Battle of Wills
Two new productions in Santa Cruz explored Shakespeare's comic and tragic veins
For a variety of reasons, it can sometimes be easy to forget just how funny Shakespeare’s plays are. A lot of the jokes and puns, particularly the bawdy ones, rely on slangy double meanings or pronunciations that have become blurred with time. Too many actors and directors don’t fully know how to nail the humor, especially while rattling off pentameter at speed. And some of the material wasn’t all that funny to begin with (lookin’ at you, Comedy of Errors).
But in a sleek, well-oiled production like the Much Ado About Nothing that’s now playing as part of Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s summer season, the laughs roll right out. Director Charles Pasternak, the festival’s artistic director as well as member of the acting ensemble, bathes everything in the rosy light of romantic comedy, making room for broad slapstick, tender whimsy, and everything in between. A lively and resourceful cast juggles the Shakespearean language nimbly, letting the script come alive without a hint of mannerism or hesitation.
The result is everything you want in a Shakespearean comedy. It flows easily from scene to scene, wafted along on an airstream of wordplay and various sorts of knavery. The setting is a 1920s seaside resort, which allows a chorus of parasol-wielding bathing beauties to open the evening with a lovely full-harmony setting of “Sigh no more,” the play’s musical centerpiece (it comes back, happily, for a reprise at its traditional spot in Act 2). Beyond that, though, time and place make no demands; the action might as well be unfolding in Renaissance Italy as anywhere else.
The point of Much Ado, as always, is to watch Beatrice and Benedick deploy their waspish wit to zing one another until they fall in love. Charlotte Boyce Munson and Jono Eiland handle these responsibilities splendidly. In their hands, the volleys of wisecracks and witticisms go back and forth with pinpoint timing; it’s like watching two first-rate tennis players at their game. Even the dropped balls can be hilarious; Eiland and Pasternak play Benedick’s use of the sobriquet “Lady Tongue” for Beatrice as a failure of his imagination, prompting him to bustle offstage in embarrassed self-reproach.
As usual, it’s hard to care quite as much about the remaining characters, but that’s not for want of effort. Allie Pratt plays the wronged Hero with an abundance of sympathy, and Will Block’s Claudio is so baby-faced, and seems to operate on such an elemental moral level, that it’s easy to buy his vile treatment of the woman he purports to love. Company stalwart Mike Ryan brings tragic heft to the role of Leonato, Hero’s father; the villainous Don John is played by Paige Lindsey White in a deathly near-whisper of malignant ennui; and Patty Gallagher gets every laugh that’s coming to her as the malaprop-spewing constable Dogberry.
Alongside Much Ado on the festival schedule is Macbeth, which unfortunately offers each of the former’s virtues in inverted form. Where the comedy is spry and translucent, the tragedy is ponderous and shadowy, laden down with broodings on its own significance. Director Paul Mullins stages things at a somber pace, as if waiting for all the shadows from one line to dissipate before the next one can be spoken. Dan Donohue and Paige Lindsey White play Mr. and Mrs. M (the two plays feature nearly the same complement of actors, shuffled around and sometimes in heavy disguise), and both of them deliver their lines with the same halting quaver.
The result may be intended as spooky (and rightly so!), but it’s often pretty dull. This may just be me, but I prefer a Macbeth that moves with taut, crisp heedlessness, because that reflects the work’s pitiless dramatic logic. It’s a drama about the implacability of consequences, about the ease with which an honorable man — which is what Macbeth is when the curtain rises — can be caught up in a chain of inevitabilities.
The play, from this perspective, presents a homily on actions have consequences in its purest form. Once you even think about killing the king, the deed is as good as done. That in turn means you have to kill his attendants, and then — whoops — your best friend is a goner, along with his son and heir if you can catch him, and by that point you’re so deep in blood that full-on tyranny is unavoidable. Nothing happens in Macbeth that isn’t set in motion in the first few moments, and a thoughtful production should make the audience feel the moral tendons that connect the opening to the play’s conclusion. The Santa Cruz production leaves you cooling your heels.
Much Ado About Nothing and Macbeth: Santa Cruz Shakespeare, through Aug. 30. www.santacruzshakespeare.org.
Elsewhere:
Lily Janiak, San Francisco Chronicle: “In this production of Macbeth, one of Shakespeare’s keenest political insights comes into focus. Just look how vulnerable hereditary monarchy is, the playwright seems to say. If you’re a kingdom’s mightiest warrior, and your king looks weak, it’d almost look weird or unmanly if you didn’t try to usurp the throne.”
Christina Waters, Good Times: “From the opening song, performed by sunbathers lolling in the sun, to the ending proclamations of love, honor, and dancing, Much Ado About Nothing was perfect. The thoroughly Shakespearean tale of masquerading lovers, and men in groups upending the path of true love in the name of misplaced comradeship, gave last weekend’s audience a rollicking afternoon.”
