Batty Burlesques
*Double Header*/Movie Review:/ Little Miss Sunshine, /by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie
Faris, at the Trinity Theater through September 28^th /.
/Opera Review: /Die Fledermaus (The Bat), /by Johann Strauss, Jr., at
//San Francisco//'s War Memorial Hall, through October 13^th /.
Full disclosure: the original reason for combining these two titles was
simply that I happened to see them in the same week. And they were both
such fun that I wanted to let readers know about them while they were
still playing. But, in writing the column, I've found – strange to tell
– more than a coincidental connection between the two.
Strange because, on the face of it, two more dissimilar works would be
hard to imagine. The newly released indie flick (a likely Oscar
contender) follows a family of all-American losers on a VW jalopy jaunt
en route to a bush league juvenile beauty pageant. The 130-year-old
classic operetta peeks into the private lives of Viennese glitterati at
the height of Hapsburg grandeur.
Yet there's a thematic common denominator between the two: the vanity of
over-reaching and the redemptive value of letting go.
/Die Fledermaus/ is all about social and sexual one-upmanship. The title
character (Brian Leerhube) has been secretly thirsting for revenge ever
since his "friend," von Eisenstein (Wolfgang Brendel), abandoned him,
drunk, on a park bench in a bat costume after a masked ball. Tonight, at
the social event of the year – the grand fête of a Russian nobleman
(Gerald Thompson) – the Bat finally gets his chance for redress.
By rights, the target of this vendetta should be starting a brief jail
term tonight for slanging a cop. But the crafty Bat contrives to have
his nemesis, as well as Mrs. von Eisenstein (Christine Goerke), their
chamber maid (Jennifer Welch-Babbage) and even the prison warden (Eugene
Brancoveanu) all show up at the Russian party. There, incognito, they
flirt, jive and insult each other in ways that are sure to haunt them in
the cold light of the morning-after.
In /Little Miss Sunshine/'s Hoover family, the over-reaching takes on
more peculiarly American forms. Dad (Greg Kinnear) is a wannabe
self-improvement guru waiting upon an elusive franchise contract. Sonny
(Paul Dano) is an aspiring Air Force cadet whose readings in Neitzche
have launched him on a surly vow of silence. Grandpa (Alan Arkin) is a
clapped out hedonist bent on a last-ditch glut of porn and smack.
Brother-in-law (Steve Carell) is a defrocked professor fresh out of a
nuthouse after a failed gay romance and a suicide bid. The pre-pubescent
baby of the family (Abigail Breslin) longs to reign as a junior beauty
queen. Even Mom (Toni Collette) – the only sane adult of the bunch – is
a world-class striver; she toils full-time just to keep the rest of
these loonies from flying off the rails.
Both /Die Fledermaus/ and /Little Miss Sunshine/ climax in gala,
flamboyantly pretentious scenes designed to showcase the particular
genius of their creators – the Russian masked ball for "Waltz King"
Strauss and a kiddie beauty pageant for a pair of veteran MTV producers
like Dayton and Faris (a husband-and-wife duo who've never made a
feature film before).
Yet these /auteurs/ use all their technical mastery to spoof precisely
their own art forms and the underlying value systems that sustain them.
Strauss' grand ball scene is practically exhausting in its phony, forced
gaiety – an irony underscored by designer Wolfram Skalicki's set, which
neatly mirrors the rococo pomposity of the San Francisco Opera House.
And cutesy MTV tropes look all the more plastic and meretricious when
grafted onto 10-year-old beauty contestants.
So we instinctively cheer as our protagonists overthrow prescribed norms
– when the von Eisensteins and their jailer reconcile in prison, or when
the adult Hoovers all take to the stage to fend off the outraged pageant
organizers while their own little kewpie gyrates her way through the
raunchy dance routine that Grandpa's choreographed for her.
The performances in /Little Miss Sunshine/ are all so spot-on and
winsome that it's hard to single out any one of them for special notice.
Rather, kudos are due to two behind-the-scenes stars: cinematographer
Tim Suhrstedt and editor Pamela Martin.
As for /Die Fledermaus,/ Goerke stole the show. Her bittersweet /Kaffee
mit Schlag/ delivery is perfect for Viennese operetta (though she /does/
carry around an extra dollop of /Schlag /onstage)/. /Thompson, a
countertenor, plays the Russian prince with all the campy virtuosity of
a Liberace. Prison warden Brancoveanu and his jailer sidekick, Jason
Graae, bring a Buster Keatonish grace to the slapstick jail scenes at
the opening of Act III.
For all its seeming Gemultichkeit, Strauss' operetta shadows dark days
ahead for Hapsburg Vienna. High society had just been devastated by a
financial crash and the empire was suffering a string of military
defeats. Looming in the not-too-distant future were the dark insights of
pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and the paranoid Kampf of a
Viennese housepainter named Adolf Hitler.
No wonder Strauss' characters all seem so determined to bed each other
and drink themselves to oblivion. I wonder what forebodings future
cultural historians, with benefit of hindsight, might detect in /Little
Miss Sunshine/.
Still, for neophyte opera-goers, /Die Fledermaus/ is about as easy an
introduction as you're likely to find. Whether you know it or not, much
of the lightsome music is already familiar: you've heard it since
childhood as the soundtrack of many a TV cartoon. What's more, in the
San Francisco Opera version, the libretto is all sung in English with
subtitles (supertitles?) projected on a screen above the stage.
This came in handy for me, as I'd not seen /Die Fledermaus/ in over 40
years. Back in P.S. 188, New York , my sixth grade teacher, Mrs.
Warhaftig, chose it as our class play. What was she thinking? Yet
somehow, at the time, I managed to convince myself that it was all about
tea and cakes, rather than adultery and drunkenness. Until the truth was
explained to me by my classmate, Elliott Abrams, who sat next to me in
Assembly and had the .lewdest mind I'd ever encountered.
Elliott also regaled me with his own, original, ribald revised libretto
of Die Fledermaus which has ever since pre-empted the canonical version
for me. He has now become Bush's Deputy National Security Advisor in
charge of global "democracy promotion" (after having pled guilty to
lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra affair and only escaping jail by
presidential pardon). He is evidently as obscene as ever, although a
good deal less funny.
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