Podcasts

Woman Around Town’s Editor Charlene Giannetti and writers for the website talk with the women and men making news in New York, Washington, D.C., and other cities around the world. Thanks to Ian Herman for his wonderful piano introduction.

Angels In America

Candide – Gleefully Over the Top

01/10/2017

New York City Opera has risen like a phoenix from threats to its demise. Lavish staging of Candide by the estimable Harold Prince is, but for a few casting glitches, glorious. (The director previously helmed productions both with this company and elsewhere.) It’s been a great many years since many of us attended a performance of Candide, yet the overture sounds like an old friend, filling one with happy anticipation. Sound Design (Abe Jacob) and orchestration are superb.

The story of star-crossed lovers Candide (Jay Armstrong Johnson) and Cunegonde (Meghan Picerno) is narrated by the play’s author Dr. Voltaire (Gregg Edelman). Cunegonde’s parents, the Baron (Brooks Ashmanskas) and Baroness (Sishel Claverie), and her brother, Maximilian (Keith Phares), disdain Candide as a bastard, forbidding marriage.

school-room

Jay Armstrong Johnson, Jessica Tyler Wright, Gregg Edelman, Keith Phares, Meghan Picerno

With the addition of flirty, sexually accommodating maid, Paquette (Jessica Tyler Wright), the three young people are home schooled by “wisest of all philosophers and scholars” Dr. Pangloss (Gregg Edelman) who teaches “Everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.” Contentedness might be scooped with a spoon, but doesn’t last.

Candide is exiled and conscripted (in a potato sack) by two Bulgarian soldiers warring with Westphalia. Cunegonde’s family is slaughtered. She herself is kidnapped and raped. Before he can climb out of his sack and she can raise herself from a state of exhausted discard,  not 20 feet from where he’s been abandoned, immediate experience forgotten, they’re singing a duet. Get used to it.

Candide

Chip Zien, Gregg Edelman, Brooks Ashmanskas and the company

Both characters, eventually joined by nine-lived Maximilian, Paquette and “the old lady” have a series of preposterous adventures separating and reuniting them as they’re borne by circumstance from Lisbon to Spain to The New World, Turkey and back. Used and abused (especially our ingénue) they’re nonetheless resourceful, steadfast, forgiving, and optimistic. Despite Cunegonde’s early aspirations to live the high life, the group ends up fulfilling Candide’s ambitions to have a little farm. Voltaire was, after all French and one must consider The Age of Enlightenment as having some way to go.

Candide

Meghan Picerno, Linda Lavin, Jay Armstrong Johnson

It’s good to see Harold Prince back in harness. The veteran director never once loses awareness of aesthetics on another large, somewhat complicated set. Whether the company is placed as chorus, playing a street scene (during which every participant has action and attitude), or united in movement, the stage looks swell. At one perfectly appropriate point, Candide works his way across an audience row; the Sage appears on a balcony, dropping parchment homilies like leaves. (This parentheses is the one point that drags.) Excepting those of Edleman and Lavin, Prince handles flamboyant character turns with eyebrow raised finesse.

Candide

Meghan Picerno, Jay Armstrong Johnson, Linda Lavin, Gregg Edelman

Jay Armstrong Johnson (Candide) has a simply beautiful tenor and displays fine acting. As Cunegonde, Meghan Picerno offers remarkable range and control, but she’s often a tad strident and less obtusely innocent than one imagines the character. The narcissistic Maximilian is well served by Keith Phares’s droll manifestation and excellent vocals. Wry warhorses Brooks Ashmanskas and Chip Zien have a winking comic touch in multiple roles.

To my mind, there are two major casting mistakes. Gregg Edelman (Dr. Voltaire,       Dr. Pangloss, the Sage and others) can sing, but is neither a character actor, nor ever funny. His endless turn as the Sage is palpably painful. Linda Lavin (Old Lady), otherwise funny in her signature Upper West Side, deadpan, New York persona, is out of her realm both vocally and theatrically. Occasional Yiddish accent of a word makes one wince.

A marvelous, illustrated Set by Clarke Dunham provides just the right context for this zany tale of excessive pastiche. Were this a children’s book, he’d be awarded the Caldecott Medal. Hidden among appealing artwork, stairwells and balconies give the show’s director ample territory on which to play. Dunham inventively utilizes cut-outs (deliciously on cart wheels) and banners giving the show a naïve (not unpolished) feel, the extravagant masquerade of a music hall. His ship (which rocks back and forth) is wonderful.

Judith Dolan’s Costumes collaborate with visual environment as effectively as they do story and character. Color is tapestry rich. Seemingly arbitrary layering is flattering, often silly, always decorative, and splendidly thought-out-especially headwear. The designer’s horse, sheep, and lion costumes are inspired.

