Past Production Reviews
3While watching “Porgy And Bess” from high in the cheap seats, the pop songs fit in and the mix of folk, spirituals and pop are completely unique, and the spirituals have never sounded better. And it is the spirituals that push the production into the third and best one I’ve seen, and, probably the best of all times. Serena, the soprano Latonia Moore’s, “My Man’s Gone Now,” was beyond being heartbreaking, it was also as an indictment of poverty and how one can’t even grieve in peace. Serena’s husband is killed by Crown (Alfred Walker) and unless she can raise $25 to bury him, his body will be given to hospitals to be cut apart and studied. I’ve heard Ella Fitzgerald’s “My Man Is Gone” and I’ve heard Latonia Moore’s keening, distraught recent recording of the same production released December, 2019. But watching Moore’s devastating performance in person is an experience of a lifetime. I live in a small apartment building, six apartments on a floor, and I heard a man sshout in horror a couple of evenings ago, and discovered later his mother had just died, “she has no pulse,” he screamed, and then a lot of commotion and then nothing. In his voice, I could hear the horror of fresh death, it is something that can’t be faked, and it is something Moore manages to add to her voice, not just a wide ranged smooth from sky high wails to low down growls of ineluctable horror, but the sound we make when we discover someone we love has just died. It stopped the show and was the highlight of the evening.
If it's not broke, don't fix it!" Most clichés gain their status through being true, but that one is honoured in the breach as often as in its application, the desire to sell something new (even if it isn't really) as addictive to the vendor as it is to the buyer. Not always though. "25 years of Richard Eyre's La Traviata" is emblazoned (in gold, no less) on the cast list and the programme compiles a Who's Who of opera stars who have sung the roles in that quarter century - it was staged here as recently as January after all! So you've every right to expect something good, something slick, something that can fill hundreds of seats on wet Tuesday night a week before Christmas. And that's what you get.
Apart from Oropesa’s Violetta, the superb tenor Liparit Avetisyan gives a convincing performance as the passionate Alfredo, a role that is rarely achieved in operatic productions. The German baritone Christian Gerhaher in the role of Giorgio Germont, the man responsible for the break-up, also offers an impressive performance. The entire leading cast as well as the rest of the cast secured the narrative’s realism that is so brilliantly embedded in its musical fabric, which translates on stage in a manner that even those not musically trained, gain a satisfying musical and dramatic experience. The stamp of the director of this revival, Pedro Ruibeiro, is much in evidence. The dramatic performance, highlighting the conflict between father-son, the shift in Germont’s attitude towards Violetta, the ‘saintly courtesan’, is made clear in their first encounter in Act II. His hard tone and demeanour towards this fallen reveal early signs of softening and gestures of respect. The social norms layered with hypocrisy are superbly probed musically and dramatically in that first encounter between the two. The dramatic tension is given momentary relief by the colourful and beautifully performed gypsy’s singing dancing and the matadors. They lighten up the atmosphere before the mood darkens.The evening, in its entirety, can be summed up as memorable
