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Menotti’s The Medium Shows Power in Silence

Steven Winn on July 27, 2015
(Left) Ashley Dixon (Mrs. Nolan), Nicole Woodward (Madame Flora/Baba), Austin Siebert (Mr. Gobineau) and Kathryn Bowden (Mrs. Gobineau) in Menotti’s The Medium. (Photo by Kristen Loken)
(Left) Ashley Dixon (Mrs. Nolan), Nicole Woodward (Madame Flora/Baba), Austin Siebert (Mr. Gobineau) and Kathryn Bowden (Mrs. Gobineau) in Menotti’s The Medium. (Photo by Kristen Loken)

Silence is music’s secret weapon. The notes unplayed or sung – in rests, phrase endings, rubatos stretched to transparent thinness – can amplify and intensify anything around them. What isn’t there holds the power to transform what is.

The Merola Opera Program, in a double billing at Fort Mason’s Cowell Theater last Thursday, carried this off with scintillating conviction with its performance of Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1946 short opera The Medium. That power was missing, however, in an endlessly over-the-top take on Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi.

In The Medium, the silence is embedded in the character of Toby, a mute boy who lives with Madame Flora, a fraudulent stager of séances, and her daughter, Monica. Everything that happens in this brilliantly perverse piece pivots around Toby’s febrile, tragic stillness.

Monica, in an eerily sensual performance by soprano Madison Leonard, sings an onanistic love song to herself by pretending that Toby (the uncanny Alasdair Kent) is singing it to her. It came off here as a lavish, rankly lyrical set piece of sexual fantasy. When Flora (a caustic and coruscating mezzo Nicole Woodward) sours on her own deceit, she turns her self-hatred, a whip, and finally, with the Freudian dead aim of an accident, a gun on the boy. Woodward’s reckless way of veering in and out of sung and spoken speech heightened the sense of implosive punishment and self-loathing.   

Even Toby seemed to embody his own power of negation. At one point in stage director Peter Kakaras’ haunting production, Kent froze in such total terror while cowering behind a chair that he seemed to become a lifeless piece of furniture himself. If anyone had supernatural powers in this Medium, it was the helpless Toby.

The components of the production were all tightly fitted together on opening night. Donald Eastman’s strangely vacant scenery, Kate Boyd’s shadowy lighting and Kristi Johnson’s aptly sober costumes cast a dank visual spell. Three séance patrons – Kathryn Bowden, Austin Siebert, and Ashley Dixon – sang with an earnest, credulous need to believe. Cynicism and hope were the faint, fading stokes under all the characters, etched with inky certainty by the excellent Merola cast. In the brief interlude between The Medium’s two acts, the audience could hear the plaintive cries of seagulls outside the theater. Even the birds out there at the end of the Fort Mason pier seemed to sense the uneasy silence.

The orchestra, under Mark Morash’s peerless direction, added one perfectly tinted color after another to this gleaming, dark-hued musical palette. Solo contributions by the piano, cello, clarinet, and a creepily keening violin were like recurring, disturbingly plausible ghosts. In the brief interlude between The Medium’s two acts, the audience could hear the plaintive cries of seagulls outside the theater. Even the birds out there at the end of the Fort Mason pier seemed to sense the uneasy silence.

The money-grubbing schemers of Gianni Schicchi, extracted from Puccini’s 1918 Il trittico, hardly seem like natural soul-mates for Menotti’s otherwordly seekers. But both these short operas on the Merola bill are about con artists and the lure of undeserved rewards. In that regard they are the tragic and comic flip sides of a similar human impulse to grasp desperately at straws.

Set here in contemporary Florence, complete with cellphone selfies and a cheesy blue tracksuit for the title character, this Gianni Schicchi cast a gaudy bright glare after The Medium’s moody murkiness.  The costumes, wigs, and hairstyles (by Marcelo Donari) and performance modes were all cheerfully, garishly over the top.

(Back row - left) Brad Walker (Betto), Austin Siebert (Marco), Ashley Dixon (Ciesca), Tara Curtis (Zita), Kathryn Bowden (Nella), Zachary Elmassian (Simone), and Alasdair Kent (Gherardo). (Front row - left) Christopher Bozeka (Rinuccio), Kihun Yoon (Gianni Schicchi) and Cree Carrico (Lauretta) in Puccini's Gianni Schicchi. (Photo by Kristen Loken)
(Back row - left) Brad Walker (Betto), Austin Siebert (Marco), Ashley Dixon (Ciesca), Tara Curtis (Zita), Kathryn Bowden (Nella), Zachary Elmassian (Simone), and Alasdair Kent (Gherardo). (Front row - left) Christopher Bozeka (Rinuccio), Kihun Yoon (Gianni Schicchi) and Cree Carrico (Lauretta) in Puccini's Gianni Schicchi. (Photo by Kristen Loken)

As the variously vulgar relatives of the soon-to-be-dead Buoso gathered in his sickroom to leer, slather, squabble, wheedle, and otherwise angle for an inheritance, they often assembled themselves in tight little stage pictures, like the cast of a Saturday Night Live sketch. Yes, Puccini and librettist Giovacchino Forzano were creating parodies, but director Kazaras and the cast spent their comic capital so hard and frantically that it tended toward self-extinction.  

By the time the track-suited fixer Gianni Schicchi himself arrived, there wasn’t much room for comic or musical maneuvering. Baritone Kihun Yoon brought a potent, big voice to the title role, and he mugged right along with the rest of the company. But he’s not – at least not yet – a gifted comic actor. It was hard not to hear and see his bristling voice and bearing more naturally as a Scarpia (from the composer’s Tosca) in the making.

Tenor Christopher Bozeka and soprano Cree Carrico sang gamely and sweetly as the young lovers Rinnucio and Lauretta. But everything, including an overly enthusiastic orchestra, made even their sumptuous love duet seem like something of an afterthought. Not a seagull was heard as Gianni Schicchi made its brash and largely charmless way to the finish.