Last Tuesday night was the opening of New York City Opera's Candide, the final work for this spring season.  And what a way to finish the year!  If you are within 100 miles of the State Theater during the month of April, there is absolutely no reason you can't come down and see this marvelous, historic, trend-setting production.  Also -- New York City Opera's "Opera for All" program is offering $25 orchestra level seats!  Seriously now, if you come to Candide because of my gushing response and find yourself truly disappointed, then contact me and we'll do a depression screening on you.  If everything checks out and you still have heavy-duty problems with spending 25 bucks to see theater so thrilling and polished, then I'll convince New York City Opera to give you a refund.  Except to prove your dissatisfaction, you're going to have to sit through another performance with me next to you.  And if you smile just once during the performance, bet's off!  It's impossible to watch this production without grinning like a goon.

 

When New York City Opera promotes, advertises, and generally raises hell about its production, it has every right to create as big a hullabaloo as it wants.  Candide was practically resurrected at the City Opera back in the early 1980s.

 

 

Candide is essentially an operetta based on the novella of nearly the same name by Voltaire.  The great thing about this work is that it's sung in English and the libretto is nearly perfection.  It manages to be profound and insouciant at the same time, and it's all done with a brevity that easily fits on the supertitles (which you generally don't need anyway because of the superb diction from the performers).  As a result, not much preparation is needed to have a rollicking good time.

 

Candide was a French satirical work written by Voltaire during the Enlightenment.  In it, he railed against the dominant philosophical system of his day -- the theory of Optimism created by Leibniz.  Optimism is the idea that humanity must, and does, live in the best of all possible worlds.  Why?  Because God created the world.  And if God is presumed to be a benevolent deity, then surely the world he created is the best possible one for us.  For those who remember high school calculus, Leibniz is the also the guy who invented calculus backwards, using the integral instead of differentiation, as Sir Issac Newton did.  Surely for a man to have created the calculus backwards, without a purpose in mind (Newton only came up with it because he needed more advanced techniques to describe his theories of mechanics), he needed to believe fervently that he lived in the best of all possible worlds... otherwise, why not just forget it all and toss back a drink at the local watering hole?

 

Anyhow, in 1755 there was a catastrophic earthquake in Lisbon which occurred on All Saint's Day, and it strongly influenced many thinkers, including Voltaire, to reject the indiscriminately saccharine ideas of Optimism.  To get oriented to this opera, all you need to know is that Candide's main character, is well, Candide.  He is young, innocent, and not super-bright.  He represents the tabula rasa which Voltaire uses to prove his point.  Candide falls in love with the local beauty in their idyllic little village of Westphalia, Cunegonde (her name means something unique to women, not necessarily G-rated).  These lovebirds and their friends are indoctrinated by their teacher, Dr. Pangloss, in philosophies reminiscent of Optimism.  Candide is banished for seeking extracurricular pleasures from Cunegonde and henceforth begins a whirlwind saga where harsh realities of a non-Optimism world are seen.  Rest assured, though, that there is a happy ending.

 

I'm not going to say any more because when you enter the State Theater to see Candide, you're really boarding a ride that exports you on a journey all over the world.  The sets are magnificently exuberant and the singers bring you into their reverie, performing not only on stage but out among the audience as well.  The entire experience is an in-your-face, let's-go-along-for-the-ride kind of evening that creates a visceral thrill rarely had in a theater that's not IMAX.  All throughout, the genius of Leonard Bernstein's score evokes exotic locations with brilliant, foreign motifs.  But this is also the man who brought us West Side Story and Our Town, so in climaxes like "Make Our Garden Grow," the music goes straight to the heart and there are few dry eyes in the house.

 

I was so excited on opening night that I risked certain banishment from the ushers and tried to snap a picture of the delicious staging.  It didn't quite come out -- all the more reason for you come see it yourself!

 

As with all opening nights, it was a different sort of crowd.  More high-rollers, you might say -- snappily dressed and ordering champagne at the interval.  From the few I spoke with, it seemed many had seen the production in the past and couldn't pass up seeing it again.  The elderly couple next to me were in tears at the end of "Make Our Garden Grow."  They also watched the performance through opera glasses, which was odd.  You have to understand that I had seats in row D, which can't be more than 15 feet from the stage.  Unless your vision is egregious, the only thing opera glasses might do from row D is perhaps to let you see the pores on Cunegonde's face!  I'm definitely looking forward to getting older.

