Gary Halvorson and Willy Decker | La Traviata / 2012 [HD-live broadcast]

 count down

by Douglas Messerli

 

Giuseppe Verdi (music), Francesco Maria Piave (libretto, after the play La dame aux camellias, by Alexandre Dumas fils) Willy Decker (stage director), Gary Halvorson (film director) / 2012 [Metropolitan Opera HD-live broadcast]

 

In this Willy Decker / Wolfgang Gussman production of Verdi’s standard, there is no consumptive coughing, no overdressed man and women attending the red-plumaged Violetta. Bringing the story into a more contemporary period, the director and designer have established from the outset—through the presence of a gigantic, surrealist-like clock, that the consumptive courtesan’s time is short. The entire set, in fact, appears as a giant waiting room with a long, curving cement-like embankment and an elliptical mezzanine where the choruses, a bit like observing doctors, can look down upon the theater of operation, Violetta’s “apartment,” wherein she plays out the short life she has yet to live.

     In some respects, this expressionistic set overstates everything, and certainly does not allow any dramatic tension about the inevitability of the plot. But it does free up the characters to symbolically enact a ritual which, after all, is not about story in the first place, but centered on the intense musical relationships of the three major characters: Violetta (Natalie Dessay), Alfredo (Matthew Polenzani), and his father Giorgio (Dimitri Hvorostovsky).

     Dessay, a trained actress, begins the opera as a performer about to go on stage, the way many have described Judy Garland offstage just before her entry, her small frame suddenly rising into a figure slightly larger than life. Violetta, having recovered from a recent consumptive attack, is weak, not at all sure she might be able to attend the party she is throwing that night. But bit by bit she pulls together, transforming herself into the party girl in short red dress her guests—men and women all dressed in black and white suits—have come to expect. This “bacchanal,” however, is closer to a mined performance of Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge than it is to Verdi’s original salon party. The champagne they drink is from empty glasses, the camellia obviously a silk flower. Dessay has not only to sing of “Sempre libera degg’io,” but, raised and lowered, on a red couch, must balance herself and dance upon the prop. She is, in short, less a consumptive woman confined to a couch than a jumping, singing acrobat. And any joys she may have in her party-life seem those that come from a successful theatrical performance than a lust for life. If Dessay was contrite, during the intermission, for having missed one of her high notes, it was easy for her appreciative audience to forgive her given her otherwise beautiful singing during her energetic apologia to the “good life.”

     It is little wonder that we find her, in the second act, having capitulated, escaping with Alfredo to the country. In the flower laden landscape of Alfredo’s world, Violetta becomes almost young again, wrapped in a flower-laden housecoat, playing hide-and-seek among the flower-covered couches. Indeed, she becomes one with the couches, becomes herself something and someone other than her former self. In this production it is immediately apparent why Violetta has given up her Parisian life; even the dreadful clock, ticking down the hours left to her, is half-covered in the same pattern, and the elliptical has become a kind of garden. The snake creeps into this paradisiacal world with her servant’s revelation that Violetta is selling her Paris belongings to support her country life. Alfred is determined to rectify the situation, rushing off to Paris, allowing the more horrific Satan, Alfredo’s bourgeois father Giorgio, time to destroy her momentary joy in life.

    For Giorgio, Violetta is, at first, nothing more than a selfish courtesan out to steal his son’s money and affections. Gradually, however, when that vision proves difficult to sustain, he employs the usual tricks of men who cannot escape the petty limitations of a societally controlled life: his beautiful daughter will lose her fiancé if Alberto does not return home. Crueler yet, Giorgio tells Violetta of her own destiny, her loss of beauty and betrayal, perhaps, by Alfredo himself. As Violetta notes, the punishment for her libertine lifestyle comes not from God but from man. Even Giorgio, however, finally comes to recognize Violetta’s sacrifice, singing in a beautiful aria (Hvorostovsky at the top of his form) of her love and generosity.

     So pure is Violetta’s love that she agrees, most reluctantly, to give up Alfredo and return to Paris, knowing now that her fate will be an early death. Accepting an invitation to her friend Flora’s costume ball, she pretends to take up once more with her former protector Baron Bouphol.

