6/10/2023 0 Comments Footlight players porgy and bessThis spared the audience that unhappy spectacle of a group of players miming anguish or ecstasy, but merely succeeding in looking embarrassingly over-exposed. In fact they often turned away from the audience, truly effacing themselves. When a principal character became important the chorus assumed an unobtrusively static grouping that led the eye to the centre of interest. In choruses the stage was alive with movement, thus relieving the predominantly amateur cast of the anxiety of individual attention. I admired particularly Ella Gerber's tact in handling the crowd scenes. This made "My Man's Gone Now" and "Oh Doctor Jesus" the clearest refutation of the view that "Porgy And Bess" is no more opera than "Oklahoma!". Delores Ivory brought a striking nobility to Serena and responded to the idiom of the music as perhaps only a negress could. Torchy, self-willed and predatory, her every movement balletic and conveying delight in her own body, here was a marvellously complete Bess. Martha Flowers' Bess was no ordinary woman. These last moments of the opera need the conviction that he put into his portrayal. His simple adoration of Bess in Act I was credibly transformed into the determination to follow her to New York. This was the most important single contribution to the opera. Inia Te Wiata's Porgy was superbly sung, strongly characterised and completely lacked self-pity. Performances of real power are necessary to support a bold production, and Ella Gerber was well served by her principals. No social realist would have the inhabitants of Catfish Row respond with comic unanimity to the arrival of the cops, and their interrogations. Ella Gerber took no socially realistic view of Catfish Row, rather she used all her evident theatrical genius to suspend belief and tell her story in bold images. The action drove forward, maintaining a firm theatrical reality. There were other very successful moments, but more important was the overall coherence of the production. This was theatrical magic as the music swelled and Bess, dazzling in a scarlet costume, high-stepped off with never a backward glance at Catfish Row. Her love for Porgy was an act that we only partly believed, it was no surprise to see her later succumb to the entreaties of Sportin' Life and strut exultantly off - hips swinging, torchy and provocative. She was theatrical, narcissistic and ephemeral in her passions. The anxiety that we felt accorded with Martha Flowers' overall characterisation of Bess. Then there was Bess's disturbing self-absorption even when declaring to Porgy that she was his woman. Such strong symbolism works in a committed production. Serena's "My Man's Gone Now" was sung with the stage drowned in dark blue light, ending with Serena supported by two women in a Crucifixion pose. Inia Te Wiata's strong voice and marvellously clear acting made a direct appeal. Ella Gerber's production often did just that.įor instance, when Porgy sang "I Got Plenty O' Nuttin' " the stage filled with his simple faith. "Rigoletto" needs to make your blood run cold. But for the true operatic experience the production must make valid theatre of the libretto. This permits performances of Mozart's comic operas in which the sophisticated wit of the music is destroyed by heavy buffoonery in the acting, or of Verdi's blazing dramas which are marred by theatrical timidity. They consider opera to be an unreal medium in which characters sing rather than speak. One school of thought can accept failure in operatic production and performances pro- vided that the music is well played and sung. This in marked contrast to last year's "Rigoletto" which was old-fashioned and lumpy, stolidly remaining "out there" beyond the footlights. It had gutsy vigour and a vibrant theatricality, reaching out across the proscenium arch and drawing us into the world of Catfish Row. Here the audience is swept along by the production, recognising the presence of an insight greater than its own, and willingly suspending judgment until the production can be considered as a whole.Įlla Gerber's production of "Porgy And Bess" for the New Zealand Opera Company brought me closer to this true theatrical experience than almost all other live productions that I have seen in New Zealand. The latter is the true theatrical experience, the only one that can lead to catharsis. The former experience can be enervating, requiring that the audience works hard to gain satisfaction (either intellectual or visceral) by struggling against the received experience. There are two broad poles of theatrical experience: one in which the audience, recognising the inadequacies of performance and production, strives to mentally create an ideal presentation whilst viewing a flawed one the other in which the audience is led into a new world, mapped out coherently and convincingly by performances and a production which establish their own validity.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |