Richard, Meet Will
*From the Sublime to the Ridiculous*/Opera Review:/ Tristan and Isolde /by Richard Wagner at the //San
Francisco// Opera./
/Play Review:/ As You Like It /by William Shakespeare at CalShakes,
//Orinda//./
"Act One is two women walking around the stage. Act Two, two people
seated on a bench. The Third Act, a man keeps getting up and lying down
again."
That synopsis, from the official S.F. Opera program notes, pretty
accurately sums up the stage action in /Tristan and Isolde/. And yet
Wagner's masterpiece holds audiences rapt for its entire five-hour
length through its psychologically nuanced portrayal of a fore-doomed love.
Tristan (Thomas Moser) has conquered Ireland and won its young princess,
Isolde (Christine Brewer), as a trophy bride for his elderly uncle, King
Marke (Kristinn Sigmundsson) of Cornwall. On ship-board she plots to
kill her captor and herself, but her devoted sidekick (Jane Irwin)
secretly substitutes a love potion in lieu of the intended poison.
So, after draining the shared chalice, instead of dropping dead, the
title characters swoon in mutual rapture. The guilt-wracked lovers, only
able to meet under cover of night, come to hate the light – a dichotomy
that Wagner develops as a metaphor for the death-wish at the core of
romantic love.
The protagonists' photophobia, of course, provides a field day for
lighting designer Duane Schuler. And David Hockney's stage sets, with
their oppressive vanishing point perspective, underscore the story's
sense of inexorability.
For this potion is no casual date-rape aphrodisiac. As Wagner's
self-scripted libretto makes clear, the magic draught revokes
inhibitions – Tristan's sense of honor, Isolde's sense of shame -- that
had stymied their long-standing, but unavowed, passion.
Although first staged in 1865, a generation before Freud ever dreamt of
"superego" or "id," this opera fully anticipates the psychobabble of our
modern introspections. No wonder there's so little action and so much
vocal self-analysis.
Just as well, though. Constitutionally, Moser and Brewer are no spry
actors, but rather grand vocal instruments. And this score gives them so
much to work with, musically.
Wagner assigns each emotion a recurring musical signature phrase, or
/leitmotif/. He builds up psychological complexity by layering or
inter-cutting these /leitmotifs/, both in the vocal and orchestral
lines. No distinct arias or recitatives, no whistleable tunes, barely
even a consistent key signature in his scores; just a constantly
shifting chiaroscuro of emotions – revolutionary in an age when Verdi's
mellifluous melodramas dominated the opera stage.
Not every singer can muster the sustained intensity of a Wagnerian role.
Moser, for instance, occasionally founders under the weight of the heavy
orchestration. But Brewer more than holds her own. Her climactic
/Liebestod/ – a paean to the grandeur of obsessive passion – is truly
sublime.
Such sublimity, of course, only makes sense in the closed context of a
single, mutually-obsessed couple. If, like Shakespeare, you recognize
the commutative property of passion, then you can have a lot more fun
with the ridiculous side of romantic love.
/As You Like It/ starts out, like /Tristan and Isolde/, with a perfectly
straightforward mutual obsession: Rosalind (Susannah Schulman) and
Orlando (Stephen Barker Turner) have fallen in love-at-first-sight. But
she's the daughter of an exiled duke (L. Peter Callender) and he's the
younger brother of a jealous courtier (Hector Correa), so both have to
flee the ducal court for refuge in the forest.
Orlando finds refuge with the ousted duke and plasters all the forest
trees with clunky love poems to his inamorata. Rosalind's exile is more
complicated: she goes in drag, accompanied by her cousin Celia (Julie
Eccles), daughter of the usurping duke (who's also played by Carpenter).
For entertainment, the two women bring along their court jester (Dan Hiatt).
The exiles encounter forest denizens with romantic inclinations of their
own: a shepherdess (Domenique Lozano) falls for the jester, while a
local swain (Max Gordon Moore) has his heart set on a sylvan damsel
(Delia MacDougal). But she, in turn, becomes eneamored of Rosalind-in-drag.
About the only character without a love interest is the dyspeptic
courtier Jacques (Andy Murray) – a tree-hugging, animal-loving,
melancholic quibbler who is perfectly content to spend the rest of his
life in wilderness exile; in other words, a Democrat. He gets to recite
some of the choicest lines in Shakespeare, including the famous "seven
ages of man" speech.
Some other choice lines are set to gypsy-themed music by composer Gina
Leischman, who doesn't confine herself to Shakespeare's designated songs
but even scores some of the blank verse dialogue. This comes off less
hokey than it sounds, thanks to the understated efforts of a
violin-accordian-bass trio which gives the music a jazzy, vaguely
/klezmer/ undertone.
It all hangs together, as long as you don't dwell upon any of it too
long. Director Jonathan Moscone keeps it all moving with his brisk
pacing and hyperkinetic stage blocking. The net result is, in the words
of Celia, "wonderful past all whooping."
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