Saturday, March 15, 2008
Peter Grimes: The view from row HD
The idea of spending a morning in a movie theater watching a satellite broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera sounded intriguing to me. I arrived ten minutes to curtain to find an auditorium three-fifths full that later turned out to look almost exactly like the Met's audience except not as well dressed. The next three and half hours were spent in the somber world of Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes in a presentation format not television and not really movies. And certainly not like the experience of being Met itself unless you could roll around on the stage or soar on a crane whenever you wanted to.
The oddball in the fishing village; it is one of my favorite archetype tales and settings. You always someone exceptional fighting tradition, provincial pettiness, and there is always some element of man against nature in it too. Furthermore, Peter Grimes delves into the social-psychological. He is a tortured soul who will be drawn and quartered in a variety of fashions by those around him.
The Borough, the fishing village community where the action takes place in Grimes, is a major character in the opera. The chorus is one two groups of folks that get brutalized in the score of this opera. The other group are the flute players who open with a solo for almost every transition. The Met production doesn't stress the setting of a fishing village with boats and stuff. John Doyle (known for a stripped down revival of Sweeney Todd) instead has rolled the action into what is an absolutely creepy Victorian village of the damned with its residents living in a big three story storefront that reminds me at times of the joke wall in Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In except without the day-glo graffiti. Sock It To Peter Grimes.
It is a lowlight world as murky and grey as that comic on PyongYang the I blogged about earlier. And that was kind of an issue for the HD presentation. The only high lit scene in the whole thing was the very last scene. If I was having problems seeing around this dim set, I imagine a lot of the folks, most of which seemed least 15 years older than myself, were having issues with it too. But when the chorus' character would bloom out at its self-indignant pronouncements on Grimes or once or twice sing with reflection, you forgot you were in a theater of any kind.
I didn't get transformed like that by tenor Anthony Dean Griffey as Grimes. The acting wasn't there and his voice was maybe too pretty. I remember wishing that Phillip Seymour Hoffman was a great tenor. But I have to give Griffey credit, he is filling shoes once worn by Britten's partner, Peter Pears and then Jon Vickers, who made it his signature role for at least a decade. I saw Vickers do Grimes at the Seattle Opera about twenty five years ago. I still recall it as a powerful evening.
It seemed everyone in the theater pulled out a sandwich out of their bags or pockets at the intermission. I'll be sure to do that next time, I smelled a wisp of tunafish salad once or twice. At least, I don't think it was herring.
posted by well-executed buffet at 3:42 PM
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