Chekhov evoked in concert of pop tunes
“What does this have to do with Olga?” one audience member whispered to another.
In terms of explicit references, not too much. Though Beth Wilmurt’s “Olga: A Farewell Concert” is named after and inspired by the eldest sister in Anton Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” the cabaret concert that opened Friday, Dec. 1, at Harry’s UpStage in Aurora Theatre, consists almost exclusively of stripped-down, jazzy and twangy arrangements of a freewheeling assortment of pop music. Wilmurt mentions Olga by name just once, as an addendum to a recorded preshow announcement about turning off cell phones and finding emergency exits. “I’ve been working all day,” she sighs, just as schoolteacher Olga has at the top of Chekhov’s trailblazing modernist drama.
Rather, Wilmurt gets at the character obliquely, through refractions and riffs, through artfully chosen lyrics that brim
with rue and self-abasement but also longing and spunk and menace: Phil Ochs’ “When I’m Gone”; Gillian Welch’s “The Way It Goes”; “Illusions,” as popularized by Marlene Dietrich.
The effect is to open up and complicate a character whom it’s tempting to write off as the good one, the responsible one, the uninteresting one, at least as compared with her younger sisters, the idealistic Irina and the mischievous Masha. In Chekhov’s play, Olga is a spinster (at the ripe old age of 28), the one who assumed matriarchal duties when the siblings’ mother died, who works ceaselessly as a schoolteacher, though not without periodic gripes about her headaches.
Many of the songs in “Olga” read as different shades of Olga’s central yearning — to return to Moscow, away from which Chekhov’s lead characters were forced to move 11 years before his play begins. But Wilmurt’s set list also endows Olga with creativity, with devilry, with sagacity. Wilmurt’s vision is that of art at its most generous: It takes a character whom the rest of the world perceives one way and says, “No, I see you. You’re infinitely more than that.”
Accompanied by Sam Barnum on guitar, Gabe Maxson on harmonica and Olive Mitra on bass and percussion (all three of whom also helped create the show), Wilmurt as a singer is beguilingly unvarnished and conversational. It’s like she’s just talking to you, only vaulting her speaking voice from one pure tone to the next — until, that is, at just the right moment she blossoms into an understated vibrato, and you realize how melodic her timbre is.
Offbeat arrangements let you hear familiar songs anew. Wilmurt’s take on Stevie Wonder’s “Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday,” shorn of the original’s orchestra and chorus, centralizes keening lead vocals for a lonelier, more plaintive effect. Her version of “In My Room” — with just Wilmurt, singing and on piano — eschews the soupy andante of the Beach Boys’ original for a springy tempo and staccato chords, which make the narrator’s solitude less pathetic than sprightly and mysterious. Sometimes, especially when Wilmurt joins her trio on the ukulele, you can imagine, just for a moment, that you’re not hearing American pop on standard instruments but Russian folk songs on balalaikas.
Still, Wilmurt’s decision to let songs stand for themselves, to allow audiences to make their own connections to the source material, means some of her choices are less fruitful. More than once she embarks on an extended diminuendo, and it seems like the stretches of quiet are supposed to signify something weighty, but what? When you don’t give your audience much context to ponder, a hush feels more like an absence than an active space.
After the opening-night curtain call, Wilmurt mentioned that she and the band intend to keep working on the piece. “Olga” was commissioned as part of the Aurora’s Originate + Generate program, and even in this perhaps unfinished form, it’s yet another testament to the Bay Area as a vigorous engine for the creation of new work.