Monthly Archives: January 2017

Boston Natives at Hawaii Opera Theatre

#HOTSpeaks: Opera Goers from Boston Value Aloha

These academics from Boston have a message for those considering seeing an opera: It’s not “high-brow.”

Boston Natives Marty and Phyllis Albert have attended at least one Hawaii Opera Theatre production in Honolulu almost every year for two decades.

This year the two attended André Previn’s opera adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire on Friday, HOT’s opening night.

“Marty and I were totally open-mouthed, and I’m speechless,” Phyllis said of the production, “by the amazing, unbeatable quality of the performance of Streetcar last evening.”

Marty Albert is a cognitive neurologist and professor of neurology at Boston University Medical School, and Phyllis Albert is a historian at the Harvard University Center for European Studies.

The pair spend their winters on Kauai and travel to Honolulu for one week each year.

“We always time that week with one of the HOT operas,” Marty said. “We call it our culture fix.”

The academic snowbirds have great respect for Hawaiian culture, and they love the welcoming feeling of aloha among locals.  The Alberts’ experience with the staff at HOT productions exemplifies the sentiment, they said.

“It is not trivial, this concept of aloha spirit,” Marty said.

The couple makes a point to visit the HOT box office in person each year for their “annual hug” with one of the staffers. Additionally, they also appreciate HOT Artistic Director Henry Akina’s in-person welcome at each production they’ve been to.

And despite their academic titles, they fit in well with the local “aloha attire.”

“We don’t dress up,” Phyllis said.

“That’s who we are – professor or not, Harvard or not,” Marty echoed.

Even in Hawaii, though, many people enjoy dressing up to go to an opera.

Phyllis and Marty support anyone’s choice to dress formally if they want to. But they don’t agree with the classification of opera as a “high-brow” art.

“Opera was meant for the masses,” Phyllis said. “It wasn’t meant for a small group of people specially prepared or dragged to it by some well-meaning grandparent or teacher.”

So on the opening night of A Streetcar Named Desire, the two entered the Neil S. Blaisdell Concert Hall in their usual, casual clothing.

Next year they plan to do the same.

“[HOT has] consistently had high quality productions,” Marty said. “I give credit to the energy and commitment of the people who try to put it together.”

And the true aloha that was cultivated among those same people greeted the couple again with a warm “Hello” from Henry Akina.

“To have an opportunity to connect with the staff, that’s sort of aloha,” Marty said. “It’s a welcoming feeling. It’s very different from the big city and the concerts in Boston.”

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser Review: ‘Streetcar’ maintains impact in wide-ranging operatic form

Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire” took the world by storm in 1947 and remains one of the greatest of 20th-century plays. That fact alone makes the operatic version of it an important work.

From the beginning, people commented on the play’s operatic style — larger than life, emotionally complex, tragic — but it still took half a century before anyone gathered the courage to adapt it for opera.

On Friday, Hawaii Opera Theatre presented the Hawaii premiere. The opera, created by composer Andre Previn and librettist Philip Littell debuted less than 20 years ago, by the San Francisco Opera. The opportunity to hear a new opera in Hawaii lent extra excitement to the evening.

From play to opera, the story remains unchanged: Still fancying herself a Southern belle, Blanche DuBois has lost her family’s estate after the deaths of her relatives and has come to live with her sister and brother-in-law, Stella and Stanley Kowalski, in a small, lower-middle-class flat in New Orleans. The story revolves around the animosity and animal attraction between Blanche and Stanley, which erupts into violence and descends into insanity. Caught in the maelstrom are Harold “Mitch” Mitchell, one of Stanley’s friends who falls for Blanche, and Eunice Hubbell, the upstairs neighbor.

The libretto is true to the play — many lines are verbatim — but it is also not really an opera libretto. Because music needs time, either words must wait around and repeat while the music expands, or the music must quick-march to the drumming of the words. Adhering so closely to Williams’ words left little room for Previn’s music, and the result is more a play that has been set to music, with comparatively few arias.

Previn created a score that ranges widely from contemporary classical and jazz to film, onomatopoeia and word-painting (such as, for example, a descending chromatic line for “I am fading”). His most effective scenes were the little “eddies” where the words paused long enough for an aria’s reflection; perhaps best of all was Stella’s love-satiated, wordless humming, blissfully immune to Blanche’s verbal assault.

Conductor Mark Morash guided the orchestra skillfully through the complex score, keeping orchestra and singers in balance.

