Ellen West’ and ‘Hansel and Gretel’ Reviews: Food’s Cruel Torment

At Opera Saratoga, the world premiere of Ricky Ian Gordon’s riveting one-act about a woman with an eating disorder, and a confused, puppet-heavy production of Humperdinck’s fairy-tale opera.

Keith Phares and Jennifer Zetlan in ‘Ellen West’ PHOTO: GARY DAVID GOLDJuly 8, 2019 2:42 pm ET

Saratoga Springs, N.Y.

Ricky Ian Gordon’s riveting one-act opera “Ellen West, ” recently given its world premiere by Opera Saratoga at the Spa Little Theater, depicts the savage struggle of a young woman whose eating disorder is a war to the death between her soul and her body. Through an unusually powerful fusion of music and poetry, the opera soars beyond the clinical details into the realm of existential dread, yet never loses sight of the suffering human being at its center. A co-commission with Beth Morrison Projects, “Ellen West” will come to New York City’s Prototype Festival in January 2020.

Frank Bidart’s long, eloquent poem “Ellen West” (1977) is based on the story of an actual patient (the name is a pseudonym) who was treated by the psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger at his Swiss clinic for a few months in 1921. She was deemed incurable and discharged; days later, she took her own life. In the poem, the dry, clinical notes of the psychiatrist alternate with the fictional thoughts and stories of a more recent version of Ellen, which are recounted with vivid language and arresting imagery. Mr. Gordon’s opera sets the full text of the poem to music. It has two singers—The Poet/Dr. Binswanger (baritone Keith Phares) and Ellen West (soprano Jennifer Zetlan)—and the focused, unshowy music embraces the fluid, conversational style of the poem, heightening Ellen’s emotions with song and building the dramatic arc of each episode and of the whole. There are no extraneous musical gestures, and a small ensemble of string quartet, bass and piano preserves the opera’s intimate, extremely personal quality.

Each episode has a distinct musical temperature. Ellen’s description of a couple feeding each other in a restaurant becomes a frenzy of disgust; later, you feel her go rigid with anguish as she stares longingly at a half-chewed orange section on the floor of a train. The most powerful episode is about Maria Callas, whose dramatic weight loss, Ellen insists, was about truth in art: “All she was trying to express was obliterated by her body, buried in flesh….How her soul, uncompromising, insatiable, must have loved eating the flesh from her bones, revealing this extraordinarily mercurial; fragile; masterly creature.” Fragments of “Tosca” echo in Mr. Gordon’s orchestration as Ellen describes seeing the diva sing that role on stage and channels the soprano in her own desperate need to escape from her body.

Ms. Zetlan’s tour de force Ellen commanded unwavering attention; she was unafraid to edge her soprano into harshness for the sake of intensity. Mr. Phares’s lyric baritone imbued the doctor’s seemingly dispassionate comments with humanity. He was also the Poet in a prologue, written for the opera by Mr. Bidart, that adds yet another layer to the story; it explains, among other things, that the original poem was an exorcism “of that thing within Frank that wants to leave the earth, and does not want to leave the earth.” Lidiya Yankovskaya was the sensitive conductor.

The simple, elegant set—a consulting room with a divan and a large window that provided a glimpse of the orchestra behind—was by Laura Jellinek.Josh Epstein’s dramatic lighting changed with each episode, suffusing the room with tints like brilliant green and fervent magenta; Kaye Voyce’s costumes included multiple iterations of Ellen’s plain smock—she put on a new one for each scene, and wore them all together when she left the clinic. For the most part, Emma Griffin’s capable direction made Ellen’s inner life visible. However, the actions of the two silent Orderlies (Nicholas Martorano and Penelope Kendros), who seemed to be projections of Ellen’s mind, were not always comprehensible.

***

Opera Saratoga’s production of Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Hansel and Gretel” (1893) suffered from confusion about scale. The orchestra, pared to chamber size and positioned downstage left, seemed determined to make as much noise as possible under the driving leadership of conductor Geoffrey McDonald. At moments when Humperdinck’s Wagnerian melodies—like the angelic vision at the end of Act II—needed to be lush and gorgeous, the musicians were regrettably raucous.

