On Saturday, June 20, 1998 at 12:00:00 AM UTC-7, Dylan and Kamala wrote:
> Well I'll say this for her, she certainly had the legs for it.
> Unfortunately Eilana Lappalainen, the titular earth-spirit in San
> Francisco's summer production of Lulu, had very little else to offer either
> musically or dramatically. The dramatic failure was not entirely her fault.
> Director Lotfi Mansouri had envisioned his heroine as a glib, happy-go-lucky
> golddigger, a figure out of musical comedy, Busby Berkely rather than Pabst.
> If there is one thing that is indispensable to an interpreter of Lulu, it is
> the ability to project hunger. This is a girl born on the streets, who
> learned at the age of twelve that sex was the only thing she had to trade
> for survival. For her, male desire is--literally--meat and drink.
> Lappalainen's corn-fed chorine had clearly never missed a meal in her life,
> and I do not mean this a snide comment on her excellent figure, but on her
> deeply American sense of complacency, of a kind of greed that comes not from
> having had nothing, but from having always had plenty and not seeing why one
> should not have even more. The character, in short, was repellent, a living
> contradiction of Berg's astonishingly perceptive and compassionate score.
> Berg was decades ahead of his time in understanding the societal trap that
> makes Lulu what she is, and in finding the outlines of a human individual in
> the rather stock temptress figure of Wedekind's plays. Berg's Lulu is not
> "femme eternelle" at all, but a mortal creature living in a trap that slowly
> closes, as she learns that the sex she sells, which she imagines gives her
> power over men, in fact makes her utterly dependent on their vision of her.
> The "one thing that belongs to her" that she wails against selling on the
> street in the final scene, was never her own property to begin with. What
> she does own, and cannot sell, is her humanity, her existence separate from
> the fantasies of desire she trades in. But it is this very quality that
> Mansouri's direction seems determined to erase, and Lappalainen's generic
> coquette follows his lead.
> I suppose it is not fair either to blame Lappalainen for being overwhelmed
> vocally by this very difficult role; she never should have been cast, and
> never would have been if today's body-obsessed culture had not made cup-size
> a more important criterion for the part than lung power. The part is a
> heavy one, but no heavier, surely, than Salome, and competent Salomes are
> not particularly rare. Lappalainen simply could not be heard for very much
> of the time, and even when the orchestra obligingly thinned out and dropped
> back to give her room for Lulu's lied, and conductor Stefan Lano reined his
> forces in even more, the soprano made no impression whatsoever, and this
> most electric moment of the drama played as drawing room comedy.
> But mention of Stefan Lano brings me to what was good about the production.
> The orchestra made a beautiful, beautiful case for the romaticism and
> lyricism of this score. Lano is clearly steeped in the music and had
> somehow brought the so-often-recalcitrant SFO orchestra into line. So
> finely and sensitively did Lanos shape his orchestral portrait of Lulu's
> inner life that if one closed one's eyes for a moment one could almost see
> another actress in the role, one that would make an air-breathing woman of
> Lulu rather than a cartoon. It was heartbreaking to hear this artist
> struggle against the nonsense that was going on onstage.
> Not all the performances were as bad as the lead's. First among them all,
> of course, was Von Stade's debut in the role of Grafin Geschwitz. My
> sister, a soprano, complained after the first act that the writing for the
> voice was ungrateful, and that no singer could have made it beautiful. At
> Von Stade's first notes in Act II, I caught my sister's eye and she nodded
> understanding: these are magnificently expressive lines, requiring only an
> interpreter who knows her business. Thank God, Von Stade has the last word
> in the opera, so that the final moments, in the hands of the Countess and
> Lanos in the pit, sounded like a valediction for a real Lulu rather than the
> stand-in we had been watching for three hours.
> Kristine Jepson was also musical and convincing as the Schoolboy, and
> Christopher Lincoln's background in Mozart and Rossini made him a
> persuasively lyrical Alwa even if he did sometimes sound strained and out of
> his depth (which made sense for the character, anyway). Tom Fox's
> Schon/Jack was a bit more problematic. He acted well, but his voice often
> spread and became indistinct in its bottom half, although oddly he sounded
> much more confident in the darker-colored music of Jack in the last scene.
> Franz Mazura, a famous Schon who appears on the Boulez recording, was
> Schigolch. I quite liked the painter, Robert Gambill, and David Okerlund
> gave a vigorous if appropriately unbeautiful reading of the Animal
> Trainer/Acrobat.
> Bob Mackie's splendiferous gowns, although they were a part of the
> triviality I disliked in the production, were undeniably fab, especially the
> last one, which was black and left one shoulder bare but had a sable trimmed
> hood and asymmetrical strings of rhinestones that traced all the soprano's
> lovely contours and my goodness, all the opera-glasses were just popping out
> like mushrooms! Some of the sets were great too, with these dinky little
> chairs in the second scene shaped like pink-and-green-and-ivory ivy leaves.
> But for some reason the set for the second act almost exactly recreated the
> set for Norma Desmond's mansion in Broadway's Sunset Boulevard which was
> pretty weird, especially when Lulu stood on the sweeping staircase holding a
> revolver and acting all defiant.
> At one point in the second act the Acrobat mocks Alwa for composing an opera
> about Lulu, "starring my fiancee's legs. No decent theatre will produce
> it." Well, that does not describe the opera Alban Berg wrote, but it's a
> pretty fair precis of the show I saw last night.
> Dylan
> =dbd=
> Wisst Ihr den Namen, den dies Raubtier fuehrt?
> Verehrtes Publikum -- hereinspaziert!
> - Wedekind

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"Dave's Faves: My Personal Favorite Recordings No. 91 (Berg)"