Jill Gardner delivered a powerful and finely nuanced performance as Blanche, the opera’s focal point. Her voice, healthier and more robust than Blanche’s character, is huge, richly hued, with clear enunciation and great control.

As Stanley, Ryan McKinny had the power to match her, with his powerful, warm baritone, and he was able to convey Stanley’s anguish and anger, desire, frustration, violence and vulnerability in that iconic spot-on scream for “Stella!”

Secondary leads were also strong: Stacey Tappan (Stella) had a lighter, clearer voice perfect for Blanche’s younger sister, and her aria longing for Stanley was both beautiful and touching. Victoria Livengood was terrific as Eunice, expanding the role with a great voice. Richard Cox, tall and well-cast, delivered a great Mitch, his voice big but sensitive, virile but vulnerable. And Charlie Mukaida was notable in his scene as the young man trying to collect for the newspaper while being seduced by Blanche.

HOT’s visual design was simple but effective, delivering meaning while keeping out of the way of the intense drama. The lighting was somewhat heavy-handed, with each color intense and conveying specific meaning: shadowy blues for fantasy, intense reds, rose-colored perceptions, sunny brights, harsh whites for reality, overhead spots for isolated introspection, etc.

There were clever solutions in staging, and even very challenging scenes worked well. Ghosts wandered through scenes, underscoring the drama unfolding in Blanche’s psyche, and staging echoed shifting relationships.

In the final scene, Blanche exits on a pianissimo, abandoned by everyone she knows and relying on “the kindness of strangers” (one of the play’s most famous lines), leaving reality for insanity/death to join her husband’s ghost.


Ruth O. Bingham received her doctorate in musicology from Cornell University and has been reviewing the musical arts for more than 25 years. 

From the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.

The Honolulu Star-Advertiser: ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ features intense psychological drama

If there is ever an iconic moment in American theater, it’s in “A Streetcar Named Desire,” when Stanley Kowalski shouts “Stella!” at the top of his lungs, pleading forgiveness from his wife, whom he has just struck in a fit of drunken jealousy and anger over her sister, Blanche Dubois.

“I’ll tell people, ‘I’m doing ‘Streetcar Named Desire,’ and they won’t know it, but then I’ll go, ‘Stella!’ and they’ll know,” said Brad Dalton, who is directing this week’s Hawaii’s Opera Theatre production of the opera of Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning drama.

Grammy-winning musician Andre Previn, known as a composer of film scores and for his work in modern American music, composed the jazzy score, with Philip Littell’s libretto drawing directly from Williams’ powerful story about Blanche, a faded Southern belle with a terrible secret (or two or three), and her emotional and physical takedown by the brutish Stanley.

The play, immortalized in a 1951 film starring Marlon Brando and Vivien Leigh, is one of many Williams dramas that deals with psychological problems, a reflection of his own life.

“This is Tennessee Williams pouring out his sympathy for those in life who feel misunderstood, who feel judged, who feel bewildered, the lost, the wanderers who cannot find their place,” Dalton said.

Dalton was assistant director in the original production of this opera when it was performed in San Francisco in 1998, and he has directed it many times since then. His presentation has the characters slipping in and out of the real world and an alternate consciousness. “There are moments of memories of traumas, where the colors and lights begin to move away from that realism and we go into more of a psychological space, and then it snaps back to reality,” he said. “It’s exciting that way, to see, ‘Oh, that character is a memory in her mind. It’s haunting her as a black silhouette.’”

DALTON THINKS “Streetcar,” more than most Williams plays, lends itself to operatic treatment. “When you read the script, it has a tremendously descriptive and very provocative sound landscape,” he said. “There’s supposed to be cats scratching and the sound of railroads going by, and jazz playing in the distance, and cackling crowds.”

Conductor Mark Morash said the opera has stood out among modern American operas in that it has been produced several times since its debut, including in major cities like Los Angeles and Chicago, and overseas in France and the U.K.

HOT’s production comes from New Orleans. “That it’s getting played at all says something,” Morash said.

Previn’s score presents a panoply of colorful sounds, Morash said, and like any great opera score, it’s a reflection of what’s happening onstage.

“When Stanley and Blanche are having what Blanche thinks is a casual exchange, Stanley is getting the dirt on Blanche,” he said. “It’s set it in this kind of jazzy music, which makes it feel it’s all easygoing. … Then there will be a little dissonance, and you realize that it’s Stanley at work, slowly but surely dismantling Blanche.”