The orchestra was one of several competing elements in the production. The singers, positioned downstage right, performed basically concert-style, while a shadow puppet show, conceived and enacted by the artists of Manual Cinema, was in the center. This shadow puppetry operation, with overhead projectors and seven puppeteer-actors, was in full view, placed sideways to the audience, with the result projected onto a screen above the stage. Then there were the supertitles, since the opera was sung in the original German instead of in an English translation, as it often is. It was hard to decide where to look.

The shadow play, featuring cutouts (designed by Drew Dir and Lizi Breit) and live performers, had a charming, deliberately naïve quality. At its best, it heightened aspects of the opera like Gretel’s manic excitement and the scariness of the Witch. (Julia VanArsdale Miller, who created the masks, outdid herself with the Witch’s nose and chin.) The visual elements also animated the purely orchestral sections. Touches like the flapping of cherubs’ wings were endearing, and images of cities, rich people having a party, and cookies rolling down factory production lines were interesting if not entirely coherent.

The singers, relegated to their corner, tried to stand out. Some succeeded: As the Father, Justin Austin made his mellifluous baritone count; mezzo Whitney Robinson was an exuberantly nasty Witch, throwing herself into character with snarls and cackles; and soprano Joowon Chae was a sweet Gretel. Nicole Thomas (Hansel), Annie Chester (Mother), Rachel Mikol (Sandman) and Sydney Anderson (Dew Fairy) completed the cast.

—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).

‘Stonewall’ Review: Celebrating a Gay-Rights Milestone Onstage

Iain Bell’s new work at the New York City Opera only occasionally succeeds at evoking the spirit of rebellion.

Jordan Weatherston Pitts (center) with the company of New York City Opera’s ‘Stonewall.’ Photo: Sarah Shatz By Heidi Waleson July 2, 2019 1:27 pm ET

New York

Iain Bell’s opera “Stonewall,” presented by the New York City Opera, concluded its world premiere run on Friday, June 28, the 50th anniversary of the start of the uprising, sparked by a police raid, that marked the beginning of the modern gay-rights movement. In the Rose Theater lobby, operagoers took selfies with a pair of towering Empresses—in spike heels and “daytime” tiaras—from the Imperial Court of New York. Inside the theater, the ceiling lights glowed in Pride colors; Bob the Drag Queen, the winner of season 8 of “RuPaul’s Drag Race,” who had just performed at the Stonewall commemoration festivities downtown, warmed up the audience with some saucy comedy.

That ebullience only fitfully infused “Stonewall” the opera, a 75-minute pageant. Ten characters—too many—are dutifully introduced in the first 30-minute section: They included the butch lesbian; the Latino schoolteacher; the teen kicked out by his family; the African-American drag queen; the hustler who blackmails closeted men. Mark Campbell’s librettos allows each a quick personal history—think “A Chorus Line”—which reveal their experiences of being despised and marginalized. Mr. Bell’s mostly bland music supplies the occasional individuating touch, sometimes for better, as with tenor Jordan Weatherston Pitts, in full diva mode as the drag queen; and sometimes for worse, like Jessica Fishenfeld’s shrieking coloratura as she lists the conversion therapies forced on her character by her homophobic parents. Since representation was the order of the day, it was surprising that a trans man—Liz Bouk, who sings in an alto range—was cast as a trans woman. The characters are gradually woven into a recurring ensemble as they anticipate “Tonight” at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village, but the “West Side Story” reference implicit in the text and the music feels appropriated rather than original.

The opera’s liveliest section is the five minutes of pure gay abandon at Stonewall. Two catchy, period-style pop songs, written by Messrs. Bell and Campbell and recorded by vocalist Darlene Love, play from the jukebox as the patrons dance and lip-synch. However, once the police raid starts, chaos descends, punctuated by the percussive thwack of nightsticks. It is impossible to follow the action or the music until Maggie (the butch lesbian, sung by the forceful mezzo Lisa Chavez) stands up to the cops. Once she is dragged off, the musical energy starts to snowball. Ironically, in the riot’s most dramatic moments, yelling replaces singing, even drowning out the large orchestra (led by Carolyn Kuan). A brief morning-after coda, in which the characters contemplate the future in a hopeful chorale, also had a Leonard Bernstein flavor—“On the Town” and “Candide”—yet captured neither the innocence nor the dark satire of those models.

