Appomattox
San Francisco Opera
(415) 864-3330
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***
Philip Glass’ new opera is certainly ambitious, said Joshua Kosman in the San Francisco Chronicle. Appomattox squeezes the Civil War, Reconstruction, the Jim Crow South, and the civil-rights movement onto the San Francisco Opera’s stage. “That’s a lot to try to pack into two and a half hours,” but at first Glass looks ready to succeed. The first act’s chronicle of the bloody, brutal war concentrates on the characters of President Lincoln, Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, and their wives. “The relationship between the two generals— each striving in his own way to satisfy the demands of humanity and national honor—is finely drawn.” And Glass’ insistent, minimalist musical themes match the somber tone, as anguished women sing with the grandeur of a Greek chorus. Though excellent at rendering mood, Glass has difficulty propelling the action, and “the sheer hugeness of the Civil War as a subject often proves overwhelming.” “In two words: It’s boring,” said Richard Scheinin in the San Jose Mercury News. Christopher Hampton’s laughably simplistic libretto “tries too hard to say something deep about the war and its poisonous legacy of race relations in America.” Before we get to the Appomattox Court House negotiations, in which Lee issued his surrender, we suffer through an interminable destruction of Richmond, Va., listen to the back stories of the two generals, and are needlessly updated on troop movements. After Appomattox, we get a parade of civil-rights icons, white supremacists, and Ku Klux Klan members, meant to underscore the tale’s continuing relevance. “I felt like shouting, ‘I surrender!’” How cowardly, said Allan Ulrich in the Financial Times. True, Appomattox “is not a perfectly integrated work. But it is suffused with both genuine rage and aching regret for what might have been.” Baritones Dwayne Croft, as Lee, and Andrew Shore, as Grant, carry the emotional burden, two “honorable, compassionate men swept up in a historical process they do not comprehend.” Bass Jeremy Galyon makes a big impression in a small role as Lincoln, though other personalities fade into the background. More a pageant than a drama, Appomattox advances a relentlessly bleak vision of American racial inequity that some may have trouble stomaching. But Glass has devised an epic, elegiac style that matches it perfectly.
The Power of Darkness
Mint Theater, New York
(212) 315-0231
****
Everyone knows Leo Tolstoy’s novels, said Linda Winer in Newsday. “But Tolstoy, the playwright?” The author of Anna Karenina and War and Peace wrote this harrowing tale of sin and redemption in 1886, but a controversial final scene led Russian censors to ban it. The Russian premiere didn’t come for a decade, and the Mint Theater’s current, “unflinching production” is only the play’s third ever in New York. Mark Alhadeff is a smug farmhand who sleeps around, while Angela Reed, Anne Letscher, and Jennifer Bissell play the restless upperclass women of the estate. “The sin-andredemption story includes major marital philandering, spousal murder by poison, galloping greed, hypocritical superstition, genuine faith, and a description of offstage infanticide that can make a TV crime-show addict wince.” The event-filled three hours fly by, an old-fashioned melodrama enlivened by Tolstoy’s powerful moral vision. Visionary in politics, Tolstoy was old-fashioned aesthetically, said Jason Zinoman in The New York Times. He never liked the modernism of Anton Chekhov’s plays, and when he turned his Olympian intelligence to the popular stage, he did so with a didactic tone. “Tolstoy doesn’t search for psychological explanations” for depraved behavior, and he’s more concerned with sin, redemption, and religion than with character development. Still, director and translator Martin Platt admirably “tries to capture the spirit of coarse peasant life,” and the Mint’s director, Jonathan Bank, deserves gratitude for unearthing this somewhat dusty gem. “While it remains an intriguing curiosity, more interesting than good,” The Power of Darkness is a must for anyone interested in Russian literature. Who knows how long you’ll have to wait for another chance?
The week’s other openings
San Diego
Oscar and the Pink Lady
Old Globe Theatre, (619) 234-5623 In this one-woman show, actress Rosemary Harris “mesmerizes” as both a 7-year-old leukemia victim and his elderly “Granny,” said Bob Verini in Variety. Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s script tackles questions of life, death, and faith. Too bad his answers seem to be “culled from scented greeting cards.”
New York
The Ritz
Studio 54, (212) 719-1300 This “underdressed and overstuffed” revival of Terrence McNally’s 1975 farce set in a gay bathhouse falls flat, said Eric Grode in The New York Sun. Towel-clad actors race around, more concerned with hitting marks than creating humor, and Rosie Perez is “a largely incomprehensible blur” as a nightclub singer.
Washington, D.C.
The Taming of the Shrew
Shakespeare Theatre, (202) 547-1122 Director Rebecca Bayla Taichman’s eyecatching and perfectly cast production of Shakespeare’s early comedy “embraces the play’s contradictions and shortcomings,” said Peter Marks in The Washington Post. When, after three acts of sparring, Charlayne Woodard’s Kate and Christopher Innvar’s Petruchio “seal their mutual admiration with a kiss, all definitely feels right.”
If/Then