An Auspicious Start to Long Beach Opera’s New Era
In my 10 years reviewing Long Beach Opera, two productions tower above the rest. In 2010, LBO delivered John Adams’s Nixon in China with a glorious scope and scale they never again approached. Seven years later, the U.S. premiere of Philip Glass’s The Perfect American melded music and mise en scène in a silvery mélange that brought synesthetic life to Walt Disney’s dying days in a sterile hospital ward as ghosts and demons visited him where he lay.
While arguably these are the two best works LBO chose to stage, the superiority of their conceptual execution is beyond serious debate. Anthony Davis’s The Central Park Five, for example, world premiered in 2019 and won a Pulitzer — but in terms of what there was to see on stage, it was several steps below the earlier twin peaks. Lesser shows suffered far worse by comparison, to the point that it was occasionally hard to fathom how this was the same company that twice upon a time reached such heights.
On May 21, with a new artistic director in place, LBO embarked on a new decade (a year late — thank/fuck you, COVID-19) and era with Glass’s Les Enfants Terribles. And considering that this inaugural offering of the James Darrah regime is better than all but the very best of the previous decade, there’s reason to hope a bright new day has dawned.
Based on a 1929 Jean Cocteau novel, Les Enfants Terribles concerns siblings Elisabeth (Anna Schubert) and Paul (Edward Nelson), whose claustrophobic intimacy/codependency manifests in a psychodrama of mutual antagonism called The Game, played out by the pair in The Room, a shared bedroom that becomes a stage and world unto itself when The Game is on. A fascinated witness to their bizarre battle royal is their friend Gérard (Orson Van Gay II), who eventually falls in love with Elisabeth. But when Paul falls in love with Agathe (Sarah Beaty), who bears a striking resemblance to a childhood schoolmate that Paul idolized, The Game begins to play out beyond the confines of The Room.
Because the action is passed through the prisms of the siblings’ linked psyches and Gérard’s reminiscence, Les Enfants Terribles is ripe for an expressionistic staging. Aside from LBO’s ongoing love affair with Glass (they draw from his oeuvre just about every season), this may be partly why they picked it. With COVID not yet behind us, responsibly mounting a live performance now — without simply doing lesser work and banking on the audience to cut you some circumstantial slack — means making the limitations work in your favor.
In light of social distancing restrictions, Darrah and co. staged Les Enfants Terribles atop the south side of the 2nd Street and Pacific Coast Highway parking structure, with audience members confined inside or next to their cars, which were parked in a rectangular array. Musicians and tech crew were stationed in the middle, while performers ranged the open space, the main action tailed by Darrah’s steadicam, with sporadic auxiliary action taking place offscreen.
Thanks to the combination of unrelentingly mindful blocking/choreography and Darrah’s meticulous lensing instincts, with the exception of two scenes (including a dance sequence sans music that was effective initially but lasted much too long) viewers were kept engaged by an aesthetic vision more than strong enough to compensate for the otherwise inescapable fact that the stage was a run-of-the-mill parking structure. In fact, Darrah’s cinematography often disappeared his stage’s concrete brutalism, capitalizing on Dan Wiengarten’s lighting design to compose color-saturated and lens-flared frames detailing a specific action or energetic eruption of Les Enfants Terribles’s insular world.
Musically, LBO always does well by Philip Glass. With only three pianos and four voices to balance sonically, Les Enfants Terribles was a solid choice for an environment lacking the controlled acoustics of a theater or concert hall. Despite occasional wind gusts, the sound came off almost without a hitch, projected by a combination of an outdoor speaker array and direct broadcast into car radios (we cracked our windows to get the best of both worlds).
Because Elisabeth and Agathe have so much melodic overlap, perhaps casting sopranos with a bit more tonal disparity than the Schubert/Beaty combo might have better served in spots. Otherwise, all four performances were solid, with Schubert particularly standing out; and the casting was irreproachable vis-à-vis acting, appearance and movement. This goes for the small ensemble quartet, who together represented a sort of miasmatic flow of emotional energy. A highlight here was Shauna Davis’s mirror dance.
Along with Darrah’s direction, Chris Emile’s choreography deserves mention. Early in Les Enfants Terribles, as Gérard’s narration (prerecorded by Gay) describes Elisabeth and Paul’s “overlapping pools of truth and fantasy,” Schubert and Nelson undulate back-to-back, arms enlaced, bringing the words to watery life. Lovely such touches abounded, with even the slowest, subtlest movement rarely devolving into undesirable stasis.
Over the last decade, while Long Beach Opera has almost always succeeded musically, their concepts and execution have often come up short. This is why the first show of the Darrah era seems so promising. In an epoch when force majeure is a compelling artistic compromise, LBO has delivered one of their most aesthetically compelling productions ever. What might they do once the COVID fetters are removed?
Les Enfants Terribles runs . . . well, you missed it. Performances were May 23 through 25. Long Beach Opera’s second — and final — live event for their 2021 season is a double-bill of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Kate Soper’s Voices from the Killing Jar on Aug. 14 and 15 (both operettas each night). For tickets and more information visit LongBeachOpera.org.