Tenor Andrew Bidlack (Andy, the homeless teen) and bass-baritone Joseph Beutel (Troy, the hustler) were among the cast’s stronger singers. Director Leonard Foglia, choreographer Richard Stafford and fight director Rick Sordelet skillfully deployed a 40-member ensemble of singers and supers in addition to the principals to create swirling stage pictures of dancing and rioting (sometimes together—the riot included a kick line), but the stagings of the introductory scene and the coda were as static as the corresponding music. Riccardo Hernandez designed the simple set of movable black walls with neon accents, illuminated (or not) by lighting designer Ken Billington; David C. Woolard’s costumes—the hustler’s satin hot pants; the trans woman’s white hippie-style maxidress; the drag queen’s pink frock and elbow-length gloves—helped conjure the period. “Stonewall” evoked some of the spirit of the rebellion, but with too much textual telling and not enough musical showing, it didn’t believably construct the tinder box of repressed anger that would explode in 1969, paving the way for life in 2019, in which gay people can marry, Pride is celebrated with parades, and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” is a mainstream phenomenon.

—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 Thought on the Oberlin Verdict and Race

One thing to note about the Gibson’s verdict, the Lorain County jury was apparently all white. Also, according to press reports, four black potential jurors were struck by the judge and the plaintiff’s attorneys. From a legal strategic prospective, why didn’t the College settle the case then and there?

But it is also interesting to note, as did one caller on a Cleveland call-in show, that the combined verdict in favor of a family of small-town white business owners is more than was received in settlement by the Central Park Five. There is no getting around how the issue of race poisons the record and circumstances. And that it is not at all to say that the Gibson family had racist motives in the incident. The long-held view in the College community that racial profiling had been employed over the years by store employees appears to be simply factually incorrect.

Opera Theatre of Saint Louis Review: Wrenching Drama and Vicious Satire

The world premiere of Terence Blanchard’s searing “Fire Shut Up In My Bones”; a remarkably modern production of Monteverdi’s “The Coronation of Poppea”; a generic take on Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”

Davóne Tines as Charles Blow in ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’ Photo: Eric Woolsey By Heidi Waleson June 25, 2019 2:43 pm ET

Webster Groves, Mo.

Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” now in its world premiere engagement at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, which commissioned it in partnership with Jazz St. Louis, demonstrates opera’s remarkable ability to get inside a character’s head. Like its source material, a searing memoir by the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, the opera goes deep, exploring the years of loneliness and confusion that resulted from a sexual assault by an older male cousin when Charles was 7 years old.

The poetic libretto by Kasi Lemmons jumps into the story with startling abruptness: The college-age Charles is speeding down a road, a gun at his side, ready to kill someone. The rest of the opera clearly plots the emotional journey to that moment: Throughout his childhood as the youngest of five brothers in a poor black family in Louisiana, he was always different (“a boy of peculiar grace”) and longed for his distracted mother’s love. Overwhelmed with guilt and uncertainty after the assault, the teenage Charles looks for help through baptism, sex with a girl, joining a college fraternity with brutal hazing rituals, and falling in love with a woman who leaves him. Only when he decides to kill his abuser—and then doesn’t—is he freed to accept himself. (The memoir explains that Mr. Blow is bisexual; the opera leaves the question open.)

Character layering deftly articulates this internal struggle. In Act I, the older Charles (the powerful Davóne Tines) shares the stage and sings with his child self, Char’es-Baby (treble Jeremy Denis). Destiny/Loneliness, sung by the remarkable Julia Bullock, is a voice in Charles’s head, tempting him to submit to his feelings of alienation and vengeance.

His environment is also richly drawn: There are the neighbors who sing the recurring barbershop-style ensemble, “Char’es-Baby, youngest of five…Such a big baby / What’s wrong with you?” and his hardworking mother, Billie (Karen Slack, a big-voiced soprano, prone to exaggeration), who threatens her philandering husband and his women with a gun, but gives Charles advice that he will finally heed: “Sometimes you gotta just leave it in the road.”

