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Volume 72, Issue 120,
Monday, April 2, 2007
Life & Arts School of Music has its cake -- and eats it, too Opera on France's infamous beheaded queen revels in the luxury of lavish performances, intricate plot lines by MONICA GRANGER
It was one of the first to fill the halls of the Edythe Bates Old Moores Opera Center with the sumptuous chords of award-winning composer John Corigliano, and now The Ghosts of Versailles returns with just as much pomp, circumstance and humor. The play is set more than 200 years after the French Revolution and the titular characters -- the ghosts of Marie Antoinette, or Antonia (played by Cassandra Black on Sunday and Cynthia Clayton Monday and Friday), King Louis XVI (Mitchell Galloway-Edgar), Pierre Beaumarchais, and their Court -- now inhabit the opera house of Versailles à la that other favorite, Phantom of the Opera. Unlike Webber's frightful Phantom, these specters fill eternity Beaumarchais' amusing theatrical farces, including gossip of Beaumarchais' courting Antonia (the joke is that they are dead and that earthly contracts like marriage also pass away). These farces are a welcome diversion from the seriousness of Ghost's revolutionary theme, and Thomas Forde's portrayal of Suleyman Pasha, a Turkish Ambassador, is as ridiculous, over-the-top and funny as it should be. Katherine Ciesinski, Moores School of Music faculty, cinches the hilarity with her farcical performance of Samira, a Turkish singer, while Dominique Røyem completes the mood, lending her dancing talent after a harem uproariously displays its belly-dancing non-talent. Boldly performed and sung by Jim Baxter, Beaumarchais sets out to please Antonia by writing an opera-within-an-opera, A Figaro for Antonia, which will change history via the talismanic powers of Antonia's necklace so that there is no French Revolution and Antonia lives to be with Beaumarchais in New England. Beaumarchais then introduces the characters in this opera-within-an-opera, most hailing from his own 18th century plays. Brian Shircliffe is as clever, unpretentious and affable in his performance of Figaro as one would expect from opera's favorite Lothario. In this introductory scene, Figaro was spectacularly funny and played spot-on. The fact that Shircliffe can sing while balancing on a ladder twenty feet in the air is just, well, cool. Figaro's wife Susanna (played by Sishel Claverie Sundays, Samantha Gill Monday and Friday) comes across as she should -- cute and as clever as her philandering husband -- but the character as written lacks depth until a prison scene sung ensemble, where Claverie's textured mezzo-soprano shined. Patrick Kelley-Alvarado believably performs a Count Almaviva jealous over his wife's infidelity; his wife Rosina, played by Rebecca Milek (Desiree Alejandro on Monday and Friday) sweetly renders the poignancy in her pleading to return her estranged husband. Unlike the pop melodies of Webber's Phantom, John Corigliano's music is filled with thematic nods to opera greats like Rossini's The Barber of Seville and Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, both of which originated from characters in Beaumarchais' plays. Ghosts even briefly carries a Wagnerian theme. Corigliano's distinctively modern, complex, yet non-classical music stands on its own next to these greats, to tell you something of the quality of Ghosts' musical score. Too bad William M. Hoffman's libretto — which, to its credit, shines best during the humorous interludes peppering Ghosts -- does not keep up. The UH orchestra, however, kept up brilliantly under the guidance of Peter Jacoby, music director for the Moores Opera Center, and Franz Anton Krager, director of orchestras. It also bears mentioning that the sets and costumes in Ghosts are extravagant and awe-inspiring of themselves. See The Ghosts of Versailles or prepare to have your own lack of culture haunt you for the rest of your life. Send comments to dcshobiz@mail.uh.edu |
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