HK Gruber’s antic “Frankenstein!!” brought the evening to a demented conclusion. Tenor Allan Clayton, dressed like an aging rocker with chest-length hair and a T-shirt reading “End of Bedlam: The New Abnormal,” snarled, cooed and growled his way through a collection of sardonic children’s stories and comics (H.C. Artmann’s German rhymes were done in English translation). “Frankenstein!!,” featuring characters from John Wayne to assorted monsters, evokes Arnold Schoenberg crossed with Kurt Weill, and includes instruments like whirly tubes, kazoos, a penny whistle and a comb. Conducted by Edmund Whitehead and directed by Richard Jones, the show was played in front of a curtain with actor Dawn Woolongong scurrying to provide props. It was savage and hilarious. 

The second two-hour show, “New Dark Age,” is a double bill of contemporary works by female composers (available through Nov. 23). Hannah Kendall’s “The Knife of Dawn” (2016) depicts the Guyanese poet Martin Carter at the end of a month-long hunger strike during his political imprisonment in 1953. Tessa McWatt’s libretto incorporates several of Carter’s poems. The protagonist—starving and hallucinating the voices of his wife, his unborn child, and his political allies (performed by three unseen female singers)—wrestles over whether continuing to write would contribute more to the struggle for freedom than his death would. Directed by Ola Ince, baritone Peter Brathwaite gave a forceful, passionate performance; Vicki Mortimer’s prison set, Adam Silverman’s lighting, and Akhila Krishnan’s video (including a solar eclipse) created an appropriately gloomy environment. However, Ms. Kendall’s stentorian, unvaried vocal writing seemed devised to deliver text rather than speak for itself. The accompaniment, a string trio and a harp, provided a bit of contrast, but at nearly an hour in length, the piece felt relentless and endless. Jonathon Heyward conducted. 

The companion work, “A New Dark Age,” was much more successful. A 10-movement cycle, it artfully combined songs from Missy Mazzoli’s “Vespers for a New Dark Age” (2014) with pieces by Anna Thorvaldsdottir (2005 and 2016) and Anna Meredith (2004, 2010 and 2016). Featuring two sopranos, Nadine Benjamin and Anna Dennis; mezzo Susan Bickley; an eight-voice, unseen chorus; and a chamber orchestra—all conducted by Natalie Murray Beale—the three composers’ music meshed seamlessly. The themes, enhanced by Grant Gee’s video and Katie Mitchell’s direction, created a persuasive narrative about the soul’s survival in the time of Covid. 

The tight, sometimes jittery vocal harmonies and propulsive rhythms of Ms. Mazzoli’s songs speak of uncertainty and determination and match Matthew Zapruder’s texts—“Come on, come on, all you ghosts,” cries one. The centerpiece of “A New Dark Age” is Ms. Thorvaldsdottir’s astonishing “Ad Genua” (To the Knees), written as a modern response to Dieterich Buxtehude’s 1680 oratorio, “Membra Jesu Nostri.” Its ecstatic text by Gudrún Eva Mínervudóttir begins “I fall to my knees and ask forgiveness for lazy thoughts, unseemly hunger, and the wild, beautiful stampede of my fear”; the eight-voice SATB choir seems to envelop the pleading soprano soloist (Ms. Dennis) in a comforting haze. Ms. Meredith’s “Heal You,” with text by Philip Ridley, takes a simpler path; it is a plaintive, consoling trio. 

The three excellent soloists sat in distanced chairs; they faced the audience and wore masks when not singing. Mr. Gee’s video, projected above them, showed their journeys from their homes, through city streets and suburban neighborhoods, past signs about masks and social distancing, to the Covent Garden stage. Images were sometimes superimposed on each other: As one singer took a train and watched the landscape go by, another’s face grew huge outside its window and then pixelated into nothingness. Anxiety thus overlaid the ordinariness of daily life. In the final section, the filmed women took their seats, and to Ms. Meredith’s spare “Low Light,” for harpsichord and strings, melted away into the darkness. The artists had made it to the theater and performed. Would it happen again?

That anxiety remains. England, Italy, France, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland and Austria have now closed their theaters again in response to the recent surge in virus cases. The Bavarian State Opera managed to transmit the livestream of its new production of Walter Braunfels’s “The Birds” just under the wire; it is available on demand on the company’s website starting Nov. 5.

—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).

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

RECOMMENDED VIDEOS

• ‘Stay Home’ Robocalls Target Voters on Election Day
• Biden Focuses on Pennsylvania, Trump Hits Five Battleground States
• Joe Biden Speaks on Election Night as Vote Count Continues
• Biden Ahead 10% Nationally, but Lead Narrows in Key States, Poll Shows
• 2016 vs. 2020: The Evolution of Russian Meddling in U.S. Elections

WSJ MEMBER MESSAGE

100 Most Sustainably Managed Companies

Grow your capital for the greater good. Our 2020 rankings make it easy for you to find investments that align with your values.DISCOVERhttps://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-37/html/container.html

Director Yuval Sharon has repurposed Wagner’s ‘Götterdämmerung’ in an inventive, Covid-appropriate Michigan Theatre Opera production staged in a parking garage for an audience confined to their cars.