Those who might have seen the original production — it’s out on DVD — might notice that the orchestral arrangement is different. With Previn’s blessing and assistance, the original orchestration was reduced and adapted for an ensemble of about 45 musicians.

Morash was involved in the project; he thinks it now sounds better.

“The big orchestra, which is probably close to 70 players, was such a behemoth; it was so bulky that you couldn’t get the intimacy of what was happening onstage,” he said. “I think this version feels a lot more like what’s happening onstage.”

The orchestra takes on a score that mixes genres and calls for unusual techniques from the woodwinds and strings, as well as precise rhythmic coordination in the jazzy sections.

“Let’s say there wasn’t much chatter during orchestra rehearsal,” Morash said with a laugh. “It’s complicated. There’s a lot of changing meters. It’s difficult music. There’s so many colors — flutter-tongue tremolandos (a “trembling” effect) in the flutes and harmonics in the strings that happen at different points. They’re doing great, and the orchestra, I think, was really excited about how visceral the music is.”

SOPRANO JILL GARDNER, who gave a pleasing performance here in “Tosca” in 2013, appears as Blanche, a coquettish yet desperate woman trying to keep things together during troubled times. Gardner, the older of two daughters who bore the burden of family responsibility when her parents died, said she identified with Blanche.

“I have a special affinity for her because she’s a Southern sister. She’s from Mississippi and I’m from North Carolina, but there’s a lot that I think I sympathize and empathize with, living within her skin as a Southern woman,” said Gardner in a drawl that seems made for Blanche’s famous line, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.”

Gardner said Southern women face particular challenges, having to maintain a “facade” at all times to create a favorable impression on those around them, while hiding their own pain.

“A Southern woman will always try to create beauty, and by doing that she’ll take care of everybody else,” she said, “but in taking care of everybody else, they keep themselves from feeling those little interior hurts. What Blanche has taught me is that everybody, no matter who they are, carries a little bit of suffering within them. It’s probably internal, which they might share with closest friends and family, but it’s something that they carry.”

Blanche has the two main arias in the opera, “I Want Magic” and “I Can Smell the Sea Air,” which Gardner particularly loves. “I think they really express the ‘essential oil’ of this character — her desire for love, for magic, for everything to be good and happy and beautiful for everyone.”

And that primal scream from Stanley? That moment belongs to baritone Ryan McKinny, returning to HOT after his bravura debut here in “The Flying Dutchman” in 2015.

Though we all think we can scream (but few think we can sing opera), McKinny said it’s not easy.

“With singing, your air and your vocal folds are coordinated and they’re balanced,” he said. “When you’re screaming you’re using your body to squeeze your lungs, so there’s a ton of air pressure going across your cords. You aren’t putting them together in a balanced way; you’re just making an emotional sound. But just like the way you might do an ornament or find a color for singing, you can do that when you’re screaming onstage.”

He sees Stanley as not the simple villain, though he does “have a temper problem.”

“He’s sort of all about being practical and earthy and honest and simple,” he said. “He always has some sort of human motivation for the things that happen. From Stanley’s perspective, this woman comes in and just doesn’t leave.”

By Steven Mark for The Honolulu Star-Advertiser

Jill Gardner on Blanche Dubois: “You have to really sing it!”

Tennessee Williams’ character Blanche Dubois from his famous play A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the hardest female roles to act on the stage.

A National Public Radio article describes it as being “like climbing Mount Everest, both physically and emotionally demanding. Actresses talk of losing their voice, suffering bouts of depression or having anxiety attacks while playing the part. Yet they covet the role.”

Opera singer Jill Gardner can relate.

“To play the role of Blanche and to go through what she goes through is emotionally very taxing,” Gardner said. “And, operatically, you have to be able to sing it! It’s not just about portraying it. You have to really sing it.”

She’ll be singing the role of Blanche in André Previn’s opera adaptation of the Tennessee Williams play, which Hawaii Opera Theatre will open this weekend. Blanche Dubois, the story’s main character, is a Southern belle who travels to New Orleans to be with her sister after losing her ancestral home and job. A conflict between Blanche and her sister’s husband unfolds with tragic consequences.

The role of Blanche is new for Gardner, and this weekend’s production will be her debut performance.

“I knew it was going to be a challenge unlike many of the other roles that I’d done,” she said. “Blanche is complicated, because she’s just so fragile and so vulnerable, and in the end she really suffers such a horrific fate that is unlike other characters that I’ve played thus far in my career.”

The last time Gardner performed with HOT was in 2013 to sing Puccini’s Tosca – a role that she has sung 15 times now.

