|
OPERA REVIEW
Every Man Jack November 12, 2006
|
Dancing With Demons By James Keolker
The creation of an opera is a long and complicated process. But the most important aspect is how it plays before a live audience. This is the critical test for the composer, the librettist, the director, and the producer: To experience what they have wrought.
Change and refinement have always been a part of this process — from the time of the Florentines and the creation of the art form, to later giants such as Wagner, Strauss, Verdi, and Puccini. And this is what's needed for Libby Larsen’s chamber opera, Every Man Jack, which was given its world premiere by the Sonoma City Opera at the Person Theatre at Sonoma State University on Sunday.
The libretto by Philip Littell is taken almost exclusively from one of Jack London’s late and lesser works, John Barleycorn, a thinly veiled exploration of London’s recurrent alcoholism. Littell describes himself as something of a “tire-kicker” of historic icons (there was a notorious dustup a few years ago over his characterization of General Vallejo in a Sonoma City Opera production). In this production he has created an almost unrelieved work of London’s wrestling with his drinking demons, from when London was a lad to his final days at his Sonoma Ranch, some 35 years later.
He ignores London’s other writings (especially his famous novels), his laudable self-education in the libraries of Oakland, his effect upon such later authors as John Steinbeck, and his interests in sustainable agriculture (when that term was not yet in use). As a result, Littell’s narrow focus robs his character of any grandeur, nobility, or moral purpose — the stuff of memorable opera.
Further, Littell confuses his audience with a mélange of extraneous characters in what amounts to a kind of vaudeville review, especially in scenes surrounding London’s waterfront bar brawling and whoring. As a result, his text loses focus, his scenes seem overwritten, and his one-act takes a daunting two hours without intermission. Likewise, Libby Larsen’s restless, fragmented score, while colorful and full of wonderful rhythmic detail, often compounds this diffusion.
However, at this opera’s musical core there are some powerful, telling scenes. It is these that make Larsen’s characterization of Jack and Charmian London a potent, dramatic force. Rod Gilfrey offered a brawny and forceful Jack. His rich baritone illuminated Larsen’s music with an exciting array of vocal slides and multiple-note melisma. He impressed with this character’s crooning, shouts, laughter, and even wolf howling. Gilfrey was compelling in Larsen’s music for Jack as an oyster-pirate, in his meeting his future wife, their life in the South Seas (“White caps, white sails”), and in the showdown scene with her in the opera’s finale. What Gilfrey and Larsen easily captured is “that cosmic sadness” that London refers to in John Barleycorn. Mezzo-soprano Jennifer Lane portrayed Charmian London as something of a wearied enabler, and Larsen’s music for her was frequently dark in tone and downward in line. Her final, confrontational aria, "What About Me, Jack?" was made especially riveting by Lane’s sincerity and intensity. The Londons in this opera are often surrounded by a number of Littell’s dancing, singing characters (dock workers, farm workers, vaudeville clowns, prostitutes, and hangers-on). John Duykers added his distinguished tenor to the ensemble. Susan Narucki, Ilana Davidson, Brad Bradshaw, and Stephen Hartley sang lively duets, ensembles, and solo turns. Larsen describes this Barbary Coast, honky-tonk, ballad music as London’s “sonic culture.” Joseph Graves directed and Maestra Mary Chun vigorously led her Earplay Ensemble of nine musicians in a seamless accompaniment of strings, woodwinds, synthesizer, piano, player piano, toy piano, percussive flower pots, spoons, vibraphone, and wine bottles. Margaret McKowen designed a series of scene pieces that were too frequently rolled in and out of place. A simple unit set of the Sonoma ranch, dockside, and barroom would have been less distracting. Nan Zhang could have made a more forceful and interesting light design for the opera’s 17 scenes. And Tom O’Connor’s choreography did not seem to take into consideration that singers who sing well do not necessarily dance well. Producer Antoinette Kuhry and the Sonoma City Opera deserve credit for bringing an opera about this fascinating Northern California author to the stage. With some judicious cutting, and by putting Jack and Charmian at the center of a more simplified telling, this opera could be well on its way.
(James Keolker is a frequent writer and lecturer on opera, as well as a professor of opera studies at the Fromm Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of San Francisco.)
|
