Vancouver Opera's Nixon in China an artful triumph
Technically, this is politics, so I posted it in the DH. Click on the URL to enlarge the big stage picture. That HAS to be the Kissinger character on the RHS.
http://www.straight.com/article-2977...artful-triumph
Vancouver Opera's Nixon in China an artful triumph
By Janet Smith
Nixon in China
A Vancouver Opera production. At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Saturday, March 13. Continues March 16, 18, and 20
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The Vancouver Opera’s ambitious Canadian premiere of Nixon in China is a surprisingly artful, nothing-less-than-stunning reimagination of an event that, on paper, sounds like something you’d see on PBS’s American Experience.
The team’s stylishly abstracted vision puts both a bold new stamp on the opera, and yet perfectly expresses John Adams’s and Alice Goodman’s elliptical score and libretto. From the moment the orchestra launches into Adams’s endless, intricate repetitions, there’s never a slip up, and the mesmerizing music chugs along right through the swoony, Stravinskian final act.
Richard and Pat Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to the then-closed Red China is unlikely material for an opera, but the event is just a springboard for a surprisingly introspective look at the inner psyches of the summit’s main players. Dry history becomes something artistic and dreamlike. You have to be open to the opera’s postmodern shifts from real-time action into memories or imagined worlds—say, a silk-robe-clad Henry Kissinger suddenly appearing in an agitprop ballet. Or Richard and Pat Nixon doing the mashed potato while Chairman and Madame Mao look like they’re recreating the Jack Rabbit Slim dance sequence from Pulp Fiction.
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It pays to know your history—Nixon in China debuted in 1987, only 15 years after the trip, and it’s been more than two decades since. But with China becoming such a global economic force now, and our relationship building, it’s illuminating to look back on a time when we were worlds apart.
Director Michael Cavanagh's production works so captivatingly well because it hits the right tone while avoiding caricature. Baritone Robert Orth, a veteran of the Richard Nixon role, never descends into jowl-shaking cliches. Baritone ChenYe Yuan, the only Asian amid the leads, brings appropriate gravitas to Chou En-lai (Mao’s philosophical premier) and bass-baritone Thomas Hammons provides the comic relief as the sourpussed, and disturbingly randy, Kissinger.
But the women are just as important, with the opera playing up their contrasting roles. Soprano Sally Dibblee is a perfect Pat, all stand-by-her-man propriety while being exposed to an unimaginable world of revolutionary women (her naively sweet refrain: “I treat each day like Christmas”). And soprano Tracy Dahl’s Madame Mao, who pulls off a showstopping ode to her husband’s red book at the end of Act II, is as shrill and powerful as Adams intended.
They don’t just have to act convincingly: each performer has to manoeuver brutal, ever-shifting time signatures and repetitive phrasing. Just listen to Orth stab away at the line “Who, who, who, who, who are our enemies?”.
Meanwhile, scenic designer Erhard Rom and projections designer Sean Nieuwenhuis conjure endlessly inventive tableaux. Red podiums and chairs are exaggerated to towering heights. News reels play out, fragmented acrossed placards or mismatched scrolls that hang from the ceiling. By the end, everything is an abstract mess of memories and afterthought, with a banquet table piled high, red ribbons stretching at odd angles, and a slanted banner morphing Nixon spookily into Mao.
About the only misstep is the Spirit of ’76, a strangely two-dimensional plane that gets rolled out in the opening moments, but you could argue that it heightens the abstract feel.
Still, the opera’s success is rooted in that ever-driving, cinematic music, performed crisply under the assured baton of visiting maestro John DeMain (who conducted Houston Grand Opera’s 1987 premiere). You could close your eyes and revel in a score that can range from the quiet incantations of Philip Glass to the blasting drama of Angelo Badalamenti. But then you’d miss out on the kind of eye candy that’s more opium dream than history lesson.
