A (Mostly) Lovely Evening Out

When I purchased a membership to the Park Avenue Armory, I really only did it to get advance tickets to Macbeth.  Since that was a thoroughly satisfying experience, getting anything else out of my membership will be gravy.  I'm hoping to take my mom on a guided tour of the Armory when she's here later this summer.  So imagine more delight when the Armory invited me to a dress rehearsal of the opera they're presenting this weekend - The Passenger is having its New York premiere under the Lincoln Center Festival umbrella.  I had read the synopsis and the subject matter of The Passenger and was intrigued until I saw the ticket prices.  Oof.  Out of my league.  The free ticket offer was therefore much appreciated by me and the startlingly handsome gentleman I took as my date to last night's dress rehearsal.

Before we get to the opera, I want to mention that my startingly handsome gentleman friend and I had a pre-show drink at Fig & Olive.  We each had a lovely glass of sangria blanca and the server brought us a very nice sampling of breads with three different tastings of olive oil - one from Tunisia, one from Spain and the other from Italy.  I hadn't tried Tunisian olive oil before!  It was my favorite.  I would definitely like to go back to Fig & Olive and try more of their food.  Moving on to the opera... 

I believe I've pointed out in the past that I know next to nothing about opera.  I probably know even less than that about modern or contemporary opera.  I have my Maria Callas CDs and my Puccini playlist, so that's what I think of when I think of opera.  So far, with the two contemporary operas I've seen lately (The Passenger and last year's Two Boys), I'm not sure that it is my cup of tea.  It's probably because I just don't 'get' it, but still.

I'm not going to talk a lot about the piece, since it was a dress rehearsal, plus...I'm going to admit something a little embarrassing here - we left at intermission.  I'm guessing the second act of the opera had more tension and was more compelling, but since the music didn't grab me in the first act, and since the seats were a tad uncomfortable for me (the bottom of the seat hit me at just the right spot to make my entire leg go to sleep and to convince me that I would have an embolism and die during the performance), my startlingly handsome gentleman friend and I decided to leave.  Plus, the first act was nearly two hours long.  It's sad to admit I just couldn't do it.



photo credit: Lynn Lane

The Passenger was composed in 1968 by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a Polish composer.  He based the opera on a semi-autobiographical novella by Holocaust survivor Zofia Posmysz.  It didn't have its first full staging until 2006 and is now making its New York debut.  The story centers around two women, one a concentration camp inmate and the other a  guard at the camp.  The opera begins on a ship in the late 1950s, where a German couple is on board, sailing to Brazil and the husband's new diplomatic post.  Suddenly, the wife sees a woman who reminds her of a woman she had thought to be dead.  Is the woman really there?  Is she a figment of the wife's imagination?  We don't know.  But the wife is sufficiently traumatized, and she then confesses her SS past to her husband.  He is horrified, she tries to justify herself, then we see flashbacks to past lives at Auschwitz.  Compelling stuff.  In theory.



photo credit: Tristan Kenton

The music, to my untrained ears, wasn't dramatic enough, or propulsive enough, to keep the story moving forward.  I asked my friend, who knows much more about opera than I, if modern opera is opposed to using arias.  There were no arias, really, to speak of, just dialogue set to music.  Does that make sense?  Not song lyrics, but dialogue that they happened to be singing.  And there was much more music than dialogue, so the performers were required to fill in a lot of non-singing time.  Unfortunately, their acting wasn't as compelling as their singing.  Now, when we arrived, we were told by the stage manager that the performers may not go 'full out' because it was a dress rehearsal, but they seemed to be giving a full performance to me.  There just seemed to be a lot of dead space between times they were singing, which didn't help with the already inert feeling of the music.  In my opinion, of course.

The singing was fantastic, don't get me wrong.  And there were moments when I thought, "ah, NOW it's going to get going...oh, no, it's not."  It seemed to me there were wasted opportunities, especially at the end of the first act.  I have some directorial quibbles and dramaturgical questions as well.  But again, maybe all of the opportunities were explored and taken advantage of in the second act, the directorial things resolved, the dramaturgical questions answered, and it's my own fault that I didn't experience them.  But everything moving and special can't happen in the second act.  Can it?  

Interesting audience neighbor notes:  we were sitting next to very young people who were holding their cell phones throughout.  I was worried that they would resort to texting at some point during the show, but to their credit, they didn't.  At the clear end of the first act, the house lights came up and the audience got up for intermission.  The stage manager over the god mic came on and asked us to please stay seated because the conductor wanted to run over something with one of the performers.  Of course, that didn't stop most of the audience from getting up to go to the lobby, but I digress.  So, the stage was completely dark and stagehands were setting up for the second act, but there was a performer over by the orchestra, not lit or anything, running over a piece we'd already heard in the first act.  Well, that didn't stop the woman in front of us from being INCENSED that there was talking going on around her.  She kept turning around and shushing the young people, as if they were interrupting the performance.  She was LIVID and nothing was being performed.  It was very odd.  When the stage manager finally came back on over the mic and said, "ok, 20-minute intermission," that was when my guest and I took our leave.  A little gingerly, I might add, since we didn't want to further anger the woman in front of us.  :)

So, although I'm very grateful to have had the opportunity to experience this dress rehearsal, I didn't really enjoy The Passenger.  Or at least what I saw of it.  But I wish them much success - of course this is a very moving story and an intriguing subject for dramatization through opera, and I've read that the author of the original novella will be in attendance opening night.  That's a wonderful thing.  I just wish I had been more touched myself.  Ah well.  Maybe next time.  I did have a mostly lovely evening though - time spent with a startingly handsome gentleman friend is time well spent indeed.