La Clemenza di Tito Mozart’s penultimate opera is music fit for a king, certainly appropriate since it was commissioned to celebrate the Holy Roman Emperor Leopold II’s coronation as King of Bohemia in September 1791. The celebrations were hastily planned, leaving only about two months to ready Prague for the royal treatment. An opera seria was required, but when approached to compose it on such short notice, imperial kapellmeister Salieri turned down the offer. The producer of the festivities knew only one composer in Vienna who could do justice to such a quick project, Herr Mozart. Working from an already written libretto by the grand master of opera seria, Pietro Metastasio, Mozart and his adapter, Mazzola, quickly churned out an opera worthy of honoring the “enlightened emperor.” The opera found early favor, but got swamped by his other masterworks that swept the international scene. Almost two centuries would pass before the intrinsic beauties of the score were fully appreciated. In Opera in the Heights’ production of this Mozart rarity, interim music director Eiki Isomura led a thrilling performance. The OH orchestra sounded splendid. Two and a half hours, which includes intermission, flew by as we were presented with a modern-dress rendition, plain, simple, elegant, of this old tale made totally fresh by Mozart’s evanescent imagination. Emperor Tito (tenor Zach Avery) is the sweetest man in Rome, beloved and honored by his citizens for his truthfulness and unimpeachable sense of justice. But when he chooses a wife, he rebuffs his predecessor’s daughter, vain and ambitious Vitellia (soprano Celeste Fraser). She goes ballistic and wants blood — his. Seducing Tito’s best friend, Sesto (mezzo Vera Savage), Vitellia convinces the hapless man to assassinate Tito. There’s a subplot about adviser Annio (mezzo Jennifer Crippen) and his love, Servilia (soprano Theadora Cottarel), a bump in the plot that inspires Mozart to pen some ravishing love duets and good-bye arias but is basically filler. Publio (bass baritone Justin Hopkins), head of the Praetorian Guard, is there whenever someone needs to be arrested. The emerald cast is one finely tuned ensemble. Tito’s a rather thankless role, too good to be true, but Act II has him questioning loyalty and tormented by betrayal in some of the most transparent continuo sections alternating with full orchestra. (Throughout, the harpsichord playing by Catherine Schaefer was always elegant.) Avery’s crisp tenor shone best when his character had something juicy to sing. Vitellia is certainly akin to Magic Flute‘s Queen of the Night, just not as floridly virtuosic. But she’s someone new to opera, a force to be reckoned with: elemental, powerful, dangerous. Vitellia breathes fire into the opera. Her “Non più di fiori” (“No more wedding wreaths for me”) augmented by sweet clarinet (thanks to Maiko Sasaki) stands alone as a concert aria, as this wicked woman debates her fate, almost going mad with indecision. Should she confess and end her happiness, or let Sesto be killed for her sin? Frasar commands a large voice that rides over the orchestra during her fiery outbursts, and she made a perfect vamp, teasing poor Sesto in lacy black lingerie. Crippen and Cottarel were lovingly matched in ardor and warmth, and Hopkins’s Publio held our attention with impeccable phrasing and honeyed tone. But this was Savage’s show. What a subtle powerhouse she is. As misguided Sesto, a pant’s role originally sung by castrato, she’s tall and blond and makes a very handsome man in black suit and tie. When director Keturah Stickman has her strip to her BVDs to keep Vitellia satisfied, the startling effect, somewhat ill-conceived, still manages to make dramatic sense since Savage plays it so well and looks the part. And her singing is a dream: supple and powerful, with a deep velvet shimmer. Designed by Jeremiah Minh Grünblatt, the entire set is plastered with newspaper pages, like decoupage gone wild. The look’s supposed to suggest political relevancy, I guess. It just looks like newspaper glued all over the set. But the updating, using Secret Service men and a chorus in black suits, works a lot better at getting this idea across. Although I miss maestro Enrique Carreón-Robledo’s fire and passion in the pit and wish he were still leading OH, I will show clemency. Thank Mozart and some really fine interpreters for this stay of judgment. February 1, 5 and 7. The ruby cast performs February 6 and 8 and includes Eric Barry (Tito), Deborah Domanski (Sesto), Mary-Hollis Hundley (Vitellia) and Claire Shackleton (Annio). 1703 Heights Boulevard, 713-861-5303. — DLG