Wig and Makeup Design by Georgiana Eberhard is also symbiotic. Nothing looks out of place despite eccentricity. Every role is given distinction. Faces emerge painted, but never vulgar.

New York City Opera hopes to take this production on tour. It would be a genuine pity not to make it available to further audiences.

The Opera’s 2016/2017 season includes seven new productions, three New York premiers, and one U.S. premiere. Next, in March, a new production of Respighi’s       La campana sommersa and, in June, Peter Eotvos’ new production of Angels in America.

Photos by Sarah Shatz
Opening: Keith Phares, Jessica Tyler Wright, Linda Lavin, Jay Armstrong Johnson, Meghan Picerno

New York City Opera presents
Candide
Music by Leonard Bernstein
Book by Hugh Wheeler, Stephen Sondheim
Lyrics by Richard Wilber, Stephen Sondheim, John LaTouche, Leonard Bernstein
Directed by Harold Prince
Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall
January 8, 2017

Mike Daisey Plays The Trump Card

08/05/2016

Donald J. Trump – This is your life!  – as told by monologist Mike Daisey. While the nearly two-hour solo performance produces many laugh-out-loud moments, Daisey ends on a sobering note: Trump may not be elected president, but what he has accomplished has set the stage for future candidates who will follow his playlist.

Daisy attempts to soften the blows by, at times, not only empathizing with Trump, but also comparing himself to the real estate mogul turned political candidate. Donald’s father, Fred, was an “alleged” racist (“alleged” emphasized by Daisey), as was Daisey’s grandfather, described as a crusty character from Maine. Daisey’s mother and father served as buffers, both parents condemning the older man’s attitude, while Trump was not sheltered from his father, instead inheriting his business and, we are led to believe, his prejudices.

Daisey’s father frequently cruised yard sales and mailed his children packages wrapped in brown paper and secured with lots of tape. While Daisey says he often burned the packages before opening them, on one occasion his father’s note proves intriguing. Inside, Daisey finds a Trump version of the popular board game, Monopoly. Daisy decides to throw a theme party, inviting friends over to play the vintage game. He serves Trump steaks (actually regular steaks that he slaps a Trump label on). Rather than Monopoly’s two die, the Trump game has one dice, a capital “T” substituting for the numeral six. Throw that letter, and the player gets to essentially rob the game’s bank.

daisey_portrait_1While most Americans now know a great deal about Trump, Daisey puts his own spin on The Donald’s history. Trump was only 27 when he took over the family business, shifting the company’s focus from Queens to Manhattan, but continuing his father’s business practices which, Daisey says, meant holding out payments to contractors and then paying less than was owed. Those who objected were threatened with being blackballed by the construction industry, he says.

Besides his father, Trump’s greatest influence, according to Daisey, was the lawyer, Roy Cohn. (On the night I attended, a young member of the audience leaned over to her mother, whispering, “Who’s Roy Cohn?” Anticipating that millennials might not recognize the name, Daisey is prepared.) Cohn was chief counsel to Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt. A closeted homosexual who died of complications of AIDS, Cohn, Daisey reminds us, has been portrayed in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and on The Simpsons as the blue-haired lawyer representing Mr. Burns, the evil owner of the Springfield Nuclear Plant. After resigning from McCarthy’s committee, Cohn went into private practice and for 13 years one of his clients was Donald Trump. He represented Trump against charges brought by the Justice Department for violations of the Fair Housing Act. Daisy notes that Trump settled and there was never any indication that he was found guilty.

daisey_trump_portrait_3This is a low tech production – just Daisey sitting at a table with a glass of water and a small towel that he uses to blot sweat from his face. (While the photos included here show shots of Trump, none were used during the press performance.) He has notes in front of him, but often improvises. With Trump producing new headlines each day, Daisey has plenty of opportunity to update his script. The fact that the Republican presidential nominee ejected a crying baby from a rally made it into the performance I attended.

While Daisey stressed that he does the necessary research for his monologues, he ran into trouble with his The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs after a portion was broadcast on “This American Life,” a public radio show. “I have difficult news,” Ira Glass, the host and executive producer stated on the radio show’s blog. “We’ve learned that Mike Daisey’s story about Apple in China – which we broadcast in January – contained significant fabrications. We’re retracting the story because we can’t vouch for its truth.”

The incident raises an interesting question: are Daisey’s monologues journalism or entertainment? The Trump Card was certainly entertaining. And, in what is turning out to be a wacky presidential campaign, much needed relief.

The Trump Card
Written and performed by Mike Daisey
Directed by Isaac Butler
Woolly Mammoth Theatre
641 D Street NW
Through August 7, 2016