The Bigger Picture
Spring Revels: BAM Opera Festival and The Open Program
by Bob Moses
Spring blossomed as the first BAM Opera Festival, curated by William Christie and performed by his Les Arts Florissants , concluded. From the religious and political anxieties played out in the opening night's Actéon (1689) and Dido and Aeneas (1685), the Festival burst into vernal revelry at the gala presentation of Henry Purcell's The Fairy Queen (1692). While this enormous production, imported from the Glyndebourne Festival Opera, and directed by Jonathan Kent, provided an impressive view of regal Restoration entertainment, smaller events such as Baroque Cabarets and evenings of songs and duets filled in the details of Purcell's canon.
An adaptation of Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, The Fairy Queen amplifies the text's magic, mischief and romance with a near-vaudeville parade of song, dance and theater. Belonging to the short-lived form of Restoration entertainments known as "semi-opera," the play alternates with masque-like episodes of dance and song reflecting the narrative - or simply providing colorful opportunities for dazzling set pieces and broad comedy. In this sumptuous, yet irreverent, production, those included a survey of the seasons, a remarkable visit by Phoebus, the sun god, a fig-leafed Adam and Eve, periodic slapstick by Bottom (the delightful Desmond Barrit) and his fellow players, and a bunny-suited carnal chorus doing what spring bunnies do. The play's romantic mishaps also framed more somber moments, including the aria "O Let Me Weep," that earned Emmanuelle de Negri a burst of applause. The night concluded with Maestro Christie called to the stage in white tie and bunny-costume trousers. He led the audience in a reprise of the last number as shiny hearts fell from the ceiling. A spectacle worthy of the ribald Restoration court.
The Fairy Queen
The exuberant inclusion of the audience at the end of the performance was another echo of masque. Masque was an antiquated form by Purcell's time; Bottom and his men bumbling through Pyramus and Thisbe in The Fairy Queen satirizes the masques that honored local nobility in days passed. But a taste for music and dance combined with theater perhaps acquired from Lully's court entertainments and ballets for Louis XIV, yet not quite the fully-sung opera current in Italy, resulted in the semi-opera compromise in England. There was no compromise in the staging or performance of this semi-opera.
The night after The Fairy Queen's premiere, a more intimate, Baroque Cabaret performance of Purcell's The Tempest in BAM's Cafe let the audience experience at close hand the singing and playing of a small ensemble drawn from Les Arts Florissant. The vocal trio was Lucy Crowe, who managed a remarkable "Thrice Happy Lovers" while hanging in mid-air; Andrew Foster-Williams, who had multiple roles in Fairy Queen including a humorous village-parson-like Hymen; and the apparently indefatigable tenor Ed Lyon, who we had seen as Actéon, and as Adam and Secresy in Fairy Queen. (When we spoke to Lyon after the Cabaret performance, he asked, "Do you have Ed Lyon fatigue yet?" Decidedly not.) The evening was a refreshingly casual exchange between the performers and audience. Jonathan Cohen, who led the band from the harpsichord and organ, brought the group back for an encore and reprised an earlier song on harpsichord because he wanted to see what it sounded like.
As we had just attended to the singing and playing while at a table with wine and food, we asked Cohen what the average guy at a tavern in Restoration England would be listening to. Drinking songs, hurdy-gurdy and pipes, perhaps catches, Cohen replied. Catches, though requiring a precise polyphony in multiple parts, often moved beyond bawdy to the downright filthy. Ah, spring…
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The next week, music, theater and dance found another expression in a radically different context. Andre Gregory and Mikhail Baryshnikov hosted a performance of I Am America at Baryshnikov's performance space. The performance by the Open Program at the Workshop of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards marshaled theater, music and dance to set Allen Ginsberg's incantatory, inflammatory poetry with southern American spirituals and original songs. The Open Program's international company located Ginsberg's fierce rejection of the media and commercialism that feed American complacency while recalling distant echoes of the dark, mystical spirituality that still lives in our national unconscious.
I Am America
As directed by Mario Biagini, the young, vibrant cast (anchored by the statuesque Marina Gregory, who seemed to shoulder the mantle of embodying American history and spirit) mastered a daunting amount of text, music and emotions. Words flowed in set pieces sparked by interactions between subsets of the company; the entire group periodically formed choruses that built call-and-response into ecstatic dance/ritual. Grotowski writes of removing barriers between the actor and the spectator, and these "do-ers" upheld that goal, first mingling around the loft space and then moving through the crossroads space formed by the sold-out audience, holding a gaze here, addressing audience members directly there.
After the performance, Andre Gregory, Grotowski's close friend and colleague, gave a warm postscript that was a passionate call for support for the Open Program's work and for the small companies whose daily practice and commitment keep alive emotionally and physically challenging theater work.
The Open Program will present I Am America at Saint Mark's Church In-The-Bowery at 131 East 10th Street on Wednesday April 14 at 8pm..
Fairy Queen Photos
Top: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Insert: Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
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