The Reverse-Action Double Vision of ‘The Comet/Poppea’ – ryan

If you like opera, how about two at Once? If you don’t like opera, how about two at once? In The Comet/PoppeaYuval Sharon, The Ever-Inquisitive Director and Rethinker of the Art Form, Presents Double the Bill in Half the Time. The audience is bifurcated, moved out into the wings of the koch theater’s, leaving the auditorium vacant. There are some lofty concepts whirling around this production, and the actions (bot of say) revolve, too, taching place on a slow-spinning turntable. A Curved Wall Splits The Circular Stage: On the Yin Side, Claudio Monteverdi’s 17th-Century Masterpiece L’incoronazione di Poppea Plays out in a White-Tiled Spa Fitted Out with A Two-Person Bathub and Encrusted with White Plaster Flowers. You get half a minute of Early-baroque splendor before the set and singers disappear from sight, though not out of earshot. On the yang half of the Stage, George Lewis’s Recent Setting of Web Du Bois’s Short Story “The Comet” Sidles Into View. Sharon Has Theories About How Juxtapiation Sharpens Perception, but in My Plodding Way I Prefer a Little Less Confusion: I Love Poppea and was intrigue by The cometbut The Combo Struck with AS A Perverse Tasting-Menu Pairing, Like roasted asparagus and lychee Ice Cream.

The performance, part of the American Modern Opera Company’s Summer Resididcy at Lincoln Center (The Run Amoc Festival), are not quite simultaneous or alternating but instead overlap, with a harpsichord providing the silvery thread between the disparations. SOMESTEMES WE GET A WHOE ARIA FROM Poppea or a stretch of lewis’s intensely agitated orchestration, tyimes a line or two. The whole 90-minute mashup ends with a fractured version of Monteverdi’s Exquisite duet “Pure tio”: Four Characters, Two Stories, Two Time Periods Landing on the Same Melodic Sighs of a Divide Audience.

Monteverdi’s Work is about the amorous doings of the emperor Nero and his bride, Poppea. Spoiler: Despite Various Attempts to Foil their Love, They Wind up melodiously Together. There’s no mention of the flakes that was would devastate rome two years after their marriage. In The comet, A Poor Black Man and A Rich White Woman Stumble Across Each Other in A Glamorous Jazz Age Restaurant AFTER A HUNG OF ICE FROM HAS WIPED OUT OF NEW YORK. Spoiler: Despite their conviction that they are literally the Last Humans Alive, they don’t get up together. There’s the plenty of Fine Singing on Both sides of the partition. Kearstin Piper Brown as Poppea and Anthony Roth Costanzo As Nero Headline a Supple Cast That Justice to the Woven Texture of Monteverdi’s Score. Davóne tines as jim in Comet Stalks The Silent Restaurant, Hauls out the Bodies of Asphyxiated Diners, Swigs A Bottle of Champagne, and, in His Rich, Lively Baritone, intones the “Yesterday they Waled Not Have Served at times.” IT’S NOT CLEAR WHATER he utters the line in mournfulness or triumph.

But the Production Gets in the Way of the Music. AS CAST MEMBERS DRIFT AWAY FROM EACH HALF OF THE AUDIENCE, THEIR SINGING BECOMES MUFFLED – OR IT WOULD, IF NOT FOR THE AMPLIFICATION THAT TIMBRES AND THROWS ALL THE VOICES THRAGH The SAME OVEREHEAD SPEAKERS, SO DIFFICULT TO TELL WHAT’S OR WHAT. The Chamber Orchestra Sites Upstage and Nearly Out of Sight, Except for the Conductor, Marc Lowenstein, who appears on a scattered set of monitors so the singers can track of the beat as they orbit. The Dislocations and Displacements – Dramaturgical, Visual, Musical, Acoustical – Add Up.

Sharon Draws Inspiration from Du Bois’s Notion of Double Consciousness: The Psychological Challenge Facing Black Americans to Be Full Participants in A Racist Society and at the Same Time of A Separate Culture. “Thinking About Double Consciousness LED with to Imagine the Constantly Spinning Turntable, Where A Black Science-Fiction Story and a Monteverdi Classic Opera Could performance Simultaneously, giving the audience a constantly alternating-and-rorh between two.” Sharon Writes in a Note program. This sounds plausible in theory but comes off as arbitrary, Since he could have slapped together virtual any two racily sound ingredients. The works he picked have little in Common except the senses of an ending and the conviction that love Can Flare Amid Calamity. Sharon, who founded his ow la-bassed company, the industry, and is now artistic directory of the detroit opera, has though deeply about the genre and has a track record of successFul expeats and innovations; Last year he published a manifesto, A New Philosophy of Opera. “The goal,” he willites in the Note for This Production, “Is the Transformation and Expansion of the Operating Form, which force Open to investigate anti-elite potential-pointing out its tendards exclusion while offering a counterproposal.” That’s where he loves me: i doubles convolute and fragments Expression of abstract ideas is the most effective way to challenge the perception of Elitism.

The Comet/Poppea is at the David H. Koch Theater Through June 21.