Operetta review: 'Moscow, Cherry Town' by Long Beach Opera

Dmitri Shostakovich isn’t the first name that springs to mind when the conversation turns to musical comedy. In fact, it might be the last. But one of the Soviet composer’s lighter works, an operetta that premiered in 1959 called “Moscow, Cherry Town,” has been dusted off by Long Beach Opera to remind music lovers that there was more to Shostakovich than somber symphonies and dire string quartets.

Presented at the Center Theater in the Long Beach Performing Arts Center on Sunday, the production, which can be seen at the Irvine Barclay Theatre on Wednesday and Santa Monica’s Barnum Hall on Sunday, makes a better case for the enduring charm of Shostakovich’s score than it does for the freshness of the libretto by Soviet humorists Vladimir Mass and Mikhail Chervinsky. As theater this is mildly enjoyable hackwork, noteworthy mostly as a curious historical footnote.

What raises the level is the festive irony of Shostakovich’s music, with its biting commentary hidden behind a smiling facade. LBO artistic and general director Andreas Mitisek capably conducts a modest-sized orchestra through the varying shades of ebullience, from bright optimism to black comedy to some middle ground where communal laughter takes arms again a sea of despair.

Theater review: 'The Pool of Bethesda' by California Repertory Company

Some plays are puzzles that must be fitted together. Such is the case with "The Pool of Bethesda," a 1991 play by English writer Allan Cubitt that has been snatched from obscurity by the adventuresome California Repertory Company.

The play shares its title with a William Hogarth painting that depicts one of Christ's miracles as a healer. The first act places a present-day doctor in 1730s London for the creation of that canvas, for which Hogarth asks the doctor to model as Christ. The doctor hardly has time, however, as he's also swept into a boxing match with another model, a sex act with a Hogarth groupie and other puzzlements.

If you were paying close attention as the story began, you might have figured out that the doctor has a brain tumor. It's causing hallucinations. This becomes clearer in the second act, when the story flips to the present day to show the doctor's real-time interactions with the people who've become mixed up in his visions.

Theater review: 'Southern Comforts' at International City Theatre

The ideal relationship, as spelled out everywhere from the Bible to the daytime talk shows, is built upon the notion of two people coming together as one.

Beautiful idea, tricky math. For 1 + 1 to equal 1, each party must negotiate, compromise and, sometimes, sacrifice.

"Southern Comforts" playfully lays out these challenges while telling a gently comic tale about a sunset-years romance. It's a sweet little story, good for a few chuckles and an "aww" or two. It's been around since 1987 but caught a second wind after Hal Holbrook and Dixie Carter performed it in Florida in 2006.

At International City Theatre, it's performed by two local favorites, Michael Learned and Granville Van Dusen, and directed by a third: Jules Aaron.

Opera review: Philip Glass' 'Akhnaten' at Long Beach Opera at last

Philip Glass’ “Akhnaten,” his third opera, had its premiere in Stuttgart, Germany, in a 1984 Achim Freyer production of such visual splendor it nearly the overwhelmed mesmerizing music and even the ancient Egyptian pharaoh who radicalized ideas about art and god. Glass has written more than 20 operas since then, but "Akhnaten" remains special.

Saturday night, Long Beach Opera presented a new production of “Akhnaten” at Terrace Theater. The adventurous company hardly has the resources to match those of Stuttgart’s state-supported Württembergische Staatstheater, where the Freyer production stayed in the repertory for several years. Long Beach gets just one repeat on March 27. And as he often does, LBO’s artistic and general director, Andreas Mitisek, began the evening Saturday with a whimsical fundraising pitch. Then he put on other hats -- conductor, stage director and production designer.

Mitisek was not responsible for the intermittently splendid choreography. And he had help from a video whizz who created dazzling stage pictures out of thin air. Still, this had the feel, for better and worse, of a one-man show not fully worked out.

It was an unevenly sung, staged and played “Akhnaten.” The budget constraints took their toll in a reduced orchestra with many of the brass parts consigned to an incontinent synthesizer. But none of that could lessen the significance of the first full-scale production in Southern California of a major opera by America’s best-known and most influential opera composer, erasing a shocking cultural omission.

Lou Reed chat and sonic installation coming to Cal State Long Beach

The Carpenter Performing Arts Center at Cal State Long Beach and the university's Art Museum will take a walk on the wild side early next year by featuring rocker Lou Reed as a conversationalist and an avant-garde musician.

The 2011-12 season at the Carpenter Center being announced on Wednesday also includes more traditional fare, including Shirley MacLaine in a Sept. 24 speaking engagement and Broadway veterans Davis Gaines (Sept. 21-22), Rachel York (Feb. 29-March 1, 2012) and Susan Egan (May 6, 2012) as singing headliners.