In contrast, singing Blanche for the first time makes Gardner feel a sense of vulnerability, she said.

That vulnerability was an essential part of Blanche, though, Gardner found.

She studied different actresses to discover what they brought to the role. Vivien Leigh exemplified vulnerability, Gardner thought, and Jessica Tandy perfectly embodied the culture of a Southern woman. Her favorite performance was from Ann-Margret, who she felt embodied Blanche’s sensual energy.

A couple topics she didn’t need to educate herself on were Blanche’s Southern upbringing or family values.  Gardner grew up in North Carolina, and she was also the oldest of her siblings.

“I was so happy to embrace my own culture within it,” she said. “I’ve never felt like I was far away from the heart of the character in that way.”

Gardner was thrilled to take on the role when HOT offered it. But like many of the actresses and singers before her, she found it took a toll on her.

After five days of intense rehearsing, Gardner said she felt overwhelmed.

“After that first week I just felt that I was lost,” she said. “It’s hard, too, because you have to walk her walk with her. I want to constantly take care of her because she’s so fragile. Going through Blanche’s journey during this opera was… rough!”

But Gardner has drawn inspiration from the Italian opera heroines in her repertoire to find the motivation needed to conquer Blanche’s role, and to do so with positivity.

Gardner searched for Blanche’s redeeming qualities, and found that she admired the complex character’s appreciation of joy, light, and the beauty all around her. Previn’s music, she said, highlights these attributes.

“If I keep that in mind, along with the intention that I will always fight to the end, that’s what balances everything,” she said. “That positive intention helps me to feel like I’m not being undone by [the role].”

Gardner feels empathy for Blanche, she said, and she hopes that audiences leave the concert hall with a desire to show empathy to others in their lives.

And despite the challenging nature of the role, she hopes to sing it again.

“I really do hope to return to this role,” Gardner said. “I love it in its complexity, I think that the music is so beautiful, and I do think it fits me very well.”

By Allison Kronberg

Hawaii Public Radio – Lies We Choose to Believe: HOT’s A Streetcar Named Desire

From Hawaii Public Radio:

“It’s a cry for those in the world who feel bewildered or misunderstood, belittled or marginalized, those people who don’t fit into the fabric of normal in society.  It’s really a cry for the misunderstood in the world.  And I think basically when you say that, you realize that all of us feel that way. ”

And, leaving the theater, we’re left to ponder the lies we choose to believe.

Read the the full article and listen to the story by Noe Tanigawa online now!

Featuring Stage Director Brad Dalton and Singer Jill Gardner, who stars as Blanche in HOT’s upcoming production of A Streetcar Named Desire.

 

Gallery – Stellaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!

The romance between Stanley and Stella Kowalski has taken audiences for a ride on stage, in film, and at the opera since it was first written by the great American writer Tennessee Williams 70 years ago.  A Pulitzer prize winner in 1948, experience the drama of this story for yourself when HOT presents the Hawaii Debut of Previn’s musical adaptation of

A Streetcar Named Desire.

Tickets on sale at Tickets.HawaiiOpera.Org from $19.50.

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VIP Dress Gallery – A Streetcar Named Desire

Enjoy these shots from HOT’s VIP Dress Rehearsal of

A Streetcar Named Desire!

Experience the unfolding conflict between sisters Blanche and Stella, when Blanche moves in with Stella and her husband, Stanley, who senses something might be amiss about Blanche and her story.

Photos by Chloe Fonacier.

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Tickets on sale from $19.50.

Purchase online at Tickets.HawaiiOpera.Org.

The Lives of Tennessee Williams and André Previn

HOT will open the doors to André Previn’s musical transformation of the classic Tennessee Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire on January 27.

The production — and the phenomenal success it represents — is a tribute to how music can complement theatre, and vice versa.

Williams wrote with authority about the challenges faced by the characters in his play, such as depression and substance abuse. His work is distinctively his own.  But André Previn’s rich life experiences and love of jazz predisposed him to be up to the task of reinterpreting the dark and emotional motifs of the American classic for an operatic audience.

They are two very different artists — the playwright and the composer. Yet, when one compares the two men’s lives, there are interesting commonalities. And the result is a fascinating, posthumous collaboration in the form of A Streetcar Named Desire.