 

Stephen and Gail, a middle-aged couple I spoke to at the interval, remarked that they thought "every [opera] house needs a good frolic now and then, at least once a season."  Certainly, Candide fits the bill for New York City Opera this spring.  They reminded me that next door at the Met is a fantastic production of Hansel and Gretel -- another exuberant and over-the-top opera with creative staging that certainly could be their frolic for the year.

 

Oh, and one last thing: I was saying that Candide was practically resurrected at City Opera. About that -- you see, Candide initially opened on Broadway as a musical in 1956 and was poorly received although Bernstein's music was undeniably profound and charming -- so it became sort of a cult hit.  Despite this, the production itself had a hard time finding traction anywhere.  So it was re-written and re-worked over the years into other versions with moderate success -- the most popular of which actually omitted more than half of the musical numbers!  Finally in the late 1970s, opera companies began expressing interest in a version truer to the original, with more of Bernstein's score intact. One of City Opera's benefactors then approached Beverly Sills with funding, and Bernstein set to work on it with director Hal Prince.  Shortly thereafter, a new two-act version debuted at New York City Opera in 1982, and it has since become the standard version performed in opera companies around the world.

 

This is the production that made Candide the great hit that it is today.  It all started here --and the tradition is still going strong. You absolutely have to come see it.

 

By the way, as if the opera weren't enough excitement, while you're at the State Theater you might as well check out some of the fantastic non-acoustic art they have in the public spaces.  On the opening night of Candide, I met up with Andrew, my old roommate from college -- it had been nearly four years since we'd seen each other!  He's working in the city now and has a keen eye for visual art.  He noticed that there was a Jasper Johns sculpture hanging on the first floor's west side lobby.  We checked with a very nice volunteer manning the information desk named Ellen.  Indeed, it was a Jasper Johns --whose work was recently featured in a special exhibit at the Met Museum.  In fact, the entire theater is filled with notable art-- most noticeable perhaps being the two enormous female nudes at either side of the promenade, each carved out of a single block of Carrara marble!  So there is truly something for everyone here at City Opera.  But please come more for the music than the two nudes, for they are idealized and abstract whereas the music is not; particularly with Candide, which is as accessible, entertaining, charming, profound, and giddy as you can get in an opera house!

A typical opera-going evening for me begins on the train.  I commute down to the city from New Haven, where I go to medical school.  It's typically a bum-numbing experience on the Metro-North, where I try to do some reading or catch up on work.  It's also a great opportunity to review the score of the opera I'm planning to see.  Madama Butterfly has never been one of my favorite Puccini operas so on this particular train ride, I wasn't eager to crack open the score.  Luckily, there was a crowd of at least ten middle-aged women in my compartment upon whom it was my pleasure to eavesdrop instead.

 

They were all middle-school teachers from Westport heading down to the city to watch their students compete in some sort of speech team contest.  The most vociferous among them was complaining about her husband, who apparently used to drive three hours up to Boston (where she went to college) every weekend to see her while they were courting.

 

But after 20 years of marriage, he was now posted in Boston for two months on some sort of assignment for his work, while she held down the fort in Westport.  And he refused to drive down to visit her or the kids on the weekends.

 

"Doesn't he love me anymore?" she moaned.  "He used to drive to see me all the time."

 

One of her fellow teachers remarked, "Life's not like Enchanted."

 

I'm pretty sure she was talking about the recent Disney movie, Enchanted.  It occurred to me that this film is an excellent reduction of the themes in Butterfly.

I'm not sure if any of you have seen it, but in Enchanted, there is a wonderful scene where Amy Adams (playing the lost princess, Giselle) is at a salon with Morgan, Patrick Dempsey's young daughter.  Morgan is advising the princess that she shouldn't wear too much make-up on her first date with the prince.

 

"But why?" asks the princess.

 

"Because boys will get ideas in their head -- and you know they're only after one thing," replies Morgan, wisely.

 

"Oh, what's that?" wonders the princess.

 

"I don't know, no one will tell me," shrugs Morgan.