By Heidi Waleson

Oct. 19, 2020 4:50 pm ET

• Detroit

Leave it to director Yuval Sharon to come up with a thought-provoking, original way to do live opera for a live audience at a time when singing and gathering in large groups would normally be a recipe for Covid contagion. Back in 2015, Mr. Sharon, founder of The Industry, created “Hopscotch,” which was performed in 24 cars driving around Los Angeles; the last live opera I saw pre-pandemic was his outdoor “Sweet Land,” a fierce commentary on colonialism and erasure. Now artistic director of Michigan Opera Theatre, he has repurposed Wagner’s “Götterdämmerung” as a fable for our times.

Slimmed down to 65 minutes, sung in an English translation by Mr. Sharon, and performed in MOT’s parking garage for audience members in cars, “Twilight: Gods” manages to successfully evoke its host city, accentuate the opera’s message about cleansing a corrupt world, and offer a “Götterdämmerung” highlight reel featuring spectacular singers. Having soprano Christine Goerke (Brünnhilde) or bass Morris Robinson (Hagen) singing right outside your car window is an unusual privilege, to say the least.

The experience begins in the outdoor flat parking lot beside the Detroit Opera House, where a brief filmed prologue establishes the scene with poetry composed and spoken by Marsha Music, a Detroit writer and storyteller, who plays Erda, the opera’s fount of wisdom. Eight cars at a time are then guided into and through the multilevel parking structure next door. They stop for the staged scenes, most with live singers and instrumentalists. Car windows remain closed throughout; all sound is relayed via car radio, with each scene tuned to a different frequency.

Ms. Music’s text forms the connective tissue. Lively and colloquial, with diction that speaks to the moment (“gaslit gibberish,” “a grim, apocalyptic time,” and even “Come on baby, light that fire”), it distills Wagner’s complicated plot of greed, lust for power, betrayal and, finally, knowledge. Eliminating the human Gibichungs, it zeroes in on the gods, the Nibelungs, and their respective offspring. It’s still a lot to digest; “Ring” novices might find themselves confused.

The musical performances supply their own spin. On the first garage level, Catherine Martin, as Waltraute, recounts the problems in Valhalla accompanied by a sinewy solo cello, her despair naked without the usual big cushiony orchestra. The instrumentations of Edward Windels’s ingenious arrangements are apt. Bass clarinet, accordion and electric bass guitar make doubly sinister the murderous admonition of Alberich (Donnie Ray Albert) to his sleeping son Hagen (Mr. Robinson). Harp, marimba and vibraphone give the Rhinemaidens’ warning to Siegfried a suitably watery texture. (Vocal ensembles are tricky in this unconventional setup, and the handsome singing by Avery Boettcher, Olivia Johnson and Kaswanna Kanyinda felt a bit rhythmically stiff.) It was moving and novel to hear a lyric tenor, Sean Panikkar, give the hapless Siegfried’s death real pathos, since there was no need to bellow.

The breakout moment was Siegfried’s “Funeral March.” A hearse pulled into view, and the cars followed, lining up between rows of candles on the floor. The recorded Wagner music, arranged and performed by Lewis Pesacov, gradually took on a Motown beat and became a rollicking celebration, with the black-clad guides operating dancing colored lights. A more joyous vibe than what one experiences at that moment in the opera house, it set up the idea that death is not the end, but the beginning. Ms. Goerke’s ecstatic “Immolation Scene” on the open top deck, accompanied by the biggest band yet, carried that theme to its logical conclusion when she leaped into a Ford Mustang, the 10 millionth built, aka her horse, Grane, and drove off triumphantly. Audio of crackling fire represented the world-cleansing funeral pyre.

The production had numerous levels beyond the ones in the parking garage. Five of the eight singers, and Ms. Music, are people of color, appropriate for Detroit, a majority Black city; that the murdered Siegfried was one of them was surely not coincidence. The audience members, safely cocooned in cars, heard the pleas of singers and players outside in the symbolically virus-laden air, mediated through the occasionally staticky car radio. Alberich and Hagen’s dark corner seemed to harbor poisonous germs; on the roof, the scene of redemption, the fresh air seemed to blow them away. It wasn’t heavy-handed. The costumes, some of which came from Lyric Opera of Chicago’s “Ring,” did not shackle the show to any particular period, and the scenic, lighting and projection design by Jason H. Thompson and Kaitlyn Pietras also suggested rather than dictated. Things were kept simple but pithy: a bolt of blue cloth unrolled for the river; two burned-out cars on the roof.

