Salome and Portland Opera

I'm afraid my criticism is more of the director, Christopher Mattaliano, but focusing on Salome, which I saw November 9th, will help me make my point.

My history with Portland Opera goes back pretty far. I remember reading a review for Rigoletto in the early '90s and really wanting to see it, but I couldn't afford tickets. When they produced it again shortly after I started working at Intel (this would have been '97 or '98), I could.

I went and I loved it. The music is amazing, I appreciated the sets and effects, and it was exciting to be a high culture event, Portland-style, where some people dress to the nines and some really don't. I ended up subscribing, and for a while I was subscribed to the opera, the ballet, and White Bird. After an amazing first season with White Bird, I started liking it progressively less, and gave up that subscription, but I stayed with the other two and was pretty satisfied.

In 2003, there was a great arts shakeup in Portland. Much was made of the fact that the symphony, ballet, and opera were all changing at the same time. Also, much was made of the new directors being Christopher Mattaliano for the opera and Christopher Stowell for the ballet, and okay, it was Carlos Kalmar for the symphony, but that's still a C-name, and also in 2000 Portland Center Stage got a new Artistic Director named Chris Coleman.

That was very interesting, but I didn't think of it as more than interesting, because I had never realized the impact of an artistic director. I started to notice it more with the ballet. I saw changes in the styles and even the physical types of the dancers. It went from reminding me very much of James Canfield to looking more like Stowell. I liked Canfield better. It wasn't that Stowell was bad at all, but he was not as compelling to me.

I don't go to the symphony or plays that often, so I don't have an opinion on their changes, but I really started to hate the opera.

It took a while. I would say that Mattaliano's first season looked very much like the previous director's last season. Yes, the first one would have been pretty much arranged by his predecessor (I can picture him, but I can't remember his name), but even the season after that still seemed pretty normal, but somehow less moving.

Things were colder and uglier. I blamed post-modernism. The voices always sounded good, but the staging did nothing for me, and I realized I could hear beautiful voices on the CD, and much more cheaply. I let that subscription go too. I never would have thought of it again, but I have a friend who loves opera, and can't find anyone else willing to go with her, so periodically she talks me into one, and each time I get more irritated with them. Salome was the worst.

I'd read the Oscar Wilde play that inspired Strauss years ago, so I had some familiarity with the characters and plot. That may have made some of the disappointment worse, but I would still have been pretty disappointed.

For the setting they chose revolutionary Cuba. I'm not sure correlates exactly with Jerusalem under Roman-installed Herodians, but that wasn't the problem.

One problem was Narraboth's knife. He is going to kill himself with this knife. Showing the knife can give some foreshadowing, but he was moving it around in the air as if he was mesmerized by it, when he is supposed to be mesmerized by the off-stage Salome. It was so over the top, like, "We get it! He has a knife!" It was as if they inverted Chekhov's gun - this is going to go off before the end, so we need to really fetishize it at the beginning, or the audience may be confused when he dies. How did that knife get there?

At least we knew what they were doing there. Two other things were more puzzling. The opening characters in the play are The Young Syrian and The Page of Herodias. The Young Syrian becomes Narraboth, and The Page just becomes Page. She looked like Honey from Doonesbury. China was going through some similar changes, but they are still two different countries. I suppose this could have been to make her appear more separate from Narraboth, but since he was the Syrian, it would have made more sense to make him look foreign. I don't think it made sense to make the page the fish out of water.

So that was off-putting, but then you see Herod in a coat with enormous sleeves that give him some trouble. I think this was to indicate that he was not up to his role, and as other characters mention how cowardly he is, and he does get himself in over his head later. I guess that makes sense, but with both of these issues, it is too distracting. Changing the setting, or details with costumes, or visual cues like that should enrich the performance without distracting from it.

One other change that kind of bothered me was that the page was female. I assume that would be a change that Strauss made, possibly to balance the vocal parts, or possibly due to unwillingness to have someone who was clearly homosexual. That was kind of important in the play though.

The page's love for the Syrian was not the key relationship in the play, but it was part of the overarching theme of unfulfilled longing and the destruction that it brings. Everyone wants something that they can't have. If they get their small desires, it only leads to more trouble.

The Syrian does get Salome to pay attention to him briefly, when she is trying to see Iokanaan, but she grows obsessed, he cannot bear it, and he kills himself. Salome wants to the Iokanaan, and does, but it stirs up things within her that she cannot bear, and leads to her own death. Herod wants to see Salome dance, and gets that, but then she requires something that terrifies him, and all his other desires for Salome end up crushed. You could argue that his desire for Herodias only brought him censure and a new coveting for his niece and stepdaughter.

Where the other characters seem at best foolish and at worst venal, the page in the play is the one character who seems able to see beyond his own desires. He is still tortured by them, and there is a feeling that it is harder it is not merely that his love is obsessed with someone else, but that his love would never even think of him that way, and he cannot even confess his love openly. Perhaps the page was a stand-in for Wilde himself, but he was the character that I felt the most for.

The gender switch may take away some of the anguish, but there is still a lot of anguish and fate and doom, and tortured, beautiful language, and that was the real problem with the Portland Opera performance. Salome is not opera buffa, but it felt like it, with the knife and the sleeves, and Salome's eventual death being by a lot of paper falling on her. I know effects can be hard, and Cuban soldiers don't carry shields like Roman soldiers, but still, it just looked silly, and it should not have been silly. And I haven't even mentioned the fake blood! I realize that on stage you have to make things bigger than you would on film, so it carries to the entire audience, but you can do that without descending into camp.

The potential was there. Soprano Kelly Cae Hogan really did a great job. You saw her make the emotional progression from an idle young girl only a little bothered by her creepy stepfather, to having new feelings stirring within her, to going crazy and cold. She hit all the right notes, on multiple levels. There was nothing silly about her, and I appreciate that, but it was just not enough.

After it was done they announced a Q&A session with Mattaliano, and I immediately thought of three questions. What were you thinking? Were drugs involved? Has a more avant-garde city made an offer for you yet?

The rest of the audience seemed to like it. They got the traditional standing ovation, which I know is kind of a cliche about Portland, and I usually think it's snobby to criticize that, but when the show feels that bad, I get it. At the same time, arts funding is going down in general. That could be largely a financial issue, because times have been hard, but a lot of the people who were supporters of the arts should be rebounded by now. It's a concern.

I love that Portland has opera, symphony, ballet, and theater, along with all the writers and rockers and artists. I don't mind that sometimes things are more modern. Under the previous regime there was one more off the wall selection each year, and that was okay. I didn't exactly like The Cunning Little Vixen, but I don't object to the idea of broadening the idea of what opera is, and the very modern staging made sense without being too distracting. The green neon circle represented the circle of life; okay.

I just think Mattaliano has really questionable taste, and when there are hard decisions to make about how to convey the meaning and the passion and the intensity of the story, that he stumbles over and over again. I thought The Flying Dutchman was hitting bottom, but I was wrong.