 

Well, it's pretty clear what that "one thing" is, wouldn't you say?  It's certainly the "one thing" on Pinkerton's mind during the first act of Butterfly.  He's a hapless American navy lieutenant in Nagasaki who has decided to purchase a house and wife to satisfy his worldly sailor appetites.  The only problem is that Cio-Cio San, the geisha who comes with the house he's purchased, believes he is marrying her for true love.  Her level of devotion and faith in sailor-boy is nothing short of breathtaking, and is parodied aptly in movies like Enchanted, where Princess Giselle and her prince decide to marry after meeting each other only once!  In Butterfly, Pinkerton and Cio-Cio San share one ostensibly crazy night of passion, but then he disappears for 3 years, only to come back with an American wife.

 

I think the reason I've always been reticent about Butterfly is that it makes such a fool out of the tenor role, Pinkerton.  It is also a huge misrepresentation of men, portraying them as mindless sacks of seed with the motto "fertilize and forget."  Butterfly seems to happily corroborate what Robin Williams has uncharitably said about men: "God gave them a brain and a penis and not enough blood to run both at the same time."  What was Puccini thinking?  (Plus, the tenor is made to sing lines like, "Lo Yan-kee va-ga bon-do.")

Oh yes. The buffoonishness is utterly complete.

 

And yet it also has some of the most beautiful music Puccini ever wrote.  The love duet at the end of Act I --"bimba dagli occhi pieni di malia" will hopefully be the theme music of my honeymoon.  It has swells and swings that seem to be in sync with the pituitary gland.  The only problem is that my wife will have to be kept in the dark about what happens in Act II or else she'll get nervous about why I'm playing music from Butterfly.

 

Thankfully, New York City Opera's production on Wednesday proved to me that you have to keep going to live performances despite old prejudices.  Every once in a great while, you'll see something on stage that is simply electrifying and makes you fall in love with the theater all over again.  I imagine it's a lot like being a physician -- one takes care of a lot of mundane disorders and ailments, but every so often, something truly life-threatening comes in and you discover once again what a privilege it is to take care of patients and their families in such times.

 

This was the second to last performance of Butterfly this season and it featured a soprano playing Cio-Cio San (Yunah Lee) who had us nibbling at her feet from the word go.

 

She not only stole the show, she hijacked it.  At the first intermission, an elderly Italian couple seated next to me rushed outside to call their friends about the "next big thing." Numerous other fans I spoke to mentioned that she reminded them of a young Renata Scotto.  I would have to agree, except that I think she's more of a mix between a young Katia Ricciarelli and a mature Renata Scotto.  (Please click on the above youtube links to appreciate what I mean.)  Scotto was one of the greatest actresses of the opera stage and Ricciarelli had one of the most delicious and creamy soprano voices of the last 25 years.  It's incredibly rare to see a young singer so vocally endowed -- with a voice that carries over the orchestra effortlessly, yet retains focus and the floating quality necessary to portray a character who's supposed to be 15 years old!  Oh, and by the way, she can act too.  And how!

 

The production was fairly traditional compared to what I've seen in the past, but that was a welcome respite.  All the Butterfly productions I've seen in the past have been uber-modern dalliances and for some reason, they all omitted the part of the young Butterfly-Pinkerton love-child, relying on symbolism instead.  Is it really that hard to cast an adorable little boy wearing a kimono?  Once, when I saw the production in Baltimore, they used a potted plant to represent the little boy.  The only way you knew the plant was the boy was that Cio-Cio San was watering it while she sang about her son.  It's definitely more poignant when you have an actual child on the stage!

 

Something funny: during the second intermission, there were numerous couples on the mezzanine bemoaning the Spitzer-Patterson affairs, inspired by the "typically male behavior" of Pinkerton.  Poor New Yorkers have been through a lot in March.  At least there's no love-child that we know about from these extracurricular activities... yet.  (This may be where potted plants actually come in handy.)

 

After Cio-Cio San committed suicide in the final act and the curtain came down, there was a split-second of silence before the audience rose out of its reverie and started clapping violently.  When Yunah Lee took her bows, everyone was instantly on their feet.  I haven't seen that kind of excitement in an opera house in a long time.  This production featured a different cast than the version that was broadcast live on PBS last week, but I can't imagine how any evening could have been more thrilling.  It's proof that New York City Opera is continuing its tradition of being the launch pad for the next generation of opera stars.  This must have been what it was like when Placido Domingo, Jose Carreras, Beverly Sills, and Renee Fleming were at New York City Opera... you just knew you were witnessing history.

