Raving About Tolstoy

 

Corey Bryant as Balaga

Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812

San Jose Playhouse

April 29, 2023

To quote that other highly unusual 2010s musical, it would have been great to be “in the room” when someone came up with the idea for Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812. “Let’s dramatize 70 pages of Tolstoy’s War and Peace using Russian folk music, musical theater ballads and electronic dance music.” Sure! Why not? A dozen 2017 Tony nominations later, it would seem that the crazy idea worked.

The other meeting must have come at San Jose Playhouse, where someone asked, “What incredibly difficult musical can we do next?” With their nicely solidifying company of talented regulars, it seems this group can pull of just about anything. The result is a dazzling and beautifuly eccentric evening of theater, full of captivating imagery and music.

Paloma Maia Aisenberg as Natasha,
Juanita Harris as Helene.

The action revolves around Natasha (Paloma Maia Aisenberg), a young noblewoman whose fiance has gone off to war. The homefront conflict appears in the form of Anatole (Jared Lee), a swaggering young man determined to capture Natasha’s heart, despite his marriage to a woman in Poland.

At first the show doesn’t seem that odd - perhaps a few rock beats here and there, or the fact that some of the actors are playing instruments. Then Princess Mary (Osher Fine) delivers a dark, comic account of dealing with her aging father (F. James Raasch), and her father’s behavior causes her to be rude to her guest, Natasha. Forced into defending their respective turfs, the two women land on long, intentional dissonances, beautiful in their bitterness. (Ah! thinks I. This composer Dave Malloy is clever.)

Almost from that point, the show goes haywire in a delicious fashion. Anatole strips off his ornate Russian uniform to reveal stylish club-wear, the men get drunk at a trendy EDM spot, and the frustrated cuckold Pierre (Stephen Guggenheim) manages to survive a duel with the assassin Dolokhov (Nicholas Rodrigues).

Speaking as a novelist, this show is frankly what Tolstoy needs. When you strip out the endless ocean of mundane details and present the bones of the story with some kick-ass music, it’s amazingly entertaining. (Seriously, I tried reading Anna Karenina once and I wanted to throw myself in front of a train.)

Stephen Guggenheim as Pierre

The heart of the show is Aisenberg, gifted with an irresistible radiance and a gorgeous voice that sounds unnervingly (and not in a bad way) like that of a Disney heroine. Natasha’s impulsive behavior - the foolishness of youth in love - is balanced by Guggenheim’s heart-rending performance as Pierre, a man lifted from a dreary, beaten-down existence by an wayward bullet.

But there are stars everywhere. Corey Bryant delivers an adrenalized show-stopper as the crazed troika driver Balaga, hired to whisk the lovers away. As Pierre’s wandering wife, Helene, Juanita Harris throws in Patti LaBelle vocal flights when she’s not playing violin or leading Natasha astray. As Sonya, Annie Hunt tugs at heartstrings with “Sonya Alone,” a desperate prayer toward saving her cousin Natasha from a bad end.

Kudos to director Scott Evan Guggenheim for weaving all these crazy threads into a unified piece, and to Shannon Guggenheim for endlessly inventive choreography. As a drummer, I got a special kick from watching Jerald Bittle navigate an incredible array of beats.

Photos by Scott Donschikowski.

Through May 28 at 3Below Theaters, 288 S. Second Street, San Jose. 408/404-7711. Sanjoseplayhouse.org.

Michael J. Vaughn is the author of 28 novels, including Mermaids’ Tears and Lavender, and two plays, Darcy LaMont and Cafe Phryque. His titles can be found on Amazon.com.

Making Tosca Even Edgier

 

Adrian Kramer as Cavaradossi,
Maria Natale as Tosca.
Photos by David Allen

Opera San Jose, Puccini's Tosca, April 14, 2023

It’s amazing to see how a few seemingly minor details can have an enormous effect on an opera. OSJ stage director Tara Branham’s small innovations, combined with an energetic, blunt approach, led to a different and provocative Tosca.

The opera’s opening is usually a mildly comic back-and-forth between the sacristan (a divinely grumpy Igor Vieira) and the painter Cavaradossi. Branham introduces a young lady with whom the painter is having a tryst. This produces some fun “hide-the-girl” humor, but it also sends a major ripple across the storyline. Traditionally, Tosca’s jealousy toward Cavaradossi has been portrayed as a irrational, commemorated by the tender duet, “Mia gelosa.” This jealousy is also seen as the fatal flaw that leads to the couple’s downfall. Now, with the introduction of the side chick, it seems that Tosca had reason to be suspicious.

