|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Brigadoon Done In
| Article
# : |
11213 |
|
|
Section : |
THE ARTS
|
| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1986 |
933 Words |
| Author
: |
Sy Syna
Sy Syna is a drama critic who has been featured in The New
York Theatre Review, The New York Times, the San Diego Union,
the Soho Weekly News, The News World, and The Washington
Times. In addition, he is an educator and has directed
several plays. Sy is currently based in New York City. |
I don't understand [it] myself," the woman behind me in the floorength mink coat said to her companion as we all left the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center. "At some point in my life I liked it."
We had just sat through almost three hours of the New York City Opera's production of Lerner and Loewe's Brigadoon, and, apart from "Fritz" Loewe's meltingly beautiful music, the production was all kinds of awful. It's not that opera singers are unequipped to handle musicals, or that musicals are too lowbrow for their talents. (The lines of distinction between opera, operetta, and musical have become by this time thoroughly blurred.) Rather, one of the key problems with opera singers generally, and with this production specifically, is that most opera singers can't act. Their focus is on their voices: producing those golden, plangent tones. It's ludicrous for them to spout dialogue in execrable Scottish brogues (despite the efforts of dialect coach Luke Yankee) only to drop all semblance of both brogue and character when the orchestra launches into a song's opening bars. Then they turn straight out to the audience, assume that fixed gaze of the concert performer, and adopt the highwayman's approach to art: "Stand and Deliver!"
What this procedure does to the logic of a scene or a character is better imagined than described. Opera buffs, through centuries of conditioning, shrug off this state of affairs. If they do get some reality up there on the stage as, say, with a Maria Calls, it is icing on the cake. Since the plots of most operas defy plausibility, being based for the most part on trumpery of the turn of the century, realism is not the chief mode of this form of art.
On the other hand, musicals since Oklahoma! Have striven to integrate songs, dances, and dialogue into one continuously flowing story, presumably plausible. Now Brigadoon was written forty years ago, when this integrated concept was still new, so it shows its heritage of European operetta in such songs as the lovely duet, "From This Day On." Its other songs sometimes advance the story but often seem stuck in as set pieces.
Agnes De Mille's original choreography, here recreated by James Jamieson, is most often ridiculous and embarrassing. It is filled with affectation and mannerisms, especially many meaningless hand gestures. De Mille sought to marry classical ballet to a Highlands folk idiom, but came up with a pretentious set of pieces, most of which echoed her work on Oklahoma!. About the best that could be said for her choreography is that her
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
