his is Drama Masks, a Bay Area performing arts column from a born San Franciscan and longtime theatre artist in an N95 mask. I talk venue safety and dramatic substance, or the lack thereof.
Mary, Queen of Scots at SF Opera
I didn’t expect a lot of what happened this past weekend: I didn’t expect the weather to start warming up as much as it did; I didn’t expect the Folsom St. Fair organizers to create a new route that cut off local businesses); and I didn’t expect a livestream link from SF Opera. Despite having followed the latter’s messy labor dispute, I wound up losing track of the season itself. That may have something to do with the fact that their season-opener, Simon Boccanegra, had its opening night delayed and its livestream cancelled. That the dispute was resolved within a week is great, but the lesson to take away is that institutions like SF Opera truly don’t exist without the hard-working folks whose names never appear in lights.
With the season proper now underway, it was an unexpected surprise to get the press-access livestream link for their production of Mary, Queen of Scots (through October 4 at the War Memorial Opera House, SF). Its subject is certainly one ripe for the medium. The real Mary had a tumultuous relationship with her cousin Queen Elizabeth, which has already been the subject of several books and films. Dramatizing the family ties that literally changed the face of England (and the world) is a story begging a grand production worthy of its multiple interpretations.
That’s not the story Thea Musgrave wanted to tell. The composer-librettist’s 1977 opera, based on Peruvian writer Amalia Elguera’s play Moray, is far more keen on the story of the men in Mary’s life. So much so that the eponymous royal (played with aplomb by US soprano Heidi Stober) is occasionally at risk of getting lost in her own story. Sure, the “Three Stars of [her] Firmament” are constantly talking about her and how they can move upward with or without her, but there comes a point where it seems that even Musgrave herself is more concerned with Mary as an idea rather than as a person.
Then again, it’s possible that some of the story depth got lost in Scottish director and production designer Stewart Laing’s emphasis of style over substance. He chose to produce this Elizabethan-era story in modern dress, which could work, provided there’s a point to the choice. Yet Laing chooses set pieces that resemble scaffolding for under-construction buildings and costumes that mainly consists of parkas of various muted colors. Again, in the right context, this could be a bold choice, but here, it just seems as if no choice was made and everyone just decided to go along with it. The choices say nothing about Mary, the royals, or how they compare to the common people.
Yet, the performance of Stober is what keeps it all from falling apart. Through three-plus hours of melodrama and head-tilting aesthetics (watching the ensemble push modern rolling suitcases was worth an eye-roll all on its own), she steps up with powerhouse vocals and a committed physicality that seem to be fighting Laing’s attempts to mute all character depth. She’s magnetic in the role, making it far more interesting to watch her that watch characters talk about her.
This being a livestream, there were no CO² readings to take, though I will say I didn’t see many masks in the few audience shots provided.
Under the guidance of conductor Clelia Cafiero, it’s great to see and hear the SF Opera Orchestra give their all now that they’re back in the pit. It’s equally compelling to see Stober just as committed to her portrayal of one of the Western world’s most important figures. Still, an imperfect libretto and bland cosmetics make this one a bit of a tough sit-through.
MARY, QUEEN OF SCOTS runs through October 4 at the War Memorial Opera House, SF. Tickets and further info here.
ACT presents North by North
One has to wonder whom director-adaptor Emma Rice’s endgame was when she conceived her hyperkinetic interpretation of North by Northwest (through October 18 at the ACT Toni Rembe Theatre, SF)? Did she want a revisionist take on the misogyny that permeates Hitchcock’s work? Was she trying to suggest the original film was more progressive than modern audiences give it credit for? Did she just want to make a slapstick comedy because she couldn’t figure out how to pull off the famous airplane scene on stage in a convincing way?
Whatever her motivations, the result is a staging of one of Hitch’s best thrillers re-imagined as physical comedy with a Mad Men aesthetic. It’s not as if the original film was short on intentional laughs—that’s the entire point of protagonist Roger Thornhill’s mother—but the so-called “Master of Suspense” wasn’t going for comedy when our hero is nearly driven off a cliff early in the film. North by Northwest is a compelling story because a simple case of mistaken identity finds an ordinary man hunted across the country by foreign spies and domestic agents. We’d love to believe we’d be as resourceful as he is, should we ever find ourselves hanging from Mt. Rushmore.
Yet, Rice’s adaptation not only shoe-horns in a narrator (Katy Owen) to spoon-feed the plot to the audience, it adds an endless series of pratfalls to make one wonder if Thornhill (Danny Collins) was meant to be played by Jerry Lewis rather than Cary Grant. What’s more, Rice’s adaptation is far more chaste that the film, with Thornhill declining a train cabin romp with Even Kendall (Patrycja Kujawska) after a bout of heavy petting.
Not only is that unnecessarily puritanical, it removes one of the film’s best intentional jokes: the innuendo-loaded visual of a phallic train entering a tunnel. Add in an unnecessary redemption for the villains and Rice seems to be recalling the original film from scattered memories that mix it up with some other work.
With only a moderate number of masked patrons opening night, CO² readings on my Aranet4 peaked around 1,288ppm in the second act.
Emma Rice’s adaptation of North by Northwest is curious in the way that it tries to bring a modern context to a decades-old work, yet it has no idea what point it’s trying to make. The cast are all serviceable and Rob Howell’s design choices are eye-popping, but the show has a “square peg, round hole” set of choices that just don’t work together.
NORTH BY NORTHWEST runs through October 18 at ACT’s Toni Rembe Theatre, SF. Tickets and further info here.
