JFK OPERA GETS SURREAL
Director Thaddeus Strassberger’s work distorts history
“Right from the beginning, we see that this is not a biopic,” Matthew Worth, who plays the title role in JFK, said last week in a rehearsal room in Place des Arts. “We are not doing an impression of Jack or Jackie. There is no effort to recreate the public personae of these very public people.”
Nor any great effort to adhere to the historical reality. The start of this opera ostensibly set during the night before John F. Kennedy’s assassination finds the 35th U.S. president trying to bathe away his back pain in the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth.
Quite plausible. An injection of morphine from the First Lady? Hmm.
Jacqueline Kennedy giving herself a booster of this powerful opiate? Pure fiction, even if Jackie’s hypothetical drug use was recently endorsed by the television series The Crown.
Of course, opera has long traded in the not-likely and never happened. The most memorable scene in Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda of 1835 — which is based on Schiller’s stage tragedy of 1800 — posits a meeting of Mary, Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I that did not take place. Few opera fans would willingly do without the climactic moment when the younger royal calls her cousin a “bastarda.”
JFK, which opens Saturday in an Opéra de Montréal run of four performances, leaves such hearty melodramatic inventions in the dust. Following his hit of morphine, Kennedy finds himself on the moon, in the company of his infamously lobotomized sister, Rosemary. There, he runs into Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev.
Often on stage are Clara Harris and Henry Rathbone, who were present at the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. They double as a Secret Service agent and a maid, or a Greek chorus, depending on which layer of meaning is salient.
Jackie (Daniela Mack) at one point engages in a duet with her older Onassis self (another American mezzo-soprano, Katharine Goeldner). In a widely noticed scene, vice-president Lyndon Baines Johnson (Canadian bassbaritone Daniel Okulitch) emerges surrealistically from a painting hanging in JFK’s hotel room, along with a squad of political cowpokes, who torment the president and frolic with a dominatrix.
Rest assured that use is made of the onstage toilet.
“Acutely offensive,” was the judgment of Scott Cantrell in an otherwise tolerably positive review in the Dallas Morning News of the 2016 world première of JFK by Fort Worth Opera.
Those not easily offended might still be bewildered. “He is a parody of the real LBJ, filtered through Jack’s imagination and prejudices,” reads an explanatory note in the piano score.
A respectful distance from historical narrative might come naturally to American composer David T. Little and librettist Royce Vavrek, a Canadian and alumnus of Concordia University. “This work departs as far from reality as the truth requires,” they comment on the website of the publisher of the score.
Like Little and Vavrek, American director/designer Thaddeus Strassberger was born after the calamity of Nov. 22, 1963 and takes it in from a postmodern perspective.
Theatrical licence, in his view, is merely an extension of the distortion that inevitably afflicts historical events over time.
“You can’t recall a memory without changing a memory,” Strassberger told the assembled media corps in Place des Arts.
“It’s like a JPEG: every time you save it, it degrades. Every time we recover a memory, we change it into what we want it to be.
“It is the same (in JFK). We are picking what is important with JFK and with Jackie and what we as a generation of creators want to talk about.” What they want to talk about are the supposed inner psyches of the characters.
This means also that performers are visual approximations, not doubles. Mack will have appropriately stylish clothing as Jacqueline, and Worth, something like a JFK coif. But the accent is neutral American. “I’m not ‘pawking the caw in Hawvawd Yawd,’ ” the baritone explained, adopting a ripe Massachusetts idiom.
If the esthetic strategies of JFK seem unusual, the choice of a subject from the relatively recent past is not. Historical operas are still among us: next season the Canadian Opera Company will stage a work by Rufus Wainwright about the Roman emperor Hadrian. But the last 30 years have seen a marked increase in operas dealing with headline-generating 20thand even 21st-century events.
Nixon in China, a 1987 recreation by composer John Adams, librettist Alice Goodman and director Peter Sellars of the presidential visit of 1972, is an early example of the type. Opinion has run hot and cold over its bluntly minimalist music and stylized theatrics.