Whether Reed will do any singing or guitar playing is questionable, since his Jan. 27, 2012 appearance is billed as an “in conversation” evening with Bob Ezrin, who produced Reed’s 1973 album “Berlin,” a semi-narrative piece so laden with despair and degradation that it’s one of rock’s deepest and most sublime downer experiences. Ezrin played a key role in launching rock-as-a-theatrical-spectacle, producing 1970s albums by Alice Cooper, KISS, Pink Floyd’s “The Wall” and the debut solo release of theatrically innovative rocker Peter Gabriel.

Adding to the intrigue: In recent years Reed has been revisiting his 1975 album “Metal Machine Music,” four LP sides of whining, grinding electronic noise that’s celebrated in some quarters as a visionary and influential sally into the avant-garde and condemned in others as a sick, nose-thumbing, temporarily career-stalling joke on his rock audience at a time when Reed’s popularity was at a peak. 

At Long Beach Opera, from Milenski to Mitisek

In 2002, I drove to Long Beach to interview Long Beach Opera’s Michael Milenski, the founder of a little company that despite frequent financial troubles had built a serious reputation for unorthodox and contemporary productions. "My main interest is in opera as a theater art," he told me, "in the spectacle part of opera."

Milenski spoke a great deal about the joys and horrors of putting on shows -– of trying to push the envelope, of fighting conventional wisdom in the opera world, and so on. Overall, he was quite inspiring, even as he was stepping down after more than two decades.

"Southern California has by this point seen my tricks," Milenski said, sitting in the office behind his Craftsman house in Long Beach's Bluff Park. "I'm not interested in repeating myself. Somebody else can take the reins and move forward; Long Beach Opera is in good shape."

Not once do I remember him mention reaching more audiences, connecting with other local groups or with, say, fans of art or theater who don’t think opera is for them. That kind of talk of “outreach” is pretty de rigueur in the arts world.

The Austrian-born Andreas Mitisek, who took over from Milenski after several years there as principal conductor, believes in reaching out, and he’s had some success with it.

When I visited him a few weeks ago, at a sold-out performance of "Medea" -– a 1797 opera he had radically reshaped -– Mitisek was everywhere. He spoke to the audience beforehand about the opera and the way he’d distilled it, his face eerily lit from below despite his cheery demeanor.

In the narrow window between addressing the audience, talking about the company with me and preparing to conduct the orchestra –- he also designed the lighting, which was criticized in a review –- Mitisek seemed to greet by name just about everyone lined up in the lobby. A few minutes after Medea’s 2 p.m. start time, he was still out in the audience, shaking hands. He even laughed off some good-natured teasing about the lighting.

“With operas like we do,” he said that day, “no one is going to come because they know the singer or the opera. “We have an audience that trusts us whatever we do, that knows that it will be something special.”

When he took over fully in 2004, the young Viennese conductor had the difficult position of following up Milenski’s strong personality and reputation.  Sometimes this kind of founder sticks around and makes the life of the successor difficult. But Milenski moved to Northern California years ago, and has stayed out of Mitisek’s way.

“Long Beach Opera is long ago and far away for me,” Milenski told me, “and I haven't followed its fortunes closely. I do know that it is still a vibrant part of the L.A. art scene, and I am very grateful to Andreas for keeping it there.”

To read my Arts & Books article, click here.

-- Scott Timberg

Photo: Andreas Mitisek, the artistic and general director of the Long Beach Opera. Credit: Bob Chamberlin / Los Angeles Times

Philip Glass Festival primer

Once asked by Allen Ginsberg if he had ever experienced a writer’s block, the composer Philip Glass looked at the poet, with whom he collaborated with on a number of occasions, with incredulity. Glass writes and writes, and he has been doing so nonstop for half a century.

So the Philip Glass Festival this month in L.A. and Orange counties cannot possibly get beyond the Glass surface of an extensive and genre-breaking catalog of works.

Still, there will be a lot to take in, with major projects from Pacific Symphony (including a performance of the oratorio “The Passion of Ramakrishna” this week) and Long Beach Opera (the West Coast premiere of “Akhnaten” next week) along with ancillary events at various cinemas, UCLA, LACMA and elsewhere.

For a concise Glassery of his concert music, music theater and film music, click here.

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Back to the future: Akhnaten and Nefertiti meet the Obama

— Mark Swed

Photo: Philip Glass at the Hollywood Bowl in 2009. Credit: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times.