Like “Hopscotch,” “Twilight: Gods” is a logistical feat. Twelve or 14 rotations of eight cars cycle through each of the four performances; scenes are played simultaneously. The company has also just added free digital screenings on Oct. 20 and 21 for a socially distanced audience inside the opera house. A co-production with Lyric Opera of Chicago, the show will be done there in April with a different text, written by the interdisciplinary artist Avery R. Young, reflecting not only a different city but, perhaps, a new time. Its ingenuity and mutability make “Twilight: Gods” an encouraging harbinger of opera’s future and our own.

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).

This GPS-enabled work of public art uses an app to create a unique sonic experience on your next stroll. 

By Heidi Waleson

Sept. 29, 2020 3:38 pm ET

New York 

After six months without live performance, plus the geographical claustrophobia imposed by barriers to travel, “Ellen Reid Soundwalk” offers both solace and liberation. Ms. Reid, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and sound designer, has mapped the 843 acres of Central Park with music, creating a GPS-enabled work of public art. It’s easy to use: You install the app, designed by Echoes.xzy, on your phone; download the walk; connect your headphones; and wander—the app then uses your location to trigger sound. 

The beauty of the piece is its nonprescriptiveness. There’s no right way to do it, no set path. Each experience is unique, depending on where you enter the park, the route you travel, whether you stop and rest or just keep going. You can spend 10 minutes or 10 hours exploring; the possibilities seem infinite.

One Saturday afternoon, I spent 90 minutes in the northern end of the park. During a slow saunter over the Great Hill in the park’s northwest corner, a soothing drone soon acquired an overlay of quick string figures; in the Conservatory Garden, bells, marimba, a flute ostinato and a choral vocalise seemed just right for the late afternoon autumnal light glinting through green and yellow leaves above the Burnett Fountain. There was even a poem, followed by a harp and flute interlude, as I left through the garden’s south gate; horns in a descending glissando emerged as I skirted the baseball fields.

A few days later, I wandered around the south end of the park. This time, I occasionally stopped and waited to hear some complete sections—a few minutes of Beethoven’s “Pastoral” symphony (along with Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday,” the only music not by Ms. Reid) playing just opposite his statue near the netting-shrouded Bandshell at the end of the Mall; a nine-minute choral sequence slowly unfolding in Strawberry Fields. 

Remarkably, there’s just over an hour of music. It is programmed into 25 macro cells that blanket the park. Each macro cell has several overlapping micro cells within it, creating a layering effect; connective material between cells creates seamless transitions between locations. Ms. Reid explained in a phone interview last week that she used the same themes for certain kinds of locations, such as water or open fields, but in different keys and instrumentations, so that areas are related, but not sonic copies of each other. Musicians from the New York Philharmonic, the lead commissioner of the project, recorded individual tracks in their homes, as did members of the Soundwalk Ensemble (the harmonized choral vocalises were created with the voice of one singer, Eliza Bagg); the quartet Poole and the Gang recorded the jazz tracks that are scattered through the park. 

Ms. Reid had been thinking about “Soundwalk” as a future project, but the abrupt halt of live performance in March gave her idea new meaning and urgency. With the commission from the New York Philharmonic and four other arts centers, she embarked on a five-month process of writing the music, mapping it and walking endlessly to test it, first in her Brooklyn neighborhood and then in the park.

“Soundwalk” can be a treasure hunt. I went looking for “When the World as You’ve Known It Doesn’t Exist,” which Ms. Reid wrote for Project 19, the Philharmonic’s women-only commissioning initiative; it had its premiere on Feb. 20. I found a snippet of the archival recording on the terrace overlooking Bethesda Fountain and the Lake, where its tense, anxious harmonies and spiraling, descending woodwinds played in ominous counterpoint to the formal, manicured landscape. (It is one of three archive performances embedded in “Soundwalk,” along with the “Pastoral” symphony and Ms. Reid’s “So Much on My Soul,” performed by the Young People’s Chorus of New York City.) “So Much on My Soul,” discovered in a crowded playground, also felt like a commentary: The lyrics, written by chorus members, gave an unsettled, personal dimension to the children’s seemingly untroubled games. 

“Soundwalk” also encourages serendipity. Venturing into the wooded Ramble, I found a joyous explosion of birdsong expressed in voices, woodwinds, harp and string ostinatos. A walk through the narrow ravine beside a stream toward the North Woods was accompanied by a pounding drum solo that suddenly opened up, along with the landscape, into a smooth jazz tune. And on a cloudy afternoon, overlooking the Reservoir, the water theme felt impossibly rich and grand, its open chords and brass choir slowly rising above the placid water, with the New York skyline seeming to mirror its ascent. “Soundwalk” gives beloved, familiar places a new dimension and a welcome chance to travel freely within them. 

