On Stage
BERMEL, ALBERT
ON STAGE By Albert Bermel Verdi As Dramatist Not long ago the Actors Studio asked a private audience to a project-in-progress, a drastically new interpretation of La Traviata. Walt Witcover, the...
...It may be that the training he had put them through added conviction to their words...
...Alfredo is maybe 22 or 23, and his father is a distinguished military (or airline) fellow of about 50...
...And they supply him with tasks or minor objectives—eating a slow apple, knitting an endless sleeve, polishing a closetful of silverware, assembling a doghouse on stage...
...What gives his technique its freshness is the quality and sincerity of the acting...
...But it is the product of working together, of spinning the threads of their abilities into a stout cord of performance...
...I mention sincerity because it is an undervalued dividend of sound acting...
...And when Germont comes back to find Alfredo reading the dear John letter from Violetta, he slaps him...
...I would assume from his Traviata, though, that Witcover would explore Mozart's music for sustained effects...
...Instead of entering with a rifle after an early-morning shoot-up of squirrels and local peasants, he has swimshorts on and is drying his knees...
...I recall an article by a music critic that drew the following quatrain from a reader: You question whether opera should be sung In mistranslations or the native tongue...
...At any rate, the audience responded warmly for the most part to this rethought Traviata, and remained more attentive, especially through the recitatives, than other opera audiences I remember...
...Wagner was implying by his treatment that opera exists for itself as a legend-tinted musical art...
...When Germont arrives at the villa to rescue his son, he seems to be smitten with Violetta himself and possibly envies his son the great time he is having with her in the woods and on water skis, rather than merely disapproving of Alfredo's liaison with a society tart...
...He has also updated the setting, so that the plot is not timeless but acceptably contemporary...
...She laboriously picks at the wrapping of a gift package Alfredo has handed her, and it turns out to be a book—a suitable offering from a student, even a student mad with desire, but a spectator is apt to wonder what the title is...
...Their instincts are not wrong, only cautious...
...to create a continuous and coherent stage action that clearly expresses the drama of the music...
...Witcover and his producer are probably on to a good thing in the long run, for themselves and for the opera public, which has been accustomed to alternating spells of crouching on the edges of their seats and dozing against the back cushions...
...Witcover seems to me to be going in the opposite direction...
...If singers stand with right wrist clasped in left thumb and forefinger and feet 18 inches apart, if they periodically stretch as though to embrace (or strangle) the balcony, it is partly for want of something better to occupy their limbs, partly because they and their directors fear above all else to wreck a crescendo...
...Alfredo dives over a fence and hurts himself, is carried indoors and babied back to consciousness by his dad...
...But at Sadler's Wells in London Michel Saint-Denis and John Blatchley have been trying to put life into the staging of (mainly) light opera...
...Motivating" could splinter the big passions into petty "drives...
...Wit-cover also uses the limited stage space at the Studio to ticm in and concentrate the movements...
...At the Met, say, these include Siepi, London, Uppman, Peters, and Nilsson, all of whom could probably enjoy plump careers in the legit theater, perhaps because they are innately talented actors, perhaps because they respond to—or insist on—guidance from their directors...
...The impressions left by the director on this opera are, in sum, very close to those we might expect on a comparable play...
...But with Don Giovanni or The Magic Flute I foresee difficulties...
...Most opera singers are lousy actors because they support their voices with attempts to establish a big, immovable personality...
...In act one, for example, Violetta's guests at the party look like an East Village crowd, while her lover Alfredo is a tidily brushed undergraduate, probably a public administration major...
...Realistic directing helps realistic plays, but doesn't do much for poetic or elusive drama except reduce it...
...Leyna Gabriele as Violetta, Ronald Young as Alfredo, and Adair McGowen as Germont behave as though knowing what to do at any given moment helped them to sing, made them feel right to speak in music...
...Other director's bonuses come when Alfredo reads Violetta's note and plunges it into his stomach like a knife...
...During "Di quell'amor" Violetta's "shtick" is practically a fiddleshtick...
...At this point McGowen is singing "Di Provenza il mar" in a superb baritone, and one is tempted to shout...
...sometimes this means making explicit and plain what was previously implicit and plain...
...Walt Witcover, the director, says that his refurbishing of the opera "has been shaping up [for] two years," and that he wants "to bring modern acting techniques to the problems of opera...
