Category: Uncategorized

Review: A View from the Bridge

Alexandria Strother

Saturday night was truly a University of Michigan night at the opera. Prior to A View from the Bridge’s Michigan Opera Theatre debut UM President Mary Sue Coleman was honored on stage as the new President and CEO of MOT Wayne S. Brown (UM alumni) spoke to his audience for the first time. Following a rousing rendition of “Hail to the Victors” was a superbly sung opera written by William Bolcom (former UM Professor) based on the Arthur Miller (UM alumni) play of the same name.

Set in the 1950s Italian neighborhood of Red Hook in Brooklyn, A View from the Bridge takes place over a span of a few weeks as Eddie (Baritone Kim Josephson) takes in two of his wife’s illegal immigrant cousins from Italy to stay with his wife and niece who he raised.

While the social commentary of the show focuses on illegal immigration there are moments of gay baiting and incestuous behavior that leaves your skin crawling. When Eddie’s niece Catherine (soprano Kiri Deonarine) announces her impending marriage to Rodolfo (tenor Eric Margiore) Eddie goes ballistic, first forcing himself on Rodolfo to “prove” that Rodolfo is gay and using Catherine to become a citizen, and then forcing himself on Catherine – acting on the urges which are hinted at throughout the opera. Adding to the uncomfortable nature of the scene is that Kiri Deonarine is Kim Josephson’s daughter and that the audience has just witness incestuous behavior regardless of the fact that it is staged.

The first act of the show reveals the operas origins in a play, relying on each character singing short phrases and replying as if reciting lines in a straight play. I enjoyed this change of format as the action of the piece occurred quicker than in a standard opera. This allowed the arias in the second act to be very powerful as I had already made a connection with the characters and felt that I knew something about their lives and their situations.

In the second act “A Ship Called Hunger” sung by Jonathan Lasch  (Marco, UM Student) demanded the attention of the audience. With limited movement, Lasch allowed the force of his voice and strength of his presence to cut a daunting yet sympathetic figure while avoiding the cliché of opera singers who “Park and Bark”.

Throughout the show I was consistently impressed with the level of the investment the singers had in their characters as well as in their technique.  The opera remain believable at all times and was a complete theatrical event that never crossed the line between spectacle, which is inherent in opera, and pageantry.

 

A View from the Bridge will play at the Detroit Opera House until April 13. Tickets are $25 for UM students with online promo code “GoBlue”.

Preview: A View from the Bridge

Alexandria Strother

image

Who: Michigan Opera Theater

What: William Bolcom’s Opera A View from the Bridge

Where: Detroit Opera House, 1526 Broadway St, Detroit, MI 48226

When: April 5, 9, 11, 12 at 7:30 April 13 at 2:30

Tickets: $25 for University of Michigan students. Tickets must be purchased online at http://www.michiganopera.org using promo code GoBlue.

Over the next two weeks Michigan Opera Theater will be presenting local composer William Bolcom’s opera A View from the Bridge. Based upon Arthur Miller’s play of the same name, the opera follows the tragedy which follows when Eddie Carbone cannot come to terms with his niece falling in love with an immigrant in 1950s Brooklyn.  The role of Marco will be played by UM student Jonathan Lasch.

Sung in English with supertitles. 2.5 hour run time.

 

Ann Arbor Film Festival Opening Screening

keshav

I saw the opening screening of the Ann Arbor Film Festival this Tuesday. Ranging from 1-27 minutes in length, every single film presented was a unique experience unlike anything the standard moviegoing experience offers. I highly encourage my fellow student body and Ann Arbor residents to participate in this film festival in future years. Ranging from narrative to experimental, the opening screening was an excellent primer on the unique film culture the festival offers.

