Due to my weird schedule, I was forced to cram watching the final performances of two shows into this afternoon and evening: Skylark Opera doing Sigmund Romberg’s “Desert Song,” and the Guthrie doing Tony Kushner & Jeanine Tesori’s “Caroline or Change.” What to say? Well there is a bit to say…and on my mind at 10 a.m. was what the late Joe Carter was saying about spirituals on the radio.
The first thing to say is that technical standards in musical theatre are high and continue to grow. Although Minnesota still has a troublingly provincial mentality we have gifted and well-trained actors and singers all over the place. In the case of “Desert Song,” witness bang-up singing, good orchestra, over-the-top silly comedy and er…scanty direction and a disconcerting tendency on the part of the set to roll up in places where solidity was required (rocks and walls.) But hey, it’s an entertainment and they played the heck out of it. I can now say I have seen a Romberg operetta and I see how easily the tastes of the past become…well, the tastes of the past.
As for “Caroline,” I am one of the three Minnesotans who doesn’t like it much. The performers were fantastic, and provided many pleasant and heartfelt moments. The band was great. My objections fall on the heads of the writers and are roughly these:
1) What are the white people doing in this play?
Whose play is it? If it is the maid Caroline’s play as it seems, given the um title and her big second-act apotheosis, why is she a cipher? Despite the glimpses we get of her home life, her relationship with her girlfriend and her big first-act song about passing a law, she is essentially an Angry Underpaid Black Woman and that’s it. The time the audience could have spent getting a sense of her struggle, her relationships with other characters or I dunno, anything that would have built sympathy and identification is spent on Presentations–The Little Boy’s Family, The Assassination of JFK, The Clever Singing Appliances etc.
The white-people music is a vaguely European/Jewish pastiche, entirely forgettable, and the black-people music–with the exception of a couple of great songs– is a series of pentatonics in varying keys, tempos and meters.The through composition, while difficult and well-executed, didn’t pay off for a number of reasons, including lyric problems and thematic confusion.
2) What is up with these lyrics?
A couple women down the row from me were zealously consulting a copy of the script during the intermission. If this were an un-surtitled German opera, there’d be some reason for this. But this show is in the vernacular. Every ensemble song was textually indistinct. The actors were amplified. Their diction was fine. The problem was the writing, which tried to do too much and accomplished nothing as a result. As for the rhymes (those I could distinguish) many were faked up–adding an adjective or catch-phrase to the end of a couplet so as to achieve a rhyme–and many were not well set.
The piece is muddled and consequently I feel muddled having seen it. And I ask myself, apart from the spectacular aura of the performance, what is the big deal?
Rather than going into a rant about bourgeois art…
I’ll say this about Mr. Carter’s theories of spirituals. Spirituals are manifestly about several things, including God, race, history, identity. In his interview/showcase, Mr. Carter dealt with these themes from a concert performer’s perspective. So he talked about the codes (eg freedom=temporal and spiritual freedom) and the cultural bases of the songs, and gave some mannered but very affecting readings of the songs.
My take on the spirituals is a little different than his. I’m a church musician, and I play these all the time for people to sing. As I play, I listen to them with a composer’s ears.
What sets them apart from other hymns is the way they are constructed. The music is not a mnemonic aid to the text, but supports it in a deeper way. Although almost all the spirituals are strophic, infelicities of scansion are absent. Harmonic and melodic movement in the great spirituals is entirely united with meaning. This illustrates the great genius of centuries of oral tradition.