 

Wednesday night helped me get over my beef with Butterfly.  I've always been slightly peeved about the way it portrays men.  But with Yunah Lee singing Cio-Cio San in a production that was pitch-perfect, I was forced into being ashamed instead of angry.  That's what powerful theater can do.  I think it made all the guys in the audience feel sorry on behalf of their entire gender that they have been "fertilizing and forgetting" since the time of Abraham.  That's how touching and affecting Yunah Lee was on Wednesday.  I'm sure we'll be seeing more of her at the New York City Opera, and it will be a huge loss for us if she moves next door to the Met.  I hope she'd come back to visit.

It was at a Saturday performance of King Arthur that I really figured out the difference between old folks at the Met and old folks at New York City Opera.  However, before I get to that, here's a little explanation of what happened during the performance.

 

You should know that opera is a still-evolving art form, and when Henry Purcell wrote King Arthur a lot of the traditions that surround staples like La Bohème and Carmen hadn't yet come into being.  Music was largely liturgical throughout the Middle Ages and it wasn't until the very late Middle Ages that secular forms of theater emerged.  Purcell was in the middle of this large evolution, and as a result his operas are more "semi-opera," or spectacles that combine spoken dialogue with dance (or masques as they were called: i.e. masquerade), orchestral music, and song.

 

All of this is fine, except that choreographer Mark Morris decided to omit the spoken dialogue from this production of King Arthur because he didn't like it.  Seriously.  But he did keep the music because... well, he liked it.  Sounds odd, and certainly most of the audience found it that way on Saturday.  I accosted a number of people during intermission to see what they thought of the unusual production, and a typical answer went something like, "Gosh, I don't know that I understand it.  Certainly it's very different.  But thank goodness, at least the music is so pretty."  Most of these people were familiar with opera, but they weren't frequent opera-goers.  None of them seemed to regret coming even if they didn't understand what was happening onstage.

 

Despite these problems, I enjoyed the production immensely.  I couldn't figure out why until I ran into a very elderly Italian woman toward the end of the intermission -- let's call her Magda.  She was my last interview, immaculately dressed and standing by the window on the 4th ring of the house, clucking her tongue at the mess of construction in the Lincoln Center plaza.  When I asked her how the music made her feel, she responded by re-enacting one of Mark Morris' trademark dance moves from the first act.  I was stunned -- mostly at her incredible flexibility.  The move was something the dancers did when the chorus was singing "Triumph!" during the first act.  It involved arching the back and feigning an archer's position.

 

"Well, what does that mean?" I asked.

 

"Deh meeoosik ees so beooteefuhl!"

 

"But doesn't it bother you that Mark Morris removed the dialogue and one cannot understand the plot?" I asked.

 

"Whyee shood I cahrre?  Eeet makes no deeferhence.  Dis ees ohperah."

 

She also reminded me to mention in my post that the New York City Opera's Madama Butterfly would be on PBS's "Live from Lincoln Center."  At the mention of this, I immediately fell back into my old-fogey Met pose.

 

"Which recording of Butterfly do you like most?" I asked.

 

"Whoo cahrres?  Evehree taiime ees deeferhent.  Ees beooteefuhl."

 

This woman was a true human being and a true opera-lover (She is Italian, after all.)  She made me realize all over again, that it's the music which is most important in opera.  Otherwise you can go see a play, a poetry recitation, attend a lecture, or just stay home and read a book.  Why did people start putting music to words in theater?  Because music provides a direct line to the soul.  Spoken word can discuss, describe, and delineate emotions, but music goes straight to your heart.

 

So I say kudos to Mark Morris for getting rid of the words he thinks aren't important. Magda agrees with him, and so do I.  How brave of New York City Opera to have used this production as the launch of their spring season.  As modern and avant-garde as it might have been (and it was pretty "out there," with paper-airplanes flying all over the stage during the maypole dance, and at one point, a pretty realistic enactment of sex on-stage...)  It was a clever way of forcing us back to the basics of why opera is important.  It connected everyone in the theater to emotions that were central to our humanity -- through music.

Norman was right -- New York City Opera is hot.  They're hot and they're right about opera.  This is the kind of hot that you can bring home to mom.  Oh, by the way, the difference between Met Opera old-folks and New York City Opera old-folks: Magda re-enacted a dance at the age of eighty-odd.  You're not going to find anyone in the Met who'll do that.  She also isn't moaning about in the gift shop trying to find a recording she first heard in 1956.  She's ready for new singers, new stagings, new productions -- and she'll find it at the New York City Opera.  Of course, even Magda has her limits.  She wouldn't let me take a picture of her doing the "Triumph!" dance.  But I got her to show me and my friends how to do it, as you can see.

