Long Beach Opera / Vélemények

A memorable passage in Marcel Proust’s monumental novel “In Search of Lost Time” (“À la recherche du temps perdu”) describes a beachside hotel dining room as “an immense and wonderful aquarium” stocked full of wealthy people who appear as a variegated assortment of strange fish and exotic mollusks.

Benjamin Makino, placed out of the audience’s sight, conducted an appropriately fluid performance. Dan Weingarten made lighting fit for a watery realm. The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation footed the bill with a special grant for a new Long Beach Opera series, “Outer Limits,” of which “Paper Nautilus” was the first.

n the heels of Valentine’s Day, Long Beach Opera offers a celebration of love in which a dreamer and a lover are transported to a dreamscape where a rose becomes the unlikely object of undying affection. Pulitzer Prize finalist Kate Soper’s new opera is universal in its subject matter, and daring in its execution. But a combination of pretentiousness and novelty without dramatic or musical grounding might give a false impression of quality. Perhaps a libretto’s music itself doesn’t have to be memorable — or even pleasant — if the artistic intent is solid and the substance comes from within different aspects of the piece. But the meandering story — which hacks up and spits out Guillaume de Lorris & Jean de Meun’s medieval poem Le Roman de la Rose —traffics in easy platitudes without saying very much that is cohesive or insightful about love. Let’s consider composer/librettist Soper’s own words: “‘All the arts of love are here enclosed.’ So promises the unnamed protagonist of the 13th-century epic Le Roman de la Rose. Plenty of love-talk indeed follows — but so do hundreds of lines about gender, astrology, fashion, war, law, God, the nature of language, and the concept of free will. What are we supposed to take from such profligate subject-hopping in an ostensible romance? Maybe the notion that ‘love’ is a good receptacle of the messy complexity of the human condition in general. As, perhaps, is opera.” But the original poem was not a receptacle. It was so successful and timeless because of its luscious and romantic philosophical meditation on love. The poem may have been long, but the main character went on a clear journey, learning and musing and making capable decisions along the way. In Soper’s Rose, the main character of the poem is now two, represented by the Dreamer (Broadway veteran Lucas Steel) and the Lover (divine mezzo-soprano Tivoli Trolear). The Dreamer isn’t entirely necessary as written; he could serve as a guide, as a distraction, as a narrator, or as a stronger love interest, but dramatically mostly serves as a plot device, and a self-satisfied one. The poem’s dozens of allegorical characters have, for the stage, been condensed down to only a handful. The God of Love (Phillip Bullock) holds court over Lady Reason (Anna Schubert), Shame (Laurel Irene), Idleness (Tiffany Towsend), and Pleasure (Bernardo Bermudez) in a locus amoenus something like a modern take on the Elysian Fields with a disco ball. The Dreamer and Lover interact with each in airy exchanges. The performers are clearly capable across the board, but Idleness and Pleasure aren’t given much substantive work to do. Meanwhile, Shame’s musical track could — in kindness — be called brave, or — in honesty — be called an affront to the senses. The impulse to compose a character’s musicality almost entirely with discordant shrillness and screeching is at least interesting, but the unorthodox approach wears out its welcome fast. Though, the stylistic autotune that accompanies her and Lady Reason’s vocals provide a much welcomed auditory theme — the most concrete in a chaotic soundscape. Production design elements strangely clash. Molly Irelan’s larger-than-life costume design is fantastical and bright, but seems to have been developed entirely separately from Prairie T. Trivuth’s starkly Instagramable scenic design, making a confused visual world rather than a cohesive one. Pablo Santiago’s lighting is oddly basic in the first half of the show, though the second act delivers some playfulness and seduction. The peak of all three designers’ work is when they all work together harmoniously, as Shame in a glistening suit of armor peers into Narcissus’s pool. In the original poem, the Narcissus myth is referenced as a contextual warning, even as the narrator espies a beautiful rose bush. The invocation of Narcissus has an entirely different context for modern audiences, as narcissism in relationships is a prevailing theme on social media. Beware narcissism, the opera warns, referencing reflections (though without supporting the omen in any on-stage action). Ultimately, the opera does remain true to the original poem’s message: humans have no power of choice in matters of love. As the God of Love sank an arrow into Narcissus himself, so he sank one into the narrator/lover, and so he sinks his arrows into us all as the whim strikes. Loving a rose makes as much sense as loving anything of beauty. Thus, even in such a messy wonderland as this onstage musing, we can grapple with our own relationships with shame, reason, and love.

