Secco Recit

A friend recently posed to me the hypothetical (and I'm just now realizing probably rhetorical) question, "Where would we be if Howard Ashman were still alive?" And my immediate response was "Well, Wicked probably wouldn't exist, or at least not in the form it does today." Which led me down a rabbit hole of counterfactualizing an elaborate timeline in which Howard Ashman did not die in 1991, and continued to change the landscape of Disney and musical theater in a radical way. (NOTE: This is all for fun and intended to be rather tongue-in-cheek. I do not have the ability to accurately predict this or any other alternate futures. If I did, I would become a time-traveling theatrical producer.) Howard Ashman and frequent collaborator Alan Menken You see, Howard Ashman's role in the shaping of a generation of childhoods began in 1987/88, when he was brought in to write lyrics for Disney's new animated feature, Oliver And Company . While worki...

It somewhat recently came to my attention that three of Disney’s most recent breakout protagonists, Anna, Elsa, and Moana, have not yet been inducted into the official Disney Princess lineup. (This despite appearing alongside the eleven official Princesses in Wreck It Ralph 2 .) This really calls focus to the seemingly arbitrary criteria Disney uses to select their Princesses. The official lineup is, in order of induction, Snow White, Cinderella, Aurora, Ariel, Belle, Jasmine, Pocahontas, Mulan, Tiana, Rapunzel, and Merida. But what criteria do these eleven meet that Anna, Elsa, and Moana fail to? Not to mention, Esmeralda and Tinkerbell (both of whom were part of the official lineup at some point before being kicked off), as well as Megara, Jane Porter, Alice, and Wendy Darling (who are sometimes assumed to be part of the lineup), and even getting into such obscure characters as Eilonwy and Kida. And, of course, Vanellope Von Schweetz, whom the official eleven (plus Anna, Elsa, and ...

As I've mentioned before , the German Reed Entertainments are a curious little lot. A series of short "musical entertainments" produced and performed by Thomas German Reed, his wife Priscilla, and assorted others, from about 1855 to 1895. These were, for the most part, not grand spectacles of great significance, and little care was taken to preserve most of them. Today, they are all but forgotten. All but six, that is. A half-dozen which retain historical interest, because their libretti were created by William Schwenk Gilbert, who has gained enough fame and historical regard that even his less significant works are considered worth preserving, if only for the sake of maintaining a complete archive. It is certainly interesting, years after the fact, to read through these musical entertainments to see how Gilbert began to explore the themes and devices he would later more fully develop. Our Island Home  would give way to H.M.S. Pinafore  and The Pirates Of Penzance . Ele...

It is one thing to mount a competent production of a widely-beloved opera to general acclaim. It is quite another to breathe new life into an oft-maligned opera in such a way that none attending could imagine why it was ever unpopular. This was accomplished (without, I hasten to add, changing the time or place in which the opera was set) by David McVicar in his ninth, and possibly best, production with the Metropolitan Opera, of Francesco Cilea's Adriana Lecouvreur . This production was broadcast as part of the Met's Live in HD series to cinemas around the world yesterday, and I happily attended, knowing the opera's reputation, being as familiar with it as I thought I needed to be to guess how I would leave feeling. I thought I would enjoy some wonderful vocal performances of some lovely music, while being vaguely entertained by the absurd plot and gawking at the breathtaking scenery and costumes I've come to expect of the designers McVicar tends to work with. Inste...

For slightly-more-than-casual opera goers, Arrigo Boito is maybe the third-best-known opera librettist, after Metastasio and Da Ponte. (This is not counting, for completely arbitrary reasons, W.S. Gilbert, who since the decline of opera seria  is the only opera librettist to regularly have his name listed before  the composer, as well as Richard Wagner, who, of course, wrote his own libretti.) Boito is best known for his work with Giuseppe Verdi. They collaborated on Otello  and Falstaff , both generally regarded to be masterpieces, and Boito also worked on the revised version of Simon Boccanegra , which is as underrated an opera as there ever was. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that Mefistofele , the one complete extant opera for which Boito wrote both text and music, should have as well-constructed a libretto as you could hope for. And it does. The biting question is, does the music match up? A scene from Boito's Mefistofele Photo by Karen Almond ...

Yesterday was the Metropolitan Opera Live In HD broadcast of Nico Muhly and Nicholas Wright's new opera, Marnie . It was also the last performance in the opera's run, so this review is pretty pointless. But when has that ever stopped me? Isabel Leonard (center) and the so-called "Shadow Marnies." Photo by Ken Howard Marnie  is based on a film by Alfred Hitchcock. (Well, technically it's based on the book by Winston Graham, which Muhly explained was easier to get the rights to. I have neither read the book nor seen the movie, but I gather the opera contains elements of both.) A Hitchcock film is in some ways an odd choice for an opera, because much of Hitchcock's skill is in the camera work, which does not translate to a live performance in a 4,000-seat opera house with a fifty-foot proscenium. But it does translate to a cinema broadcast, and several of the shots struck me as something that worked really well in the cinema, but probably didn't p...

In Gilbert and Sullivan's penultimate opera  Utopia (Limited) W.S. Gilbert proposes a system of government designated “Despotism tempered by Dynamite.” According to this system, the land of Utopia is governed by a King who wields absolute autocratic power, but is supervised by two Wise Men. If the two Wise Men feel the King is abusing his power, they denounce him to the Public Exploder. The Public Exploder then blows the King up with dynamite, at which point the Public Exploder becomes the new King. The result, according to the opera, is “an autocrat who dares not abuse his autocratic powers.” An absurd system of government to be sure, but on closer analysis, it presents an interesting example of the concept of Separation of Powers. Separation of Powers is a model utilized by many modern major governments with the aim of preventing any one individual from acquiring too much power. The idea, as stated by James Madison in Federalist No. 51 , is that in giving each branch of govern...