Handel, with care
When you take over the artistic leadership of a long-standing and beloved organization, one strategy for success is to start out with a terrific performance of the repertoire your predecessor was most closely identified with — just to show you’re not afraid. It’s like punching the biggest guy in the prison yard on your first day, except without the resulting injuries.
Peter Whelan’s first season as music director of the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra & Chorale got underway last Thursday with a superb semi-staged rendition of Handel’s opera Tolomeo, an outsized feast of vocal and instrumental beauty. This was precisely the vein of 18th-century music that was the specialty of Nicholas McGegan, the organization’s longtime former music director, and perhaps the voice of prudence might have counseled Whelan to leave it alone just a little longer.
But where’s the fun in that? This production — an amuse-bouche briefly offered to patrons in the Bay Area and the Caramoor Center in Katonah, N.Y., before the season opens officially in November with Handel’s Alexander’s Feast — made as dashing an opening as one could wish. The orchestra sounded suave and focused, and the cast delivered Handel’s brilliant arias and duets in an unbroken sequence of expressive grandeur.
Candor compels me to admit that it took me a little while to come around to Whelan’s interpretive style. Much of what I know, or think I know, about how Handel’s music can sound is derived from 30 years of listening to McGegan’s performances. That conductor’s distinctive approach — light-footed, ultra-dry, with an emphasis on transparent instrumental textures and sharp textural edges — has come to seem like the music’s natural aspect. (This is a byproduct of long music directorships; MTT, similarly, taught me to hear Mahler a certain way, as did Donald Runnicles with Wagner.)
Whelan’s conception of this music, by contrast, is bigger, richer, bolder. He favors slightly slower tempos and meatier textures than McGegan did, and the results probe the expressive depths of the score. It’s not as though there’s much dramatic substance to unearth in Tolomeo — the plot is a sillier-than-usual roundelay of unrequited love and pointless disguises featuring Cleopatra’s two sons. Director James Darrah Black, tasked with making something theatrical of it, rifled through his ideas file and came up with packing crates and mirrored cubes.
Still, each individual number creates its own emotional universe — that’s the M.O. in Baroque opera — and the singers rose magnificently to the challenge of depicting those worlds of sorrow or defiance or exultation. In the title role, countertenor Aryeh Nussbaum Cohen delivered a fountain of tonal color and effortlessly precise coloratura. Sopranos Lauren Snouffer and Nicole Heaston have both appeared regularly in the Bay Area, but never that I can recall with such blazing dramatic force or musical eloquence. Countertenor Kangmin Justin Kim sounded recessive and tentative, but bass-baritone Dashon Burton held up his end as a fearsome, robust villain. Whelan’s tenure could not have got off to a more auspicious beginning; I can’t wait to see what further treasures await.
Elsewhere:
Michael Zwiebach, San Francisco Chronicle/SFCV: “Though the opera is rarely performed, Tolomeo is defined by gorgeous melodies, with no weak link in its varied procession of arias. For an opera that deals with loss, separation and external threats, there is also a surprising emphasis on pastoral tropes, with plenty of singing about waves, breezes and the like.”
Patrick Vaz, The Reverberate Hills: “The staging was at its best when it worked on a symbolic, poetic, signifying level, which is where the striking stage pictures would come in; where it fell down was with the basic what is going on here stuff.”
Cryptic clue of the week
From Out of Left Field #330 by Henri Picciotto and me, sent to subscribers last Thursday:
Observing contest with fly (7)
Last week’s clue:
Protagonist of The Handmaid’s Tale conceals conclusion of rescue bid (7)
Solution: OFFERED
Protagonist of The Handmaid’s Tale: OFFRED
conceals: goes around
conclusion of rescue: E
bid: definition
Coming up
• Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music: The annual Santa Cruz celebration of new orchestral music launches its 64th season this weekend with the traditional profusion of premieres and returning favorites. Under the title We the Dreamers, music director Cristian Măcelaru leads the orchestra in commissioned world premieres by Clarice Assad, Vivian Fung, Sarah Hennies, and Pedro Emanuel Pereira, along with music by Philip Glass, Lisa Bielawa, Elena Kats-Chernin, and more. July 31-Aug. 9, Civic Auditorium, Santa Cruz. www.cabrillomusic.org.
• West Edge Opera: Every summer, the innovative East Bay company presents a trio of staged works both old and new. On the calendar for this year’s festival are Handel’s Rinaldo with countertenor Kyle Tingzon in the title role; The Turn of the Screw, Benjamin Britten’s beautifully compact chamber opera on the Henry James ghost story; and American Apollo by composer Damien Geter and librettist Lila Palmer, about the relationship between John Singer Sargent and Thomas Eugene McKeller, a Black hotel worker who served as the painter’s muse. Aug. 1-16, Oakland Scottish Rite Center. www.westedgeopera.org
I thought Michael Zwiebach's review in SFCV/SF Chronicle contained a gratuitous swipe at SF Opera, which then turned into the headline in the Chron.