Another small addition comes in the second act, which takes places in Baron Scarpia’s apartment - which now features, for the first time that I’ve ever seen, a bed. Right there. Branham even brought in a couple of housemaids to replace the covers and pillows, as if to say, Look, a bed, right there.

Once again, huge ripples. Every time Scarpia mentions his creepy affections toward Tosca, and the extortive leverage he has recently obtained with the capture of her rebel boyfriend, there stands the end goal, the bed. Right there.

The overall effect of Branham’s approach is to remove whatever subtlety remained from Victorien Sardou’s play and just be right out front with everything. A despot who weaponizes religion to seize power and get himself laid? In an era when a President pays off a porn star while touting Christian nationalism and white supremacy, Baron Scarpia is a rank amateur.

This let-it-fly attitude seems to transfer readily to the cast, who perform with a fun, loose-limbed energy. This reaches its first-act peak with the Te Deum, the choir singing the sacred text as Scarpia paints graffiti all over it with his cries of lust for the hot soprano. The sound builds to spine-chilling heights, with the California Theater’s 1927 pipe organ rumbling magnificently beneath (played by Veronika Agranov-Dafoe).

Maria Natale as Tosca,
Kidon Choi as Scarpia.

Adrian Kramer gives Cavaradossi an unusual rock-star quality (most tenors being much stouter), that fits with the rapscallion angle. His voice has impressive weight (his first few lines feel almost baritonish) but this evened out as it rose to the upper regions. Not a spinto, but let’s call him a “luxury lyric.” He showed much art in moderating the big voice in tender moments like the lovely Act 3 aria “Oh dolci mani.” His “E lucevan le stelle” was riveting.

Scarpia is one of the more malleable villains in opera, and changes with the character of each singer. Baritone Kidon Choi brings a social stiffness combined with a fierce alpha presence. He spices it with a radioactive sense of danger, a la Darth Vader or Joe Pesci, as if at any moment he’ll cut off your breathing or slam a bottle over your head. Those around him - notably Joshua Hughes as his lieutenant Sciarrone - do some excellent reaction work, as if they are always one wrong answer away from the gallows.

And then there’s Tosca. Maria Natale is as perfect as you can get. Her voice has so many gears: the dramatic soprano who scream-sings at Scarpia’s attacks, the pure lyric who recalls better days in Tosca’s tender Act 3 remembrances, and especially the dramatic lyric who agonizes over her fate in “Vissi d’arte,” delivering top notes so rich and full you want them to go on forever.

Natale’s acting powers are on full display in Act 2, as Tosca negotiates the crushing conflict of trying to save her lover but not having the information to do so. (As Cavaradossi yells in pain from the adjoining room, a metallic band squeezing blood from his temples.) In understanding why this particular Act 2 was such a nail-biting, stomach-churning experience, I realized it was Natale’s ability to force the audience to feel her pain. She has a marvelously expressive stage-face that inspires deep empathy.

And then, the killing. Oh, what a killing! Tosca discovers the knife sticking out of the ham (the one the true Toscaphile has been eyeing since the beginning of the act) and holds it behind her back as she positions herself near the bed, seemingly ready to give Scarpia whatever he wants. When the Baron makes his creepy approach, she stabs him in the gut. As he falls to the bed, she throws the knife across his face and a stream of blood gushes out. Then she stabs him a few more times as he lies atop the bed. It may have been the best opera-killing I’ve ever seen. Bonus points to fight director Dave Maier.

You could feel the joy in Joseph Marcheso’s conducting, fully at home in Puccini’s lush score and leading the orchestra in an elegant, rich performance. Bass-baritone Robert Balonek gave a great desperate feel to the fugitive Angelotti. Steven C. Kemp’s set designs focused on tremendous period paintings in the church scene and a sprawling battlefield tapestry for Scarpia’s apartment. My favorite of Elizabeth Poindexter’s costumes was Scarpia’s black waistcoat with white embroidery.

General director Shawna Lucey’s tenure has been marked by some fun marketing ideas. The latest is a classic Tosca poster with a cut-out face so patrons can pretend to stand over the mannequin corpse of a freshly slaughtered Baron Scarpia. OSJ’s ‘23’-’24 season includes Romeo and Juliet (9/9-24), The Barber of Seville (11/11-23), Rigoletto (2/17-3/3) and Florencia en el Amazonas (4/20-5/5).

Through April 30 at the Caifornia Theatre, 345 S. First Street, San Jose. $55-$195. operasj.org, 408/437-4450.

Michael J. Vaughn is a 35-year opera critic and author of 28 novels, including Operaville and Gabriella’s Voice (available at Amazon.com). He is currently at work on a novel titled Punks for the Opera.