The Artist at Work: Meryl Streep’s “Theater of War”

In the summer of 2006, while The Devil Wears Prada was playing to packed movie houses across the country and Meryl Streep was enjoying the first true wave of her recent popularity that lasts to this day. It was a strange time as ever for her to appear in The Public Theater’s production of Bertolt Bercht’s epic pacifist play Mother Courage and Her Children in Central Park. Given that the play is considered a classic of German theatre, politically charged, lengthy and difficult, no less a marquee name than Ms. Streep could have compelled audiences to sit through this on a summer night when they could have been at an air-conditioned multiplex instead. Given the recent discussion and awards show presence of the delightful Streep for her current triumph in the otherwise undistinguished motion picture The Iron Lady, it’s an opportune time to see a true artist at work.

Adapted from German to English by the Pulitzer Prize and Tony Award-winning playwright Tony Kushner, the production assembles a dream team to bring Brecht’s vision to life. Not only is Streep the lead, whose presence guaranteed capacity crowds to a nearly four-hour pacifist play in the notorious New York summer, but the production is directed by George C. Wolfe. All three talents are tied in by Kushner’s seminal play and miniseries Angels in America, and their pedigree shows. Brecht isn’t exactly a big crowd draw like Steven Spielberg, but his name in the theatre is amongst the biggest, alongside Shakespeare, Beckett, Marlowe and Bizet. The mounting of the 2006 production was captured in the documentary Theater of War.

The documentary appears from the poster to be an intimate portrait of how Streep prepares for her role, one of the most notoriously difficult to perform on the stage. This is a role you grow into, one you earn, one in which you must have complete mastery of your craft to inhabit the role. To give you an idea of the challenge in playing Mother Courage, it’s the female equivalent of playing King Lear for male actors. What’s striking is that although we see her in rehearsal, in performance and in some interviews, and whenever she’s on stage in the production she carries the whole weight of it on her shoulders, she’s just one part of the enterprise. When asked about the collaborative and building process, she likens it to the plumbing and underlay of a building that has yet to be complete: you may want to show off how pristine it is and it will ultimately hold up the structure, but you don’t necessarily need to see the darn thing. Word.

Mother Courage and Her Children explores the psychology of the war profiteer from the inside-out, while making statements about the urge to battle in the modern era. This is what Brecht intended: to explore contemporary themes in artificial settings years removed from the present day, and drawing parallels and conclusions on his philosophical questions in the present day. Mother Courage travels through Germany during the Thirty Years’ War and makes her living selling necessities of life such as food and clothing from a covered cart. She takes along her three children – Eilif, Swiss Cheese and mute Kattrin – on her quest to profit from the war, and she welcomes it.

Brecht’s thesis, of course, is that there is no such thing as easy money and everyone must pay from the spoils of war. Indeed, Mother Courage loses all three of her children but she herself survives. It’s a long treatise, Kushner states, on how the world has nothing to offer the young and that life is a lesson in “how to eat shit and learning to pretend you like it”. This is a grim play. The reason it’s such a difficult role to play is that Mother Courage is almost never offstage for the entire three to four hours of the performance. She sings several songs about how to eat that figurative shit (the one that comes in every job or “out of your ass” as the play states), delivers long and vulgar speeches on survivalist instincts, and must somehow win the audience over before they bolt for the exit when they realize that Mother Courage and Miranda Priestly might have Ms. Streep in common, but the latter character has better accoutrements and a Park Avenue townhome.

And yet Theater of War so fully immerses you in the milieu of creating a production that the experience of creating art is never less than enthralling. There’s considerable discussion of Brecht’s history and anti-Nazi sentiments, which drove him out of Hitler’s Germany through Europe and Asia, and into the United States, where he was investigated by the House Un-American Activities for producing “radical” literature. This is truly how one learns to make a statement: not by throwing tantrums in dressing rooms, or the odious rider clauses certain “diva” singers allegedly have when they’re on tour, but by eating, living, breathing the playwright’s vision and making an artistic statement through a performance, not through one’s declaration of being an artist.

Theater of War is available to view on Netflix.

Road Show: Les Misérables

“You only get one cry in life, you’ve chosen well!” – Rip Torn to Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock, upon giving his character a promotion.

Original Broadway poster

Far too many people cry at too much trash disguised as “art”. The Blogger knows people who cry at Twilight, Britney Spears concerts and Jackie Collins novels. Too bad these people have such terrible taste. The Blogger has been known to cry at only one book, film and play in his life. These are, respectively, Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Tim Robbins’s Dead Man Walking, and the musical of Les Misérables, or “Les Mis”, as he and millions of others affectionately call it.