 

Next stop, Madama Butterfly!

 

Early this season, I came down to New York City Opera to sign my contract for this blog.  Afterward, Jaime in the marketing office was nice enough to give me a quick tour of the State Theater.  It was unbelievable.  I got to meet one of the sopranos who is singing in Candide, Lielle Berman. 

 

You have to understand that opera stars can be difficult, but she was the opposite of what you hear about divas.  They used to say that if Kathleen Battle wanted the air conditioning turned down in her limo, she'd call up her manager, who'd call up the limo company, who'd call up the limo driver. 

 

Anyhow, I think Ms. Berman sensed that I was in awe of meeting her and she tried to put me at ease, saying, "Gosh, so you're in medical school.  That's incredible."  But honestly, this woman gets up on stage, opens her mouth, and fills the several thousand cubic meters of air in front her with truly sinful noises, sending shivers up the 2,000+ bodies and gaping mouths in front of her.  She stands on the same wooden planks that Beverly Sills walked.  She breathes the air Placido Domingo breathed.  Medical school seemed unbelievably rudimentary at that moment.

 

She was eating chili.  I should have asked her if that's good for the voice.  She asked if I was musical or played an instrument but I was too humbled to say anything about the fact that I studied piano at Peabody and opera at Yale.  This was a diva.  She was eating chili.  Okay, on with the tour before I start peeing my pants, Jaime.

 

After the tour I said goodbye to Jaime and wandered over to the Met gift shop (that's at the Metropolitan Opera, the other opera house next to the State Theater).  This place is really like an Alcoholics' Anonymous for opera nuts.  What happened to me that day is very common.

 

"Hello, I'm Mary from Rhode Island.  Oh goodness, you're so young and I think you might have a better memory than me.  I'm looking for a recording with the Berlin Philharmonic and this young man helping me is wanting to know who the conductor was... do you know?  He's the new one, the British one with the funny teeth."

 

I told her it was Simon Rattle and she practically started crying.  "My God, yes!  Oh I tell you, my mind isn't fresh when I feel irregular."  Then I got another tap.

 

"Excuse me, I'm Norman.  I'm looking for a Faust with Di Stefano before he had his nose fixed.  Have you heard it?"

 

"Oh," I said.  "I've never been able to find an early recording here.  Have you tried the internet?  Sometimes you can find great CDs on places like eBay or Amazon."

 

"Oh... I've heard of the internet but I don't know.  Can it be trusted?"

 

Sigh.

 

About 20 feet away, at the entrance to the shop, the theft alarm went off for the 7th time since I'd come in.  And for the 7th time that day, I heard, "Ma'am!  Ma'am!  Not to worry, it's your hearing aid that keeps setting off the alarm.  No, no -- I know you paid, it's the hearing AID."

 

Norman and I started talking about Roberto Devereux, which I'd heard many times but had never seen.  It's possibly one of the hardest bel canto roles for soprano ever written, practically impossible to sing.

 

"God.  I mean, hot damn, you know?  There was no one like Beverly Sills in that."

 

From the clips I'd heard, I had to agree with him.  This was another one of the holy grails Norman was looking for.  I mentioned to him that she never performed it at the Met, only at New York City Opera.

 

"Oh, of course, that was at the City Opera in the 70s," said Norman.

 

I asked him if he wanted to walk over there and see if they had any recordings.

 

"Hot damn.  You're right," he said, and we were off, side-stepping the 8th hearing-aid alarm.

 

Sadly, the New York City Opera gift stand was closed when we got there.  Norman walked around the lobby and looked wistful.  I asked him what separated City Opera-goers and Met-Opera goers of his age.

 

"Well," he said, "The City Opera... I don't know.  Damn, those were the days.  It was hot then, you know.  Hot damn, it was hot!  It's always been hot.  But after a while, I just started going to the Met."

 

"Norman, it's absolutely hot now," I said.  "It's positively smoldering!  You should come see King Arthur before its run concludes."

 

"You know what, maybe I will.  Hot damn, maybe it's time."

 

Well, we said goodbye.  I still didn't know the difference between old folks at the Met and old folks of New York City Opera, but I had heard "hot damn" uttered more times in one day than I had in the last year.