Archives for May 2, 2007

I just got back from the opening night of Mark Morris’ Metropolitan Opera production of Orfeo ed Euridice. (Celebrity sighting: I sat behind Ned Rorem.) I’m still sorting out my complicated thoughts about the staging and don’t expect to be blogging about it until Monday, but I can definitely say that it ranks with The Coast of Utopia as the most important and consequential theatrical spectacle of the current season.
The provisional bottom line: you need to see it, and you only have three more chances, this Saturday afternoon and next Wednesday evening and Saturday afternoon. Go here for more information.
More anon….

Mark Morris’ Metropolitan Opera staging of Orfeo ed Euridice, which opens tonight, is his third crack at Gluck’s best-remembered opera. I reviewed the second one in the New York Daily News in 1996, at a time when I was still in the process of getting on Morris’ wavelength:

Mark Morris’ staging of Gluck’s “Orfeo ed Euridice,” which opened Thursday at the BAM Opera House, is not your usual operatic production–if only because nearly half the people in the cast are dancers.
Morris’ “Orfeo” puts the Mark Morris Dance Group together on stage with countertenor Michael Chance, sopranos Dana Hanchard and Christine Brandes, and Boston’s Handel & Haydn Chorus for a performance in which song and dance are blended into a single dramatic entity. Opera buffs with open minds will find this “Orfeo” imaginative and challenging; balletomanes who love Morris’ choreography will be in seventh heaven throughout. But does it really add up to a satisfying whole? I’m not so sure….
The members of the chorus, dressed in evening clothes, are placed on risers at opposite sides of the stage; the dancers, dressed in tunics, swirl around the soloists, illustrating and commenting on their plight. In the first act, the results were too busy–the presence of the chorus consistently pulled the eye away from the dancers–but no such problems marred the second act, for which Morris’ choreography was straightforward, fluid and entirely convincing. And his direction of the ascent from Hades was marvelous in its simplicity: he made Hanchard and Chance look as graceful as a ballerina and her cavalier.
But Morris’ treatment of Christine Brandes was jolting: he dressed her in a campy pair of wings and made her act like a bratty little boy. It was as if he’d painted an exquisite canvas, then punched a hole in it with his fist. And the last-act ballet–in which Morris, not for the first time, goes head to head with George Balanchine, who used the same music to unforgettable effect in “Chaconne”–looked raw and unfinished….
In the end, I found this “Orfeo” disappointing, full though it is of good things. It is only the greatly talented who can be greatly disappointing, and Morris is as talented as they come: I admire him more than any other choreographer of his generation. But he has too often proved unwilling to express powerful emotions in a fully committed way–his handling of Amor is a case in point–and for all his astonishing gifts, I once again came away from a Mark Morris premiere shaking my head and muttering to myself, “Get serious!”

Would I have felt the same way about it had I seen it again recently? Maybe, and maybe not. It’s no secret that I’ve changed my mind about some of my early opinions of Morris’ work, just as I think Morris himself has grown more emotionally forthright since then. On the other hand, I don’t like cutesy-pie camp any more now than I did in 1996–though I’ve also come to see that Morris’ use of camp is more expressively complicated than I originally thought.
In any case, tonight’s Orfeo is an altogether different kettle of fish, and I’m very eager indeed to see how Morris cooks it. Even when I don’t like what he does, I still think he’s the greatest choreographer of his generation, and I’d rather see his failures than most people’s successes.

“The whole study and culture of criticism, as I see it, is to gain entrance to vastly different worlds of the imagination, and to learn how to behave oneself while there; then to be gifted enough in expression to be able to give a vivacious account of what one has felt and thought while in those different worlds, whether one has ‘liked’ them or not.”
Neville Cardus, Autobiography