Cloud Tectonics Magic realism is a genre that takes time to get used to. Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges (Fictions and A Universal History of Infamy), Colombian Nobel-prize winner Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Death in the Time of Cholera) and even our own Toni Morrison (Beloved) are subtle practitioners of the art. Playwright José Rivera is not so subtle. In Mildred’s Umbrella’s uneven production of his Cloud Tectonics (1995), we are beaten about the head. What should be ethereal and mysterious morphs into annoyance and unintentional humor. The most intriguing bit is the beginning. It’s night in Los Angeles, and our heroine, Celestina Del Sol (Patricia Duran), thumbs for a ride during the “storm of the century.” Cold and wary, she munches on soggy crackers as car lights sweep over her very pregnant figure and pass her by. We soon discover that she is very much out of time. She is picked up by Anibal De La Luna (Greg Dean), a baggage handler at LAX. We learn that Anibal loves L.A. for the “women falling out of the skies,” for the disasters waiting to happen. Celestina is searching for the man who got her pregnant back in Montauk, Long Island. She was accosted by the last man who picked her up, but she doesn’t want to call the police or go to the hospital. This good Samaritan offers her shelter for the night. “I’m not going anywhere,” she says ominously (and will say repeatedly throughout this one-acter); “I’ve lost track of time.” We’re in magic-realism land with a vengeance. The characters’ names are weighty enough: Luna, Sol, Celestina. We get it twice the first time. Celestina hits Anibal with a stunner: She’s 54 years old and has been pregnant for two years. He impetuously kisses her, then apologizes. Suddenly, Anibal’s macho brother Nelson (Darnea Olson), on army leave, arrives to see his brother after six years. Without provocation or character preparation, he swears eternal love to Celestina. Then he’s off, back to his base. Wait for me, he pleads to Celestina. After a bit of body rub and kissing of toes, Anibal and Celestina climb the ladder to the loft bedroom. Before anything happens, who returns, without mustache and using a cane, but Nelson, out of the army and anxious to resume his paternal duties. Time has passed, but it hasn’t; it’s now and the future. Director Jennifer Decker, Mildred’s Umbrella’s artistic director, has a fine eye for atmosphere — those opening scenes set the mood in bold strokes — and keeps Rivera’s heavy-handedness a bit on the light side, which is a good thing. Through February 7. Studio 101, 1824 Spring, 832-463-0409, www.mildredsumbrella.com. — DLG
Fly Written by Trey Ellis and Ricardo Khan, Fly tells the story of the Tuskegee Airmen, the first division of black aviators to fight in combat during World War II. Formally called the 332nd Fighter Group, the pilots took their nickname from Tuskegee, Alabama, the town where they trained from 1941 to 1949. In creating the show, Ellis and Khan desired to make the play not so much a history lesson as a history story, something non-didactic and more engaging. To do so, they incorporated elements of video and dance. Let’s get the video stuff out of the way first since it’s the more successful, if rather pedestrian, effort of the two. As we meet four young black men boarding the train for Tuskegee so they can train to fly planes in the war (each has his own reason for signing up), I bet you can guess what the large video screen on the back wall of the stage shows. If you said a train moving along, you’d be correct. The same obvious choice is true for flying scenes (projected open skies), combat scenes (videos of fighter jets) and classrooms (images of desks), etc. The images are mostly painfully tiresome, adding nothing remotely intriguing or engaging to the production. However, nodding off is not an issue in this play thanks to HOW VERY LOUD THE ENTIRE PRODUCTION IS. AND BY LOUD I MEAN HEADACHE-INDUCING-LEVEL LOUD. Some of this has to do with the cranked-up microphone levels the cast donned. Then there’s the narrative itself, which has the four main black pilot characters spending much of the play fighting among themselves. Director Allie Woods seems to think that no piece of dialogue couldn’t be made stronger simply by having his actors shout the lines at the audience and at each other. The other reason behind the decibel level of the show is the aforementioned dance element, which in this case is tap. In addition to the four black flyers and some miscellaneous white characters whose job it is to illustrate how horribly blacks were treated and thought of in the United States at the time, Khan and Ellis introduce a voiceless character, Tap Griot. Griot’s MO is to spend the entire time onstage lurking about, handing things to the pilots or REALLY LOUDLY BREAKING INTO TAP DANCE to illustrate how the characters are feeling. Woods also fails in staging what should be edge-of-your-seat combat scenes and instead gives us lukewarm and at times risible imagery. Despite all this, the actors playing the four pilots all do a fine job eking out character. Kendrick “KayB” Brown is sweet as the youngest of the pilots, just 17 but the most talented flyer. We meet the elderly Chet, the narrator, at the start and the end of the play, and Brown does a nice job transitioning between the two ages. Jason Carmichael as Oscar, a man who chooses