Dubbed “the world’s favourite musical”, Les Mis was first performed in France in 1980 and premiered in London’s West End in 1985. The original French score was performed by Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg, with an English language libretto produced by Herbert Kretzmer. Twenty-six years after its debut, the musical has yet to close and still plays eight performances a week. Such a feat for a long-running show is completely unheard of. The Broadway production, despite some initially mixed critical response, cleared the board at the 1987 Tony Awards and played for sixteen years in New York, with a successful revival less than three years after its closing. The libretto has been translated into 21 languages and performed over the last quarter-century in 38 countries, including Germany, South Korea, Chile, Japan, Argentina, the Netherlands, Israel, Sweden, Australia, Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Mexico, Hungary, Poland and Spain.

Colm Wilkinson, the original
Jean Valjean

Les Mis is no small production. The score demands two dozen major and featured parts. It has been greatly reduced from the original 1,400 page novel by Victor Hugo and yet performances may still run close to three hours. Set over several decades in post-revolutionary France, the main narrative thread concentrates on Jean Valjean, a man who served nineteen years in prison for stealing a loaf of bread for his starving family. This role is one of the most challenging in Broadway history and requires an operatic vocal mastery (it is often played by trained tenors). Upon release, Valjean is hounded by police inspector Javert, a man so relentless in pursuing Valjean over the decades that he’s essentially the world’s most inexhaustible parole officer. Valjean becomes a successful businessman who adopts Cosette, the impoverished daughter of the fragile prostitute Fantine. Fantine’s character is best known for singing “I Dreamed a Dream”, a now-iconic Broadway standard known popularly as Susan Boyle’s audition song for X Factor. Cosette was plucked from the brothel-owning Thenadier family, whose daughter Eponine grows up to fall in love with Marius, Cosette’s beloved. Marius’s school chums are at the forefront of the Paris Uprising of 1832, an insurrection at which thousands of rebellious, ill-equipped universe students who never held a gun in their lives were massacred. Through all this, fortunes are made and lost, the population starves and die, characters somehow survive and carry on through their hard lives together.

Lea Salonga as Fantine in the 2006 Broadway revival

Unlike most musicals, there are no dance numbers here. The musical has proven to be a draw for top musical talent over the decades, as roles have been performed by revered Broadway stars such as Colm Wilkinson, Patti LuPone, Alfie Boe and Lea Salonga. Other stars who have taken roles in various productions throughout the years and in the world include Matt Lucas, Deborah (formerly Debbie) Gibson, Daphne Rubin-Vega, Ruthie Henshall, Nick Jonas and Lea Michele. I personally know several people who each own several cast recordings produced over the last two and a half decades. In a British nationwide poll, the listeners of BBC Radio Two chose Les Mis as “The Nation’s Most Popular Musical”.

The German Opera Project: Wagner's Ring in San Francisco

Achtung, Ring nuts!

It would be remiss of the Blogger not to advise all of you who have been following my self-directed German Opera Project, which you can read here and here, that the San Francisco Opera’s production of Wagner’s giant economy sized magnum opus Der Ring das Nibelungen has commenced performances very recently.

Scheduled to run from May 29 to July 3, director Francesca Zambello’s staging of the lengthy opera will be presented in three cycles that will allow opera fans to see the Ring in the intended chronological order. These cycles will play from June 14 to 19, June 21 to 26, and June 28 to July 3. The production, said to cost $4.6 million, will play a full length of 17 hours per cycle. The early reviews have been nothing short of phenomenal, and without the nasty backlash that accompanied the troubled LA Opera production that lost millions last year.

Off to play tennis with F. Scott Fitgerald.

Following in the grand tradition of modernist readings of the play, this new production is visually styled to capture the looks of the twentieth century. The look can best be described as a cross of the Titanic and The Great Gatsby. In other words, nary a Viking helmet or a spear will be seen, although it will be less visually experimental than the LA Opera’s Cirque du Soleil-go-on-an-acid-trip milieu. The gods in Valhalla are dressed as if they are out to go for tennis with F. Scott Fitzgerald himself.

Rough day at the office.

The look is heavily industrial and has a heavy Art Deco slant, but as the chronology unfolds, the looks evolve as well. The giants are dressed like construction workers dangling on a scaffold over Manhattan. Brunnhilde (played by Nina Stemme, the famed Swedish soprano who has drawn raves for her performances) appears in full business gear when not dressed in her Aviator-inspired armour, and would have undoubtedly rocked a board meeting or two. The result would have made Alexander McQueen proud and would look only mildly out of place on Project Runway (although one has yet to see Heidi Klum embrace her Teutonic roots on the show by appearing in full Viking gear). Much has been made of Chereau’s centennial Bayreuth production as a critique on modern capitalism 30 years ago. The implications are considerably more explicit here, as the art direction strongly recalls the Eurythmics’ seminal “Sweet Dreams” video, with a touch of Ayn Rand’s living room for good measure. 

