Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Opera Review: Salome

By Mark-Brian Sonna of MBS Productions

“UGH! ARGH! OH NO!” summarizes my feelings about Salome currently being presented by the Dallas Opera. This great opera, one of the best composed by Richard Strauss, using Oscar Wilde’s famous and controversial text should have left me breathless. Instead, I cringed a few times and giggled and chuckled along with the audience.

Outside of a couple of volume issues where singers got too soft, vocally and musically, the opera delivered. From smaller roles such as the slave played by Ava Pine to the great intensity of Robert Hayward’s Jokanaan (John the Baptist) to the emotional instability of Salome played by Mlada Kudley, the voices were impeccable and expressive. One need only close one’s eyes and listen to the thundering orchestra and the power of emotion behind the singing and you couldn’t help but be swept away by the grand emotion of it all. Unfortunately, this wasn’t a recording, it was a live stage show and did it misfire!

The blame for this sits squarely with the director John Lloyd Davies. I want to know what the hell he was thinking. The stage design was oddly abstract, which would have served the opera well, since an abstract set will cause you to focus on the performers and their acting. Unfortunately, though he has some good credentials in the stage design arena (and I must say some people hated this set, as for me it was OK), he has no sense of composition of the human body as it relates to the stage. He created multiple visuals that became unintentionally funny. When Herodias, played with much tempest by Judith Frost, accuses her husband of lusting after Salome, she juts out her arm, points her finger, and tilts her head back. Since she has a rather tall wig and a voluminous gown, it reminded me of Elsa Manchester in The Bride of Frankenstein. I along with the audience broke out in laughter.

The funniest/worst moment of stage business for me was the serving of Jokanaan’s head on a silver platter. This moment that should be horrifying was so poorly handled my jaw dropped. We know Jokanaan is in a cistern, and we see the executioner go down to kill him. What I didn’t expect is that his head would “rise up” through the hole with the tray balanced on one hand as if the executioner were serving coffee at the Mansion. This performer knows how to balance a tray! When the tray is lifted off his hand, he sinks his hand down into the hole with a bit of a flourish. Here’s some advice: if you must have a lopped off head rising out of the floor it would be best to have the performer hold two sides of the tray with tight fists, not have the five finger tray balancing method employed in finer restaurants!

The climactic "Dance of the Seven Veils" was a disaster. Candace Evans who so brilliantly choreographed and directed The Merry Widow missed the mark on this one. She was saddled by a non-dancer as Salome. I had this happen to me when I had to do the choreography back in 1982. What to do? I took the advice from Busby Berkley: get everyone dancing around the non-dancer so much you don’t even notice the lead isn’t dancing. Ms. Evans attempted to aid her Salome by having a small group of sexy shirtless male dancers. But they moved too slowly! The music was complex with an underlying syncopated rhythm and all we got for the most part was adagio movement. She brought a series of mirrors on the back of the dancers, literally, yet quickly ran out of creative ways to use them. The music for this prolonged dance sequence is made up of exquisite instrumentation with a stunning percussive quality. This opera is composed by Richard Strauss! No other composer could have delivered a more sublime piece of dance music, yet the whole thing was a fiasco of bad poses that went on and on and on…and on. There was no whipping up into an orgiastic fury. She’s supposed to seduce her father to the point he has an orgasm by just watching her! Peeling a hard boiled egg would have been more exciting.

Could Herod being played by Allan Glassman be more fey? A swishing Herod doesn’t work. He is a sexual carnivore, who is married to his brother’s wife and lusts after his own daughter. He also goes mad seeing visions of black birds. To clue us in, he actually flaps his black cape, and twirls in it at one point. Yes, he didn’t just turn, he twirled it! He was hardly a bastion of masculinity, let alone a voracious heterosexual predator. Again, where was the director in all of this? Couldn’t he tell it was just plain wrong???

Peter J. Hall’s costumes had one major flaw in it that didn’t aid the production and hurt it. While he set the costuming in the 1910s, which kind of worked, he first dressed Salome in white, which is correct, but later in the show after her dance, by grievous mistake, he dressed her in orange. Her orange Klimt-inspired gown is gorgeous, but part of the horror of the show is watching Salome make love to Jokanaan’s head. In every production I’ve seen from Fort Worth to Broadway she ends up in white, and by making love to the head she covers herself in the dripping blood making her a gruesome spectacle of insanity. Think of the movie Carrie in which Sissy Spacek is covered in blood and the gruesome image presented. Salome introduced this image to the world’s consciousness. Perhaps they thought the audience couldn’t handle that much blood? Come on! It’s not like we all don’t know the story. You are supposed to be repulsed by Salome, and the visual demanded by the script requires it!

I finally got so tired of looking at the absurdity being played out on stage I began to close my eyes for a minute or two at a time to just listen to the opera. Boy, did it sound great! But when I’d open my eyes back up it was such a disaster visually. If you want to hear this score go see it, but look away. Otherwise, you might end up laughing with the audience. And this is definitely not supposed to be a comedy!

Purchase tickets online or by calling 214-443-1000.

Pegasus News content partner - MBS Productions

Related stories

• Week-in-view: Won’t you be ours? (Feb. 7, 2008)

See more stories in:

• Arts > Fine Arts > Opera