Early Life
Both Williams and Previn had happy childhoods, through Williams was born 18 years earlier. Williams grew up the son of a shoe company executive and a southern belle in Columbus, Mississippi. Previn was born in Berlin, Germany to a wealthy family. But both artists lives were soon upheaved. When Williams family moved to the city of St. Louis, Missouri, he became unsatisfied with life. He took to writing to provide an escape from city life and his parents’ dysfunctional marriage. The threat of World War II and Nazi rule, on the other hand, is what forced Previn out of his peaceful youth. He and his family fled to Paris in 1938, and Previn devoted his time in the city to studying at the Paris Conservatory of Music.

As both creators were beginning to recognize their talents, they faced obstacles. In 1929 Williams began studying journalism at the University of Missouri. But his father ended his education after learning that Williams’ male love interest attended the same school. Williams became a shoe salesman at his father’s company soon after, and his hatred of the labor contributed to his chronic depression. Previn’s studies in Paris were cut short when his family announced their move to the United States. No one in the family spoke English. Previn gave music lessons at home to earn money, but he wasn’t content with the role.

Finding a spark of passion would bring both of the men closer to their dreams.

Flourishing Careers
Williams moved to New Orleans at the age of 28 and fell deeply in love with the city, which would prove to inspire much of his later work, including A Streetcar Named Desire. He began submitting his plays to local contests, and word of his talent spread. He landed an agent not long after. Previn, who had again taken up studying composition, became infatuated with American jazz. His unique understanding of both classical music and jazz drew admirers. He wrote a musical score for Metro-Goldwyn Mayer (MGM) and signed a contract with the movie studio at just 18 years old.

And so the artists’ careers began. Williams spent years writing and traveling the country before his first critically acclaimed play, The Glass Menagerie, hit the stage in 1944. The play won Williams a New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award and brought him fame. A Streetcar Named Desire opened two years later, earning him another a Drama Critics’ Award and his first Pulitzer Prize. Around the same time, Previn was receiving accolades as well. As MGM Musical Director, he adapted hit songs for films and composed original scores for musicals and other dramas. He was nominated for sixteen Academy Awards and won four. In the late 60s and early 70s, Previn was pulled again by classical music and began recording with the London Symphony Orchestra and also became conductor-in-chief of the Houston Symphony Orchestra.

But some of the same issues that plagued the characters of A Streetcar Named Desire, such as depression, addiction, and adultery, would eventually present themselves in the two men’s public lives.

Challenges
Williams had fought depression his whole life, and writing was his salvation. But even writing couldn’t ease the pain of losing his best friend to cancer in the 60s. The decade also brought the harshest criticism of his work by the press. Though he continued to write, he became more and more dependent on alcohol and drugs to cope. In 1969, Williams’ brother hospitalized him. That same year, Previn was dealing with problems of his own. While Previn was married to his second wife, he had an affair with actress Mia Farrow, the ex-wife of popular singer Frank Sinatra. She gave birth to their twin sons in early 1970. Previn left the Houston Symphony Orchestra and he and his wife divorced due to the misconduct. Previn married Farrow afterward, but they also divorced after about a decade.

Both men never faltered in their craft, even with the setbacks.

Lasting Achievements
After Williams was released from hospitalization, he began feverishly writing again. Over the next decade or so, he wrote plays, a memoir, poems, short stories and a novel. But In 1983, Williams’ addiction caught back up with him, and he died in a New York City hotel room surrounded by bottles of wine and pills. Despite the abrupt and heartbreaking end to his career, Williams went down in history as one of America’s greatest playwrights, winning four Drama Critic Circle Awards, two Pulitzer Prizes and the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He died, perhaps, not recognizing his full impact on the stage and the screen. Previn, on the other hand, has lived to see his full life’s work honored and his earlier missteps reconciled. He toured throughout Europe and the United States as the principal conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra and continued to compose throughout the 70s and 80s. In 1982, Previn married and had one child. Additionally, he formed the Andre Previn Jazz Trio, which toured in the early 90s. In 1998 Previn received a Lifetime Achievement Award for his career as a conductor and composer at the Kennedy Center Honors ceremony in Washington, D.C. Now 87, Previn is known as one of the most versatile musicians in the world.

The opera adaptation of the classic American play A Streetcar Named Desire is the result of the combination of Williams’ and Previns’ rich life experiences, unique perspectives, and monumental talent.


To see the work of these historic artists come to life in Hawaii, click the button below.

By Allison Kronberg

Sources:

http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/tennessee-williams-about-tennessee-williams/737/
http://www.biography.com/people/tennessee-williams-9532952#synopsis
http://www.notablebiographies.com/Pe-Pu/Previn-Andr.html