This is not to say that the production is catered only to dedicated Wagnerites and opera fans. The SF Opera has launched a number of initiatives in order to make the Ring Cycle more accessible to the public, including a public symposium, online interviews and previews, and even an online learning course. 

Modern Film Classics: Moulin Rouge!

There’s a famous anecdote of the first-ever performance of Ravel’s Bolero. This classical piece is comprised of the same syncopated rhythms, played over and over again, with increased ferocity and with gradually more instruments, before culminating in a fiery climax, after which the audience had heard the same few bars of music played repeatedly for fifteen minutes. At the end of the performance, an outraged audience member furiously told the composer, Ravel himself, “Sir, you are mad!” To this, the composer responded, “Madam, you have understood the piece!”

Today marks the tenth anniversary of the release of The Blogger’s all-time favourite film, Baz Luhrmann’s mercurial Moulin Rouge!

 

When it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival as the opening night film at a pull-out-all-the-stops premiere, the film was like no other film on the market. Boasting dizzying, hyperkinetic editing and soaring camerawork applied to the then-defunct musical film genre, Moulin Rouge! expanded Luhrmann’s dazzling aesthetic vision from previous works and applied it to a big-budget, go-for-broke artistic extravaganza. It was such a bold directorial statement that even its title was so emphatic that it required an exclamation point. Luhrmann didn’t set out to create a landmark, influential film when he embarked on the lengthy twelve-month shoot. Given that it was the third entry in his “Red Curtain” trilogy of films, based on the aesthetic of heightened theatricality applied to film, one should have expected that this film was loaded to excess. In other words, since it’s his magnum opus and signature piece, people were not prepared for their immediate reaction after they saw the film. I still have knock-down, angry debates with people who truly, madly, passionately despise this movie.

This is not to say that Luhrmann was self-indulgent for the sake of getting off on his own artistic fetishes. He knew that he had to obtain funding for the work and drew no less than Nicole Kidman, in one of her most luminous performances, to show off her heretofore unknown musical skills. In the central role, Ewan McGregor is all over this film, almost never off-screen and narrating it. With no original film score for his musical, Luhrmann decided to deconstruct some of the most popular songs of the previous three decades, stuff them into a soundboard, and remixed the hell out of them all. From Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” to Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” and the film’s smash “Lady Marmalade” cover, nothing is too good to ravish and put into the mix. The overall visceral reaction was nothing less than a period piece set in 1900 transported to 2000. One end of the millennium meets the other. The dates are not accidental.

A Gay Old Time: Vancouver Men's Chorus Spring Concert

The Artful Blogger is a sucker for a song and a dance, preferably together. He didn’t have a high school glee club to join (it must be an American thing) and he never had the gift of song, so he must live vicariously through others. In particular, he only wishes that there could have been a chorus like the Warblers on Glee to have joined.

This is why the Blogger is very much looking forward to the Vancouver Men’s Chorus upcoming series of spring concerts. “Duets: Two Fabulous!” is exactly as it sounds: a series of duets starring talented and vocally inclined Vancouver men. The concept of this year’s show is duets performed by the Chorus and another local vocal group known as Pandora’s Vox. For the Glee fan within, this is a bit like watching two hours of dream duets between New Directions and the Warblers.

The Chorus is a non-profit group that showcases local gay and gay-friendly musical talent. They host a fall concert and a Christmas show, in addition to numerous events such as Big Gay Sing, World AIDS Day, AIDS Walk, outreach events, and Singing Can Be A Drag. The Blogger attended last year’s fall drag concert, where the “Telephone” duet was first performed by two intrepid members of the Chorus with copious amounts of glitter and suitable amounts of theatricality. The Chorus includes many of the Blogger’s personal friends, who have taken turns slaughtering him at karaoke night and making him look like the sad movie star warbling drunkenly in Lost in Translation. (Mercifully, the Blogger will not be allowed to castrate songs in front of a paying audience, not even as Yoko Ono in drag.)

Verdi, Verdi Good

Although this blog is dedicated to the finer things in life, and opera is one of them, this writer finds it deliciously, comically ironic that arguably the most famous aria in La Traviata is a drinking song.