to fly because it’s “for his people,” has an ease about him onstage that makes him instantly likable even if his character is as thinly crafted as onion paper. Nikem Richard Nwankwo as J. Allen, a Jamaican man who enlisted to impress his father, gives us an intense anger that feels more real than that of any other character onstage. Finally, Joe “JoeP” Palmore as WW, a ladies’ man who admits his desire to be a pilot has to do with snagging babes, wins our hearts with swagger and coolness. While Ellis and Khan may have succeeded in not giving us a mere instructive examination of how the Tuskegee airmen came to be, they certainly don’t give us much to actually hold onto. While my complaint often skews toward “show, don’t tell” in theater, here’s an example where a little “tell and knock off the showing” might have gone a long way toward connecting us to these amazingly brave and important men. Through February 22. The Ensemble Theatre, 3535 Main, ensemblehouston.com. — JG
The Magic Flute Mozart’s final opera, a grand fairy tale filled with lofty philosophy and low-brow vaudeville, is the work that gave him the most pleasure. Not only was it his most profitable hit, running daily sold-out performances at Emmanuel Schikaneder’s suburban, middle-class Theater auf der Wieden, but the Viennese had finally warmed up to his incomparable stylish music. He never lived to see Flute conquer the world, for he died two months after the premiere. Mozart loved this German theater of stage effects, low comedy and fantastic plots, and with Schikaneder he wrote a blockbuster, a German singspiel, very much like a Broadway show — a story told through dialogue, songs and dance. (With music by Mozart, this is the highest-quality musical.) The theater had been refurbished into a state-of-the-art house, and could accomplish every type of scenic effect from balloon ascensions to walks through fire. It was the perfect place to stage Flute with its epic panoramas of ancient Egypt, jungle animals dancing to a magic tune, a hellish Queen of the Night who vanishes into damnation’s flames, priestly rituals, a trio of boys, and feather-trimmed bird catcher Papageno, the everyman doofus out for a good time with a bottle of wine in one hand and a comely wench in the other. This life-affirming opera is Mozart at his most sunny. The work’s wide range of styles — treacherous coloratura for the treacherous Queen, classic Italianate legato for prince Tamino, crystalline and chasm-deep sound for Sarastro, leader of the forces of light, and folk tunes for rowdy Papageno — seamlessly weave together. Flute is indeed an opera for the entire family; there’s something for everybody. In this sparse but handsome production from English National Opera, with color-coded sets and stylish costumes by Tony award-winner Bob Crowley and rather perfunctory direction by Sir Nicholas Hytner, Mozart’s own magic is put to three severe tests. Why, in this day and age, does Houston Grand Opera perform this work in English! If the opera’s in German, sing it in German. As for the dialogue scenes, they, too, are the bane of contemporary houses when singers have to speak lines. They throw their voices out in a most unnatural way, as if they’re Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. And then there is maestro Robert Spano, music director of Atlanta Symphony and Aspen Music Institute. With his impressive list of credentials, conducting all over the world in all the great houses, you would think he’d know better than to let Mozart drag his feet. I thought this wonderful opera, full of spritz and majesty, would never end. But there were bright spots, one a supernova. Soprano Kathryn Lewek was a jaw-dropping Queen of the Night, her signature role throughout the world. It’s her shimmery, pinprick voice in full command of Mozart’s most showstopping arias that does the trick. Her Act I “Zum Leiden” (“In Grief”), which builds from a lament to a piercing accusation, is only the tease for perhaps the most famous — and famously difficult — of all coloratura outbursts in the rep, her Act II “Wrath of Hell” aria that everyone somewhere has heard, even if they’ve never heard of Magic Flute. The rest of the cast was fine but not exceptional. Soprano Nicole Heaston was a creamy-voiced Pamina; tenor David Portillo cut a princely figure with voice to match as Tamino; bass Morris Robinson was underwhelming as stentorian Sorastro; baritone Michael Sumuel beguiled as feathery Papageno; tenor Aaron Tegram, as evil Monostatos, got lost amid his swirling velvet great coat; and soprano Pureum Jo made a sassy, comic Papgena. The queen’s three ladies were elegantly sexy (D’Ana Lombard, Megin Samarin, Carolyn Sproule), but the vocal treat was the luminous Spirit trio (Hannah Haw, Brook Camryn, Eden Nielson), all high school students who stole our hearts with their angelic tone. February 7 and 14. Student performances February 10m, 11 and 13m. Wortham Theater Center, 501 Texas, 713-228-6737. — DLG
This article appears in Feb 5-11, 2015.