Kate Soper’s “The Romance of the Rose,” which had its long-delayed premiere at Long Beach Opera, showcases her signature quick-shifting eclecticism. SAN PEDRO, Calif. — “What is art?” the composer Kate Soper asked at the beginning of “Ipsa Dixit,” her last big stage work, from 2016. In her tender, whip-smart new opera, “The Romance of the Rose,” which premiered this weekend at Long Beach Opera, she quotes a chunk of Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” that poses another query: “What is love?” No one has ever accused Soper of shying away from the big questions. And her works go about answering them studiously but sensuously — with earnestness, wit, whimsy, self-awareness and music that ranges freely among, for a start, Baroque madrigals, power ballads and barbed modernism. In “Ipsa Dixit,” she answers the question “What is art?” with, more or less, the piece’s title: It is whatever I say it is. In “The Romance of the Rose,” the answer to “What is love?” is something like: It’s a lot of conflicting things, in a scary, delicate balance. It’s every thing. Over a decade in the making and based on the medieval epic of the same name — nearly 22,000 lines of octosyllabic Old French couplets — “The Romance of the Rose” adapts some of the poem’s strands while adding inventions of Soper’s own. (She usually writes her librettos, often with interpolations from other authors, ancient to modern.) In an allegorical garden, the Dreamer guides the Lover as she pines for a rose: “What a perfect symbol for a dream of love!” Aroused and confused, the Lover is set upon by the God of Love, Lady Reason and Shame — and all have advice that’s at once persuasive and suspect, compelling and incomplete, about how the Lover should feel, about what love means. As the loose, stylized, funny, often poignant plot progresses, these allegorical characters seem to lose their moorings; in Soper’s world, even stock figures can’t be trusted to maintain their points of view. (This isn’t, or isn’t just, the old battle between head and heart.) The fatal seductiveness of narcissism; ambivalence about performing; the nature of reality — it’s all, ambitiously, here. I should insert what has become a standard caveat about this composer: Describing “The Romance of the Rose” might make it sound dry and bookish, but it isn’t. Soper’s text is so sly and eloquent — “Since the truth’s thus riddled with such tears, the essential question’s not ‘What is the truth?’ but ‘Who cares?’” — and her music so eclectic and quick-shifting that her work keeps you engaged even when you’re a bit baffled. Like her other stage pieces, “Rose” is high culture and low, talky but agile, brainy but — and! — feeling. Few composers are as interested in, or as gifted at, exploring the transitions and the middle ground between speaking and singing, which gives Soper’s works a familial relationship to book-based musical theater. There’s something of “Hadestown” in this new piece’s opera-pop-Broadway amalgam and mythological milieu, even though Soper’s vision is less folksy and more crystalline — more like Sondheim in its precision and cleverness, its laughing-crying lucidity about life’s complications, if not in its sound. Her vision of musicals extends from sumptuous golden-age lyricism through “Phantom of the Opera”-style rock belting to contemporary confessional intimacy, though she’s also unafraid of astringency, complexity and moments of plain noise. There is also the lovely, pared-down tunefulness that gives away Soper’s early-career roots as an aspiring singer-songwriter: She writes in an online essay about “The Romance of the Rose” that the germ of an aching torch-song duet for Idleness and Pleasure (two minor characters who nod toward a Greek chorus), a highlight of the score, dates back to those days. Like a true singer-songwriter, Soper trusts economy of musical expression. Christopher Rountree, Long Beach Opera’s music director, conducts an ensemble of nine, but often the instrumental textures are sparer than even those modest forces. In one memorable passage at the end