That is precisely the spirit of one of Verdi’s finest, most-beloved works, which is currently being staged by the Vancouver Opera Society. The so-called “drinking song” is a defiant celebration of one woman’s indefatigable spirit and refusal but to enjoy life in the moment, for “life is a folly” according to her worldview, without any cares for tomorrow. This is because she is one of those consumptive types in nineteenth century Paris who somehow remains full of voice and prone to fainting spells in overcrowded ballrooms. The play’s title literally means “the fallen woman”, and Violetta succeeds beautifully on this. In the opera’s first act, Violetta throws a lavish party to celebrate her recovery from a long illness, where she ends up ditching her current rich lover for a younger plaything. Fast-forward to several months later, when Violetta and the young man, Alfredo, have moved in together, akin to social suicide in those days. Like many a party girl no matter what the era, her reputation precedes her and threatens her social standing and future prospects. And since I mentioned that Violetta is consumptive, I wouldn’t spoil anything by saying that the play does not end well.

Comedy Tonight!

Everyone, it seems, loves Stephen Sondheim: even lawyers.

Here in Vancouver, the legal profession gathers once a year to stage a charity event show for two local non-profit arts groups, the Carousel Theatre for Young People and the Touchstone Theatre. This is the annual Lawyer Show. While productions in the past had a legal slant, such as Witness for the Prosecution and Inherit the Wind, the lawyers have expanded their repertoire in the last few years: in fact, they performed Shakespeare for the last two years and by all accounts, the lawyers have a good deal of fun staging it, whether they were reciting soliloquies or merely carrying spears. 

This year’s play will prove to be the most high-risk yet, as the lawyer are staging their first musical. Based on Sondheim’s musical, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum shall continue to satisfy every lawyer’s need to unshackle the more stringent conventions attached to the profession and give them a chance to burst into song. There’s an old joke that all lawyers are at some level really failed actors with a need to command a stage, so the leap for litigators to tread the boards has somehow always been natural and organic.

The illustrious cast includes a number of leading practitioners and up-and-coming legal superstars. It also includes at least two trained theatre professionals. The feisty redhead in the picture above is the writer’s good friend Amanda Kemshaw, a litigator and former dancer trained in the style of Martha Graham. Also look out for Danielle Lemon, a sole practitioner in intellectual property law whose vocal stylistics can be heard on her MySpace page.

The show opens with the now-immortal “Comedy Tonight”, and indeed comedy is what one will get in this show. Forum boasts all the elements of classic force including mistaken identity, improbably situations, and a good deal of door-slamming. Since farce actively encourages transgressive behaviour, it may be one of the few times when the lawyers let loose with a few double entendres in mixed company and get away with it. Needless to say, from the writer has heard from former cast members of previous shows, everyone has a grand time performing, even if the lawyers are opposing counsel who have faced off in court before! There’s also the required elaborate chase scene at the end, where everyone is somehow resolved through bizarre plot machinations, deus ex machine, or as Shakespeare himself once wrote, “I don’t know; it’s a mystery”.

This year’s Lawyer Show plays nightly from May 4 to May 7 at the Waterfront Theatre on Granville Island. Click here for ticket information. Take note that the $75 ticket also includes a $45 tax receipt, since it’s a charity event. Thursday's performance even has an oyster bar after the show!


Bring everyone to the Forum, including and especially opposing counsel and actors who may one day wonder if they too could suffer the fate of leaving the theatre to become lawyers.

Hypersmash

The German Opera Project: Go Big Or Go Home

Hyper Smash

As a child, I saw the classic Looney Tunes animated short “What’s Opera, Doc?” It was my first introduction to high culture, albeit via popular culture, as “Ride of the Valkyries” played throughout the short. In it, Bugs Bunny runs from Elmer Fudd by dressing as a fetching Nordic soprano with a horned Viking helmet and breastplate. (As I was informed at the time that the helmet was German or Norse, I assumed for years that everyone in Germany or Scandinavia wore them not only as a national costume, but also in daily life. That is another story.) The most telling line in the short was when Bugs “died” at the end and is carried off to Valhalla by Elmer. In the very last frame, while Elmer weeps, Bugs comes to life, turns to the camera and says, “Well what did you expect in an opera? A happy ending?”

It was not until I got to high school that I learned the proper reference to the opera. It was Wagner’s mammoth Ring Cycle, a piece that plays anywhere from 15 to 20 hours over four evenings and is considered a towering icon of Teutonic culture. Since I could not stomach the idea of even 1.5 to 2.0 minutes of solid opera, I could not fathom how people would willingly subject themselves and sacrifice their evenings to an event that was 100 times the size. It also did not help that for a long time, having lived overseas, my concept of opera was limited to Chinese opera, which consists of hysterical high-pitched caterwauling (to the untrained ear) punctuated randomly by a gong, and only then after interminable stretches. (Curiously, the cross-dressing by Bugs in the short and the convention of men assuming female roles in opera did not make me blink.)