San Francisco Classical Voice

Lecocq's Operetta Reconstituted
September 19 & 26, 1998

Where can "Arkansas trash with no panache become a VIP?" --in Washington, D.C., according to David Scott Marley in his libretto for Daughter of the Cabinet, performed recently by Berkeley Opera at the Julia Morgan Theater. Marley's Daughter of the Cabinet is a mostly successful, very free adaptation of La Fille de Madame Angot, by Charles Lecocq, a contemporary and compatriot of Bizet and Saint-Saens. Lecocq wrote this opera comique for Brussels' Fantaisies-Parisiennes where it was first performed in 1872.

Marley has reworked Madame Angot herself -- a late 18th-century stock character representing the gaucheries of the post-Revolution bourgeoisie -- into a nouveau riche Georgetown divorcee who seeks the respectability she never enjoyed for her cloistered daughter, Claretta. Through events involving the well-worn opera conceit of forged letters and other spurious documents, Claretta is transformed, forty-eight hours after Election Day, from ingenue to a savvy Berkeley undergraduate (political science major?) who avoids the nearly inevitable fate of operetta heroines: matrimony.

Though the dialogue sags a bit, particularly spoken with the exaggerated delivery of relatively inexperienced performers, Marley's resettings of the sung numbers are consistently clever, generously sprinkled with risque double entendres. The raffish hearts of Lecocq and his musical progenitor Jacques Offenbach would have been gladdened.

Philip Kuttner conducted the July 19 performance, with Laura Detcher in the title role. As lead roles go, the part isn't demanding, but Detcher brought to it not only a balanced and full tone, but also confident intonation and musicality that comes from intelligent preparation. With her perky demeanor and and crisp declamation, Claire Kelm as Bolivian Bombshell Zia Zapata was an effective foil, dramatically and musically, for Detcher's Claretta. Their second-act duet was the most musically affective number of the work, despite Marley's deliberately cloying text about golden days of lullabies, lollipops and lavender. [Note the audio clip, below.] Tenor Harvey Garn and baritone Macatee Hollie might not have been ideally suited to playing the roles of political satirist and Vice-President elect respectively, but their singing was irreproachable.

The July 26 performance with Heather Carolo and Shawn Marie Williams as Claretta and Zia was rather less successful. Even in this small and acoustically flattering theater, Carolo's voice was too slight for solo numbers and insufficiently agile for the swift repartee of Lecocq's ensembles. Williams' discomfort playing a femme fatale rendered a bit embarrassing her Bolivian accent and mannered grimaces. Lisa Riley conducted energetically, but with little control; in ensembles particularly, ambiguous tempos in vamps and in helter-skelter codas put the singers on edge and rendered the performance more of a read-through than a sufficiently rehearsed effort.

An endearing and commendable attribute of organizations like Berkeley Opera is that they provide to local amateurs an opportunity to participate in productions as chorus members. The women's chorus in Daughter of the Cabinet stretched credulity a bit as Hollywood starlets, but their youthful male counterparts did a fine job as reporters and Secret Service agents, singing well, and having a great time hamming it up for an audience that was appreciative, though regrettably small.

(Charles Cronin is a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley's School of Information Management and Systems. He completed a Ph.D. in Musicology at Stanford in 1993.)

©1998 Charles Cronin, all rights reserved