A revival in Houston last year gave rise to accusations that it perpetuates Asian stereotypes.
The Death of Klinghoffer, also by Adams, Goodman and Sellars and featuring Kent Nagano as conductor of the 1991 première, stirred even more controversy, not least among the relatives of the disabled Jewish American citizen of the title, who had been murdered on a cruise ship only six years earlier.
“Romanticizing terrorists as Robin Hoods” was how musicologist Richard Taruskin characterized the tendency evinced by this opera when the Boston Symphony cancelled a concert performance of its choruses shortly after the 9/11 attacks. Hundreds protested a 2014 Metropolitan Opera run of The Death of Klinghoffer, which went ahead as planned, although the company dropped its Live in HD transmission.
Not all Adams works for the stage are ripped from headlines.
El Niño (2000) has nothing to do with the climate-driving marine phenomenon, but tells the Nativity story from the point of view of the dispossessed. The Gospel According to the Other Mary (2012) likewise finds contemporary relevance in a biblical subject.
Doctor Atomic (2005) revolves around Robert Oppenheimer and the Manhattan Project that resulted in the development of the atomic bomb. While the Second World War might be classed as borderline contemporary, Girls of the Golden West (2017) rolls us back to 1852 and the California Gold Rush.
Sounds like fun? Not to worry: “Nativism, racism, opportunistic greed and environmental degradation” (Adams’s note) are duly addressed.
The most important antecedent
in Montreal is Dead Man Walking, an American opera (music by Jake Heggie and words by Terrence McNally) about capital punishment, based on the 1993 memoir of the same title by Sister Helen Prejean. Preceded by a successful movie, this San Francisco Opera commission of 2000 was a huge hit when the Opéra de Montréal staged it in 2013.
And thus a trend was started. The 2015 offering was Silent Night, a pastiche by American composer Kevin Puts with words by Mark Campbell.
This was gently panned in the Montreal Gazette, even though it had “its heart in the right place.”
Then came Les Feluettes in 2016 with music by Kevin March, an American residing in Australia, and words by Michel Marc Bouchard. Set in Quebec and drawing on both Roman Catholicism and same-sex love for its thematics, Les Feluettes resonated with the OdM audience.
Last season, Montrealers saw Another Brick in the Wall, with music by Julien Bilodeau based on the Pink Floyd album The Wall.
It ran for 10 performances despite mixed reviews.
Now a contemporary opera is as fixed in the OdM seasonal template as a potboiler by Puccini.
“We want to show the opera is an art form that can take on a lot, really cross borders culturally, in terms of the type of stories we can tell,” said OdM general director Patrick Corrigan. “Modern operas will always figure prominently in our programming.”
Nor does American subject matter hurt.
“This place, like many others, has a real fascination with Jack and Jackie,” Corrigan said.
“And it’s always an interesting time to look at the notion of the American presidency.”
Indeed, it is hard to think of a time when the American presidency was more closely scrutinized.
The OdM is making its viewpoint clear by donating $5 from every regular JFK ticket sold to the KANPE Foundation, a charity that helps Haitian families.
“JFK considered the United States to be a ‘nation of immigrants’ regardless of their place of birth,” reads a full-page newspaper advertisement placed by the company. No Twitter reaction so far from the White House.
JFK is a co-production with Fort Worth Opera, which means that Pierre Dufour, Corrigan’s predecessor, and OdM artistic director Michel Beaulac agreed in advance of the Texas première (and well in advance of the Donald Trump presidency) to mount the second run.
While not all North American companies are rushing to stage new operas, many have picked up on the European habit of making classics “relevant” with contemporary settings. Sellars has presented the title character of Handel’s Hercules as a U.S. serviceman returning from Iraq.
Can opera live on topicality alone? The art form has survived for centuries on the strength of great music and arresting drama that transcend the particulars of time and place. History is helpful. It is also the final judge.