     While in Verdi’s original, the costume ball was replete with gypsies and bullfighters, the new Met version has mixed these with costumed performers from the partygoers, along with a male dressed as Violetta in mockery of her return to their world. If the whole scene is a kind of confusing mish-mash at times, it still makes more sense than the presence of these “types” at the grand ball, and their taunting tales only reiterate what we know, Violetta’s life as a grand courtesan is over. The clock itself is now transformed into a gambling table where Alfredo, who in revenge has rushed back to Paris, wins, tossing his winnings at and stuffing them into Violetta’s orifices in what is clearly a kind of capitalist rape. Even Giorgio, having followed his son to the party, is shocked by Alfredo’s behavior, but then propriety is at the heart of his torturous demands.

     The party-goers, now carnival celebrants, reenter this cold waiting room once again, this time with another women, clad in red dress, strapped to the clock. Violetta is no longer the life of the party; she has almost been drained of life.

     Sick and suffering, with just a few hours to live, she awaits the return of Alfredo who, having survived his duel with the Baron, has discovered the truth of Violetta’s abandonment and has written of her determination to see her once again. As in any grand opera, the lovers reunite to imagine the possibility of life as they once lived it, a reunification that the audience has known is impossible from the start. For a second, just before her death, the courtesan is relieved of all pain and age, until she faints away, both Alfredo and Giorgio left to face their own failures of faith in her love.

     Some of the subtlety of this opera may have been lost in the symbolic posturings of Decker’s and Gussman’s vision, but the overall dramatic impact, particularly in Dessay’s powerful performance, remains, and La Traviata seldom wavers in its musical splendor as this grand courtesan had in her past.

 

Los Angeles, March 15, 2012

Reprinted from Green Integer Blog (April 2012).

Mat Plendl | Revenge of the Wicked Witch / 1993

the wicked witch of the west gets a gig in las vegas

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mat Plendl (screenwriter and performer) Revenge of the Wicked Witch / 1993

 

Despite The Wizard of Oz’s truly iconic position as a gay classic, I have always felt a bit uncomfortable describing it as a LGBTQ pic. Yes, there is the cowardly “dandy-lion,” a girl who feels quite unhappy with her current identity, and an entire world of fairy pixies she dreams up as an alternative to her rural Kansas life. The witches of her real world represent strictures of authority which she would like to escape but has no way of doing so despite the love of her practical Auntie Em and uncle. In visiting the wonderful and colorful world of Oz, Dorothy has clearly entered a queer world of possibility. In the process she rediscovers her ability to think, her heart, and her courage, all the things a young possible lesbian girl might need to come to terms with herself. But…this is a world that is coded even beyond what one might describe as a 1939 coded film. It’s a truly wonderful fantasy that isn’t truly about sex—which I’d argue is at the heart of all LGBTQ films. But The Wizard of Oz is a coming-out story for anyone who feels compelled to be like everyone else in his or her community, straight or gay equally, which is why it is so totally appealing.

      But then there’s this wonderful 1993 deconstruction of the film by Mat Plendl, which deliciously and quite queerly explores the wickedness, several years before the far blander Broadway musical by Stephen Schwartz Wicked (2003), in a manner closer to the later gay comic entertainer Randy Rainbow.

      Plendl has reclaimed the original story, like a fractured fairy-tale, as an evil Grimm-like story in which the witch is no longer villain but a secret hero, desperate for the ruby slippers in order to prove herself to her family who have obviously disowned her for her wicked ways. She is the true lesbian hero to which the sweet Dorothy might only aspire to, witches long being associated in literary and cinematic presentations of lesbian behavior (read my essays on Bell, Book, and Candle of 1958 or Ulrike Ottinger’s Laocoön & Sons from 1975, and there are others).

      Through his wonderful performance addressed to plastic flamingos, a representation of the famed Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas, this dissatisfied bitchy witch wants the ruby slippers simply to get the powers from which she, the outsider, has so long been refused. (“The shoes sure are pretty. Pretty enough to kill for? I bet you’re just about do go tippy-toe down the yellow-brick road to break ‘em in.”)

       But since the story doesn’t really permit it, she sourly settles on forgiveness and a new act in Vegas where Plendl pelts out several witchlike songs, including Lorenz Hart’s and Richard Rodger’s “Bewitched, Bothered, and Bewildered,” Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen’s “That Old Black Magic,” and Carolyn Leigh and Moose Charlap’s “I’m Flying.”

      Plendl’s movie displays a true camp spirit that, in a sense, redeems the somewhat saccharine tale of Dorothy in dusty Kansas, to end by suggesting to Auntie Em “There’s no place like Vegas.”

     This version of The Wizard truly confirms its queerness and over-the-top excess.

 

Los Angeles, November 23, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2024).