BLO Leaves Nothing to be Desired - Brittany Renee has taken on the hugely challenging role of Blanche.
IN: Reviews
BLO Leaves Nothing to be Desired
by Steve Landrigan
Patricia Racette is one of the finest actresses in opera. She inhabits her roles like few others and wrings every bit of theatrical power out of them. Hence, it is no surprise that she is an equally gifted director. She guided the Boston Lyric Opera’s production of Andre Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire, an opera based on the play by Tennessee Williams, with a masterful hand that frequently went for the emotional jugular.
On Thursday evening at Emerson’s Cutler Majestic Theater I heard the first of three performances. The run continues on Friday at 7:30 PM and Sunday at 3:00 PM. It is well worth a look, especially for those interested in how opera has been finding a new voice over the past three decades. With one exception, there are no hummable arias here. Instead, we have a new kind of opera that, as a friend said to me, is akin to a pointillist painting in music. It is genuinely exciting to encounter.
This co-production with the Opera Theater of St. Louis, where it premiered last June with a mostly different cast, is powerhouse evening of musical drama from its first moments when a video projection of a vintage streetcar whose destination sign reads “Desire” come barreling straight at the audience. The excitement that generates does not let up for the opera’s nearly three hours.
Told in three acts with only one intermission (though two would have been welcome), the production takes William’s gothic Southern tragedy to a whole new level of intensity. Previn was a hugely successful composer of film scores. His experience of using the words spoken by actors as a foundation for musical expression serves him well here. The Williams estate did not allow him to make alterations of the dialogue, so Previn was constrained to work with lines like “I have cold cuts in the ice box.”
He seems to embraced this restriction and puts the focus right back on the words. Interestingly, Previn does not seek out the inherent rhythms of the spoken words, but rather imposes his own sense of timing on them. This only further brings them to the fore. Except in one remarkable instance, Previn eschews melody. I found myself repeatedly following a pattern of notes expecting them to weave into a melodic line, only have them suddenly change course with a high-pitched note, often loud, interrupting the pattern. In many ways, the score is like an extended recitative. Such continuous parlando takes some getting used to.
A leitmotif that opens the production — a jangle of horns sounding somewhere between a railroad whistle and the screech of steel wheels in tracks — repeats whenever something unfortunate is about to happen. In this story, that is often. Its haunting tones persist through to the last notes of the score when — ever so quietly — it signals the end of this unhappy tale.
The one melodic episode comes quite near the end when the central character, Blanche DuBois, momentarily discards her illusions to which she has clung for years and confronts the sad story of her life. She sings a heart-rending aria“I can smell the sea air.” The music flows in a way it has not all evening as Blanche contemplates her death and the release it will bring. Lots of strings and gentle woodwinds replace the sometimes shrill and frequently earthy brass that dominate other scenes. The trombonists are kept busy here.
The opera was commissioned by the San Franciso Opera in 1995 and premiered three years later with Previn himself conducting and Renee Fleming singing Blanche. Its New Orleans setting gave him ample opportunity to use a blues-influenced musical idiom, with sinuous horns telling the contrasting tales of the faded belle, Blanche DuBois, and her hard-edged working-class brother-in-law, Stanley Kowalski. The play offers more than its share of high-octane emotional moments that opera thrives on, and here draped in Spanish moss.
Countless productions of the play have been staged since it opened on Broadway in 1947. It snagged a Pulitzer the following year. A 1951 film starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh earned accolades. Both it and the play were directed by Elia Kazan, a towering mid-20th-century presence. The challenge for Previn was to find something fresh to say musically.
Blanche appears unannounced at the home of her sister, Stella, in a low-rent district of New Orleans. Blanche has lost her family’s plantation, but not her sense of being a doyenne of the landed aristocracy.
Stella’s husband Stanley is a WWII army vet now working as a traveling salesman. Life’s a grind for him, but he earns enough to support Stella who is expecting their first child. He takes things as they are; illusions have no place in his world. His aggressive, hyper-male personality runs headlong into Blanche’s insistent efforts to live in her fantasies.
Blanche embodies the Old South, Stanley the new post-war industrial order. It is inevitable that they clash. Caught between them is Stella, the only genuinely sympathetic character in this family.
Brittany Renee has taken on the hugely challenging role of Blanche. She has to project the fraying personality of a steel magnolia with ugly secrets and no place to go while delivering a demanding part that just does not let up. She does so impressively. Renee has a mighty soprano voice and she needs everything it can give her to get this story told. Someone to watch.
She is matched every violence-prone inch of the way by baritone David Adam Moore. Every Stanley Kowalski in every production of this tale has the ghost of Marlon Brando hanging over him. But not here. Moore makes this Stanley Kowalski his own, whether he is lording over his wife Stella, or allowing himself a tender moment with her, he creates a fully realized character out of a script/libretto that could easily rendered as one-dimensional. He has a warm, rich voice which I look forward to hearing in a classic romantic roles sometime.
Angela Yam, as the long-suffering Stella who has the inner strength to put up with the failings in her husband and sister, stole my heart. Her repeated acts of kindness are mostly ignored by the self-obsessed Blanche and the dominating Stanley. Previn gives her a sweet moment early on where she sings, “I can hardly stand it when he is away for a night… when he’s away for a week I nearly go wild.” In a soaring soprano, she exposes both her vulnerability and passion for Stanley. Yam makes it profoundly memorable
Brenton Ryan, as he navigates between being Stanley’s poker-playing friend and Blanche’s love interest Harold Mitchell, is spot-on. His generous feelings towards Blanche get crushed when Stanley tells him about her years as a prostitute. His clear tenor carries his pain.
Boston opera stalwart Neil Ferreira is here as Steve, another one of Stanley’s buddies and the hen-pecked husband of Erica Brookhyser’s pitiable Eunice. Both roles are somewhat thankless, but they bring their characters vividly to life despite having little with which to work.
Juliette Kaoudi as the flower seller and Suowei Wu as the young collector make brief appearances and each offers earnest, well-sung interpretations, adding a texture to the tangled mess of the main characters.
Andrew Boyce designed a cramped two-room set that says everything that is needs to be known about how Stanley and Stella live. A spiral external stair to a wrought-iron balcony places the scene squarely in New Orleans. Eric Southern frequently splashed the set with swashes of color, and sometimes with the faces of the characters, making visual Blanche’s mental fragility. Amanda Gladu’s costume’s captured the personalities of those who wore them. And special kudos to projection designer Kylee Loera for putting the actual streetcar named Desire on stage in a brilliant coup de theatre.
Conductor Daniela Candillari held it all together, driving the orchestra with virtually no let-up. A tough job, but she did it well.
In the end, it is Patricia Racette who is to be praised for creating such a fresh production out of a story that is well known, even if the music is not. She helped her singers shape characters that wasted no time in using Previn’s edgy score to confront their anxieties. With her team, she has created a production that deserves to be seen widely and by many.
Stephen Landrigan is a former print journalist and concert presenter.
posted by Pimp My Voice at 11:30 AM
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