The Rake's Progress
Music by Igor Stravinsky
Libretto by W.H. Auden & Chester Kallman   
Now through November 21st at the Royal Theatre in Victoria, BC

Since The Rake's Progress premiered in 1951, it has been considered a modern classic.  Indeed, it might just be one of the first post-modern classics.  I've always thought of it as the very thing that contemporary opera should strive to be: touching, irreverent, hilarious and intense.  It's also quite weird.  I'm pretty sure that we should thank whiskey for that; both Stravinsky and Auden did their share of drinking, and during the brainstorming for the piece, they downed more than their fair share.  The results speak for themselves.  Although inspired by a series of Hogarth paintings by the same name, The Rake's Progress is its own unique animal.  It showcases human weakness and folly, love, redemption, etc., to be sure, but also counsels us what to do should we run into the devil in the future.  I have long counted it as one of my favorite operas and was quite excited when I heard the news that the Pacific Opera Victoria would be the only company in North America to perform it this year.  Last week, I found myself hopping the Clipper to take in opening night at Victoria's Royal Theatre (notice that I'm using the Canadian spelling?), a venue about the size of the Moore Theater, but with a much nicer smell.

I've always considered the staging for The Rake's Progress as perhaps the most straightforward of any 20th century opera.  After all, the cast is small: Tom Rakewell, our dim, misguided hero, Anne Trulove, his, er, true love, Anne's father, who isn't particularly fond of Tom, Nick Shadow, the devil himself, and Baba the Turk are the principals.  There are several other minor characters, a chorus and that's all.  Stravinsky's spry neoclassical score contains some tricky passages, but, given proper rehearsal time, most musicians have no problem executing it.  Like I said, almost everything about this work is straightforward.  And that's the kind of performance I was expecting from Pacific Opera Victoria.  Unfortunately, the piece's brilliance was obscured by some muddled direction and poor performances.

First off, the orchestra was very well managed by conductor, Timothy Vernon.  They were solid and consistent throughout the performance.  In addition, the vocal performances by Colin Ainsworth as Tom and Lucia Cesaroni as Anne were excellent.  Neither had any trouble with Stravinsky's shifting meters or odd harmonies.  It was very much to Ainsworth's credit that he was able to take Stravinsky occasionally awkward settings of English, smooth them out and make them flow.  He is an excellent singer and actor.  As for Anne, Cesaroni's rendition of the haunting "No Word from Tom" was as good as I've ever heard it.  Chad Louwerse as Anne's father was also quite good.  I was a little disappointed with Gregory Dahl as Nick Shadow.  His singing was fine, but it's a big role that requires more charisma than he could muster.  He's the devil, for Pete's sake!  We need more evil than black clothes.  He wasn't menacing at all.  He could have really sunk his teeth into the part, but that didn't happen.  For some reason, the director, Glynnis Leyshon, assigned Shadow a pair of sultry "assistants" who follow him everywhere.  This wasn't very effective in my view, because the entire piece is about Tom sparring with Shadow until the final showdown.  Adding any additional characters merely fills the stage.  It doesn't enhance the drama in any way.  If anything, it dilutes their interaction to an extent.  Shadow alone is leading poor, hapless Tom to ruin and he doesn't need any help doing it.     

The one role that was completely botched was that of Baba the Turk.  At Shadow's urging, the weak-willed Tom acquires Baba as his wife.  She is a circus freak, a bearded lady, in fact.  This is supposed to be a surprise to the audience.  Baba is supposed to draw up in her sedan chair, unhook her veil and voila, there's her beard.  What weird fun!  But her veil was so sheer, you could already see her beard.  Sure, everybody knows she's got a beard, but where's the fun in that?  After she's made her grand entrance, her part should be played broadly.  That didn't happen.  In fact, mezzo-soprano Mia Lennox-Williams does almost nothing with the part.  In Chapter 6, there's a famous scene where Baba's talking to Tom and won't shut up.  Tom yells at her and she bemoans her fate until Tom throws a towel over her head.  In mid-phrase, she cuts off, not to be seen again until two scenes later when Tom, now bankrupt and absent, has his belongings auctioned off.  Baba is wheeled out, to be auctioned off as a "mystery" possession, the towel is removed and she picks up her phrase exactly where she left off.  Once again, this was so poorly executed that all comic value was lost.  Her parting shot at giving advice to a despondent Anne also landed with a thud.  In my mind, Baba is one of the more interesting characters in opera.  She's vain and annoying, but she's not at all a bad person - she's just completely wrong for Tom.  Who is right for him?  Why, Anne, of course, but thanks to Shadow's interference, Tom forgets all about her until the final chapter.  

The intense final face-off in the cemetery between Tom and Shadow was quite well done, despite the fact that Shadow's assistants were hanging around.  In this scene, Shadow reveals himself as the devil (because Tom was too slow-witted to figure it out for himself) and gives Tom a chance to save his soul by guessing which cards Shadow has drawn from a deck.  For nearly 10 minutes, the singers are accompanied only by a very dry-sounding harpsichord.  In the end, Tom guesses correctly, but Shadow robs him of his sanity which nicely sets up the final scene at Bedlam when he has Anne sing him to sleep before he expires.  It's very touching stuff, but here once again, the direction is off-kilter.  Here you have Tom who has gone insane being upstaged by his follow inmates when he should have been the focal point of the entire scene.  It wouldn't have been too much trouble to bring out attention toward Tom, but that just didn't happen.

Probably the worst performance of the evening came from the chorus.  From very early on, it became apparent that the music was simply beyond them.  They sounded very ragged throughout the piece.  For example, whenever the music hit a patch of shifting meters, you could actually hear singers dropping out until there was only one person on a part.  But when the rhythms became less tricky, everyone would jump in again.  This happened is nearly every scene in which the chorus sung.

Well, despite this performance, The Rake's Progress is still one of my favorite operas.  It is one of the most brilliant pieces of music that you'll hear anywhere.  But just as the work itself is a cautionary tale, so is this performance.  It proved to me that the piece needs the kind of director who can bring out its more dynamic aspects and play up its very sly humor.  Those elements weren't brought out at all.  I felt that the audience, who seemed more comfortable with the 19th century repertoire, didn't fully benefit from all that this wonderful opera has to offer.