One of the most visceral and difficult pieces presented was Cut, a 13-minute collaboration between two German filmmakers. Cut is an experimental narrative which contains frequent visual motifs of red and white across a disparate group of images–some traditionally beautiful, such as a woman adorning herself with lipstick, while other shots were disturbing–shots of people recovering from surgery, bug bites, and other graphic imagery. Cut made me cringe from start to finish, even for shots that I would normally consider aesthetically pleasing. This is not a filmic experience I would voluntarily engage with in my leisure time. Cut was thrust upon me by the festival amongst a bundle of other films. Nevertheless, the harrowing experience was highly rewarding, forcing me to reconsider not only the mechanics of visual storytelling, but also to question what I consider to be beautiful. The juxtaposition of graphic, disturbing imagery sharing similar color tones to traditionally beautiful photography demonstrated how arbitrary and contrived cultural beauty imperatives are.

Another picture which caught my attention was the Division, barely a minute long and the shortest piece amongst the anthology. This stop-motion piece shows the filmmaker tearing a single piece of paper into increasingly smaller divisions. What begins as a mundane action turns into a compelling thought experiment: how small must a physical object become before it loses its “thingness”? Division is both visually stimulating and intellectually provocative, engaging the audience with intriguing visuals, bombarding them with a sequence of complicated imagery.

Based on audience reaction, the most popular piece in the opening screening may have been A Million Miles Away, an experimental take on a traditional story. A Million Miles Away is a journey into the emotional minefield that is the high school experience. Told through the perspectives of high school students of disparate social standing and a strange substitute teacher, this entirely female ensemble performance renders the psychological territory of the high school world in a way that I have not seen any mainstream high school movie do. A Million Miles Away publishes several characters’ text messages on-screen, simultaneously satirizing the low-attention-span nature of communication and glorifying the unifying capabilities of mnemonic communication shorthand. The emotional resonance of the film lies in its fearless intent to capture a more personal inquiry into the psychological reality of the high school experience, not only from the perspective of various students, but also from the perspective of the substitute teacher–the furthest outside the high school.

The Ann Arbor Film Festival is a highly non-traditional film-going experience. I would be the first person to admit this isn’t the place I’d go to for decompression, designate as a hangout for my friends after a day of work, or bring a first date to. This is an experience which challenges what the traditional moviegoing experience should be.

REVIEW: The Magic Flute

Chelsea Zabel

I’d like to take a moment to freak out about the brilliant lighting scheme of “The Magic Flute”. This opera is, I think, about finding a compromise between dark and light, between pure disorder and pure order, but doing so through the eyes of a child. This might not make any sense to you, but I thought that the lighting portrayed that beautifully. There was a particular circle that was useful in telling me the time of day and how I should feel about it by the color that was lighting it up.

Anyway, now for a quick summary:

“The Magic Flute” begins in the bedroom of a young girl. Her parents are fighting, it’s thunderstorming in the night, and her wardrobe doors are forced open by a young prince running away from a dragon. The Queen of the Night sends this Prince Tamino on a quest to save her daughter from her kidnapper, Sarastro (who didn’t actually kidnap her because Pamina is the daughter of the Queen of the Night and Sarastro). Pamina and Tamino fall in love while Tamino’s friend, Papageno, can’t learn to keep quiet, but in the end they manage to stop to the war between Sarastro (who appears to be a kind of lord of light) and the Queen of the Night.

That was very quick and will probably have Emanuel Schikaneder rolling in his grave, but I wanted to get that out of the way to talk about the cast. Jacob Wright and Jonathan Harris, who played Tamino and Sarastro, respectively, have outstanding voices that I remembered from “The Barber of Seville” last semester. Katy Clark’s soprano was thrilling as Queen of the Night, and Natasha Drake performed a beautiful Pamina. All of the leads were phenomenal, and I am amazed to think that there is another set of entirely different Michigan students who are equally as talented.

Although at times this show was a little slow and heavy, it was also fanciful and sentimental, and I especially enjoyed the ending. After all of their hardships, so many circumstances vying to tear them apart, Pamina and Tamino find a way to be together in the light of day, away from the chaotic Queen of the Night. As an audience we find ourselves again in the long-forgotten little girl’s bedroom where her parents are bringing her a tray for breakfast. Day has dawned over night just as it always will, but I do wish we could have seen the dragon again.