Mr. Blanchard’s attractive music is oddly lyrical and tonal for this turbulent story, more a cushion for Ms. Lemmons’s words than a voice in itself. The orchestra includes a jazz rhythm quartet, but its sound is peripheral rather than central, only appearing in occasional moments, such as the scene when Chester (Charles’s assailant, sung by Markel Reed) makes the child complicit in a theft of candy. Catchy, up-tempo numbers include a comic ensemble in a chicken-processing factory and the gospel-tinged church service. Arias like Charles’s “Tears from a walled-off place” recur, keeping his anguish at center stage. Yet it is Destiny/Loneliness’s music, with its seductive allure, that has the most impact.

The production, directed by James Robinson, with a simple set by Allen Moyer, costumes by James Schuette, projections by Greg Emetaz, and lighting by Christopher Akerlind, evokes the impoverished Louisiana town of Gibsland; five dancers, choreographed by Seán Curran, become, among other things, the confusing sexual images that visit Charles in his dreams. The assault is staged without physical contact, but the context makes clear that something bad happened. The large, excellent cast also included Chaz’men Williams-Ali, a charming rogue as Charles’s father, Spinner, and Rehanna Thelwell as Ruby, one of Spinner’s women. William Long conducted.

***

OTSL’s first-ever production of Monteverdi’s “The Coronation of Poppea” (1643) brought out the remarkable modernity of this opera, whose musical language, stripped of artifice, is direct and communicative and whose story is a vicious satire cloaked in beauty. Director Tim Albery’s production was staged in a tiled space that looked like a cross between an empty swimming pool and a morgue, with modern costumes; Hannah Clark was the designer. Mr. Albery’s trenchant English translation captured the savagery of what’s at stake as the Emperor Nerone and his mistress, Poppea, mow down all the obstacles in their path. As Nerone tells his tutor, the Stoic philosopher Seneca, “It’s the people who need to be subjected to the chains of reason, and not me. I am the Emperor.” (He later orders Seneca to commit suicide.)

The taut, focused staging matched the incisive musical direction from harpsichordist Nicholas Kok, leader of the eight-member period instrument band that played from the rear corners of the set, and the excellent diction of the singers. As Poppea, Emily Fons’s soprano oozed sensuality; as Ottavia, Nerone’s repudiated Empress, mezzo Sarah Mesko sang through her teeth in barely repressed fury; and tenor Brenton Ryan gave Nerone a dangerous edge. (In a nontraditional choice, Nerone stabs Ottavia to death instead of merely exiling her; clearly no one is safe in his orbit, not even Poppea.) David Pittsinger sang Seneca with deep-voiced authority; Devon Guthrie’s purity of tone was just right for the innocent Drusilla; countertenor Tom Scott-Cowell brought a frantic terror to Ottone, who tries and fails to murder Poppea on Ottavia’s orders. Notable supporting singers included tenor Matthew Cairns as Liberto, the pistol-packing guard who reluctantly brings Nerone’s order to Seneca, and mezzo Michaela Wolz as the exuberant Amore, who bets on Poppea’s triumph and wins.

***

Verdi’s “Rigoletto” (1851) got a light updating in Bruno Ravella’s production. It was set in Paris in the 1880s, instead of Renaissance Mantua, so there were can-can dancers in a cabaret instead of the Duke’s dissolute court (costume designer Mark Bouman went to town on their flouncy costumes and the sinister top hats and capes of the Duke’s followers). As Rigoletto, the Duke’s jester, Roland Wood used a ventriloquist’s dummy for his nasty jibes, supposedly to separate his performance persona from his secret life as the loving and overprotective father of Gilda. He was also given a large scarlet birthmark on his face instead of a hunchback. However, Mr. Wood didn’t vocally demonstrate this duality over the course of the evening. He pummeled the music, making his large baritone seem oversized for the space. Even as Rigoletto begged the courtiers to return his stolen daughter, there was no real pathos to his performance.

Despite the opera’s updating and the idiomatic English translation by James Fenton, Mr. Ravella’s directing, apart from a few dramatic flourishes, was generic; so was Roberto Kalb’s pedestrian conducting. Tenor Joshua Wheeker was, for the most part, a mildly caddish Duke; So Young Park, a prettily innocent Gilda. Two potent low voices—Nicholas Newton’s Count Monterone and Christian Zaremba’s Sparafucile—supplied menace. And in a brief #MeToo moment, Lindsay Ammann’s Maddalena recoiled from the Duke’s brutal advances. Then it was over—she let him seduce her in the opera’s famous Act III quartet, the strongest musical performance of the evening.

—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).