...On the other hand, the opera is an old warhorse in the repertory and has long been tedious to sit through as a parade of hit numbers and Second Empire costumes...
...The party at Violetta's is a din of gasps, popping balloons and champagne corks...
...Why not operatic classics...
...As a precursor of 19th-century ver-ismo theater, it possibly stands the infusion of psychologizing more hardily than would any other work by Verdi...
...In recent years most directors of note have faced up to one or more operas, not always with useful results...
...It is not surprising that singers who really can act are the exceptions...
...But what happens with the other operatic giants, besides Verdi...
...Witcover's technique of "clearly expressing" is unabashedly Method...
...On the one hand, in Verdi grand music is its own drama and justification, and to an extent resists being fleshed out with gestures and motivation...
...Done with discretion, such activity can divert an actor's attention away from sheer self-display and toward the reality of his role?or at least its stage reality...
...Left at the mercy of these instincts, opera has settled into what we call conventions of its own, the principal one being, "Don't disrupt the moment...
...and when Alfredo is saying a reluctant good-by to Violetta and traps her in his colic?- scarf...
...The dramatic logic in serious opera is generally crude, not to say sledgehammerish...
...and the same is true of much comic opera, such as Meyerbeer, Offenbach, and lesser practitioners...
...Alfredo has thus fallen for "an older woman," who averages out in age between his father and himself...
...Most directors today, whether Method or of some other school, use two means to plumb for sincerity...
...Act two, set in Violetta's exurban villa in Auteuil, is introduced by a brief movie in which Alfredo water skis and kisses Violetta behind some New York State foliage...
...Miss Ga-briele's Violetta looks to be in her late 30s...
...he has filled in dozens of secondary motives, drawing on the subtext of the libretto to account for every emotional transposition in the score...
...Traviata is a borderline opera...
...in short, to develop a performance in which the drama is seen as well as heard...
...They encourage each actor to find movements, mannerisms and vocal levels that seem natural to him, so that his contribution is a personal one, the best he can offer...
...So could many operas by Puccini, Tchaikovsky, Menotti, and other moderns, even some of Weber...
...It may also be that Piave's libretto gave them an Italianate exaggeration which offset the literalness of the staging and kept it from becoming a mere modernization...
...On his first entrance Germont sees the rumpled double bed and reacts to it, not with stuffy horror, but with a mixture of anxiety and ruefulness...
...Dramatic classics are undergoing rethinking all the time...
...Alfredo's father Germont, the old squire from Provence, is now handsomely attired in an Air Force (or Air France) uniform...
...Witcover's cast sang with admirable articulation...
...The most far-reaching experiments of the '50s took place in Bay-reuth, where the late Wieland Wagner emancipated his grandfather's work from the original stage directions and gave each opera a timeless, abstract presence...
...By itself it may not fortify actors with enough mystery and charm and assertiveness to be mistaken for bravura playing...
...How To Get By With TBI Later he wonders what purpose the book was put to—did it mean that Violetta ought to spend more time reading and less on the job?—and he realizes that he missed the aria...
...But, more important, it was "the first serious opera on a contemporary subject and presented in contemporary dress," as Witcover reminds us in the program...
...Certainly the two acts of the opera shown that night provided a workout for the eyeballs...
...For many years producers and directors have yearned to find singable translations on the understanding that opera ought to be better in English for an English-speaking audience...
...Witcover occasionally gives his singers more busywork than they need...
...This hoary matter's hardly worth debate When singers are all inarticulate...
...Stop bathing his face and let's listen to the damn music...
...The Kama Sutra...
...Witcover is a good director in the Stanislavski tradition—this showcase production did not go on at the Studio by accident—and he makes some of the business more engaging to follow than a secondhand description may suggest...
...But acting tasks have a way of turning into fussy activity...
...If it turns out to be // Seraglio or Cost fan tulte, all well and good...
...One cannot make the Don's lasciviousness and malevolence, or the Queen of the Night's fury "real" without some cheapening, any more than one could "explain" the love of Tristan and Isolde...
...Nevertheless, the story does acquire some colorful overtones from Witcover's imagination...
...Witcover is intent on unveiling its psychological meanings by explaining its drama...
...The Masterworks Theater, which plans to produce this Traviata when the third and fourth acts have been assembled, has already set its sights on a Mozart...
...One aspect of the current production that gives me confidence is his good sense—that is, good taste—in retaining the Italian text...
Vol. 51 • June 1968 • No. 13