Back to the future: Akhnaten and Nefertiti meet the Obamas

Are the president and first lady reincarnated from Pharaoh Akhnaten and Queen Nefertiti of ancient Egypt? Photos of them side by side on Andre Heath's The Alien Project blog might at least momentarily bewilder even the toughest skeptics of reincarnation and Jungian archetypes.

The mysterious Akhnaten, father of King Tutankhamen, attempted to buck tradition and forge a monotheistic religion during his 17-year reign, ending around 1334 BC.

This month he’s back in the news. Philip Glass’ 1984 opera, “Akhnaten,” the last of his three portrait operas -– (the others are “Einstein on the Beach” and “Satyagraha,” about Gandhi) -- is finally being given its West Coast premiere by Long Beach Opera on March 19 and 27.

It’s all part of an ongoing Philip Glass Festival that continues March 10-12 in the Renée and Henry Segerstrom Concert Hall, with Carl St.Clair conducting several works in a program called “The Passion of Philip Glass.” On Saturday, there’s a talk with the composer at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

While researching the opera, we came across the blog post from 2009 and it piqued our curiosity. Even Glass himself got interested.

Theater review: 'The Hyacinth Macaw' at the Royal Theatre, Queen Mary

Playwright Mac Wellman's ultra-loquacious opacity turns absurdist wordplay into a daunting exercise. California Repertory Company's production of his 1994 "The Hyacinth Macaw" at the Queen Mary in Long Beach is no exception.

The second of Wellman's four "Crowtet" plays, "Macaw" opens as teenaged Susannah (Anna Steers) meets enigmatic Mr. William Hard (Jerry Prell), who enters from the aisle calling her an orphan, "a rootless, yanked-up thing." Eventually, this emissary from "the land of evening" informs Susannah and Dora (Lysa Fox), her wearily domestic mother, that paterfamilias Ray (Craig Anton) is "a duplicate," whom Mr. Hard was sent to replace. Thereafter, Wellman's textual mulligatawny goes into overdrive.

Across-the-map references, stream-of-consciousness reversals and phrases such as "entrechat of enthymemes" collide in an ostensible reverie on illusory self-identity in a declining nation (or planet). It's the kind of logorrhea-afflicted meta-text that has provided American Theatre magazine with copy for decades.

Director Jim Martin oversees a competent academic reading, with designer Cristina Bejarano's Joseph Cornell-inspired set and Nick Davidson's lunar lighting standout décor elements. Given the mountains of verbiage, his actors are heroic, including laconic Simon Brooke as homeless Mad Wu, whose Act 2 advent includes lines such as "The world is complex. It contains little things like tantalum and the large intestine."

Opera review: Long Beach Opera stages abandoned opera in abandoned warehouse

If Long Beach Opera opened its 2011 season Saturday with a radicalized version of Luigi Cherubini’s “Medea” in an abandoned furniture warehouse, the EXPO Building on Atlantic Avenue, well, somebody had to do something like this sooner or later. It would be hard to think of an opera more historically important and with more impressive advocates that has so struggled to find a niche in the repertory.

The original French version, with spoken dialogue, had its premiere in Paris as “Médée” in 1797. A few years later, Beethoven modeled “Fidelio” after it. Loosely based on Euripides, Cherubini’s portrayal of the heroine who murders her two children out of revenge for an unfaithful husband, proved horrifically brutal enough to even shock Parisians in the late stages of their revolution. Yet, in one of opera history’s extraordinary ironies, Cherubini’s lavish choral scenes helped usher in sumptuous French Grand Opera.

At the other extreme, “Carmen” was stylistically another successor of “Médée.” Brahms hailed “Médée” as “the highest peak of dramatic music.” An Italian version, “Medea” (with dialogue turned into recitative), became a star vehicle for Maria Callas. She sang the role often, including at La Scala in 1953 with Leonard Bernstein conducting, and inspired other notable sopranos to briefly take up the opera.

Still, Cherubini -- an excellent craftsman but lacking a Beethovenian-sized vision and personality -- couldn’t catch on. Bernstein never conducted a note of Cherubini with the New York Philharmonic. The composer is considered a quixotic specialty of Riccardo Muti. The EMI recording of the live Callas/Bernstein performance is maybe the scariest display of a woman scorned on disc, yet it is the only major Callas opera set out of print.

Enter audacious Long Beach Opera. Andreas Mitisek, LBO’s artistic and general director, has rethought the work. He based his version on the original French “Médée,” leaving in some of the original dialogue, but also adding bits of Euripides’ “Medea” and Pierre Corneille’s 1635 play “Médée.” He and soprano Suzan Hanson, the production’s Medea, made their own colloquial singing translation into English.