Residents of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., can experience their own version of “Soundwalk” at the Saratoga Spa State Park, in the Vale of Springs/Karista Path area, until Nov. 1. Next spring, it will arrive at the Mann Center for the Performing Arts in Philadelphia, Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts in Vienna, Va., and the Britt Music and Arts Festival in Jacksonville, Ore. Why stop there?

—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).

Copyright ©2020 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved. 87990cbe856818d5eddac44c7b1cdeb8

Appeared in the September 30, 2020, print edition as ‘Scoring Central Park.’

American opera companies, including Houston Grand Opera, have begun to create original content for virtual viewing.

By Heidi Waleson

Sept. 22, 2020 2:47 pm ET

Live performance with audiences remains difficult for opera companies as long as Covid-19 infection rates remain too high to permit large indoor gatherings. In response, several American companies have embraced comprehensive digital solutions. Their challenge will be to create original content that is designed for the medium, not simply standard performance forms shoehorned into a different distribution channel.

Some tantalizing projects have been announced. Boston Lyric Opera’s operabox.tv will offer a commissioned eight-part episodic series, “Desert In,” developed by composer Ellen Reid (of the Pulitzer Prize-winning “p r i s m”) and director James Darrah. Planned for release in the spring, it will be built using a television-style writers’ room approach, with multiple librettists and composers. The Opera Philadelphia Channel plans cinematic productions of David T. Little’s “Soldier Songs,” starring baritone Johnathan McCullough, and Hans Werner Henze’s “El Cimarrón,” starring bass-baritone Sir Willard White, for later in the season. Coming up on Sept. 24, 25 and 26 is Opera Omaha’s “Miranda: A Virtual Steampunk Opera,” a VR opera experience with music by the ever-inventive Kamala Sankaram. Gamers owning sophisticated VR gear will have a viewing advantage; others will have to make do with YouTube. Several companies will be dropping opera music videos: LA Opera plans, among others, an animated adaptation of a suite from Du Yun’s one-act opera “Zolle” and an exploration of the death of Carmen by writer-director Lila Palmer and composer Tamar-kali. 

On Sept. 18, Houston Grand Opera launched HGO Digital, a partnership with Marquee TV, an on-demand streaming platform for arts and culture. Most of Marquee’s other content comes from European arts organizations. It is subscription based, but the HGO content will be free, and the programs, their creation underwritten by a $1 million gift, will be released twice a month. These include recitals and several original opera films, such as David T. Little’s delightfully eccentric “Vinkensport, or The Finch Opera” (Oct. 23) and a double bill of Mozart’s “The Impressario” and Lee Hoiby’s Julia Child opera, “Bon Appetit!” (Nov. 27).

HGO Digital’s debut program, a 40-minute recital by Tamara Wilson, part of the Live From the Cullen series, made for a disappointing start, however. Ms. Wilson’s powerful soprano is easy on the ears—creamy, voluptuous and seamlessly produced throughout her range. I first heard her in 2012 at HGO as a luminous Elisabeth in the five-act French version of Verdi’s “Don Carlos”; in spring 2019 she delivered an eloquent Desdemona in “Otello” at Canadian Opera Company. She was supposed to sing her first Isolde at the Santa Fe Opera this summer. But Ms. Wilson seemed stiff and uncomfortable in the more exposed and intimate recital format, especially without an audience to provide feedback. An odd background of purple light and some stagey makeup did her no favors either. 

She began with Purcell’s “Music for a while,” lightening her timbre appropriately, and then leaped from the 17th century into the 20th with “Sleep is supposed to be,” “The world feels dusty,” and “I felt a funeral in my brain” from Aaron Copland’s “Twelve Poems of Emily Dickinson.” All three got overly assertive, relentless readings, magnified by some clangorous piano playing from Patrick Summers, HGO’s artistic and music director. André Previn’s Dickinson song “As Imperceptibly as Grief” got a more buoyant reading. Four Amy Beach pieces supplied some novelty: They were prettily tuneful, especially the moody “Night.” After an overwrought performance of the final Beach song, “Dark Is the Night,” Ms. Wilson’s voice bloomed more comfortably in Strauss’s “Morgen,” in a bit of welcome sunlight. More Strauss would have been preferable to the subsequent Rossini group, “La promessa,” “L’invito” and “La danza.” Ms. Wilson delivered their smooth, bel canto lines but not their playfulness, though she tried, and Mr. Summers did his best to push her along. She gave the concluding “We’ll Meet Again,” by Ross Parker and Hughie Charles, a low-voice, cabaret croon but couldn’t communicate enough sincerity in that evergreen anthem of hope and resilience to break through the screen and the artifice of the production.