of the first act, the Dreamer’s elegy is accompanied by the slow calligraphy of a solo viola. It’s Long Beach Opera’s luck to have ended up with the piece after its premiere — planned for April 2020 at Montclair State University’s Peak Performances series — was canceled by the pandemic. Long Beach, which in 2019 premiered Anthony Davis’s “The Central Park Five” before it went on to win a Pulitzer Prize, has had some internal rockiness in the past year over its commitment to inclusion efforts but also a new artistic director, James Darrah, who has staged “The Romance of the Rose” at the Warner Grand Theater here. Darrah’s production is a mixture of scrappiness and chic, and emphasizes the otherworldliness of Soper’s conception. Prairie T. Trivuth’s set, lit starkly by Pablo Santiago, depicts the garden as a pristine white courtyard dotted with potted plants and, eventually, dripping with blood. Molly Irelan’s costumes, with period cuts, vivid fabrics and sparkling touches, further the opera’s mood of pert pastiche. Its Baroque references connect medieval France to the glittery splendor of 17th-century allegorical court masques. In keeping with Soper’s stylistic variety, the cast comes from a range of musical backgrounds but shares a commitment to making the bountiful, erudite text legible. (The supertitles, for once, aren’t really necessary.) As the Dreamer, Lucas Steele has a sweet voice and Disney-prince ingenuousness with a self-referential wink. Radiating a charming mixture of naïveté and intelligence, Tivoli Treloar has a light mezzo-soprano flexible enough to convey all the Lover’s changes of perspective. As the God of Love, Phillip Bullock travels from airy falsetto to basso profundo depths. Anna Schubert is a fiercely articulate Lady Reason, Laurel Irene a punkish Shame. Tiffany Townsend and Bernardo Bermudez bring rich-toned gusto to Idleness and Pleasure, here a couple of louche lounge lizards. “The Romance of the Rose” isn’t perfect. The piece experiments with giving each of the three main allegorical foils a distinctive live-electronic vocal processing identity — Lady Reason, angular vocoding; the God of Love, echoey reverb; Shame, angry distortion. But even if it had been more perfectly executed, this conceit feels like a complication too many in an already complicated piece. Soper’s previous major stage works, “Here Be Sirens” (2014) and “Ipsa Dixit,” were substantial single acts. Conceiving “The Romance of the Rose” in two acts was Soper setting a new challenge for herself, not just in length but also in structure. What, in theater, should prompt an intermission, and what brings the audience back for more? What hunger in the first act does a second act satisfy; what crisis is resolved? These are questions that “The Romance of the Rose” doesn’t entirely solve. The second act feels like more of the same, with a somewhat blurrier version of the characters having the same debates they had before the break. (The production could be clearer in the final half, too.) Discussing the piece later with the friend I brought to the performance, I thought that Shame, which we learn at the beginning is our “urge for self-annihilation” — “an emissary from the gut to foil both the head and the heart” — might have been more effectively introduced as a crisis at the end of the first act. The war that ensues between her and the rest of the dramatis personae might then have given the second act higher and sharper stakes. Shame’s role in the first act as an equal point in the allegorical triangle surrounding the Lover might be true to the original poem. But in the opera this figure feels like the odd one out, rather than the singular nihilistic force opposing everyone else onstage. It’s a criticism, sure. But the fact that my friend and I spent hours going over what we enjoyed and what we might tweak about “The Romance of the Rose” gives you a sense of the piece and its marvels, its ability to stick in the mind and soul. After all, a lesson of the opera is that, for better or worse, we can’t help wanting to perfect the things we love.