Mozart's Don Giovanni - Sydney Opera House

Picture from Don Giovanni article
from Sydney Paper

It is always a good sign when an opera opens with an incredibly muscled man jumping out of a window wearing skimpy black leather shorts and an open shirt. Then he opens his mouth and a deep, huge, booming baritone voice fills the entire theater...it was like butter. Oh my...a six pack with butter.

We saw Mozart's Don Giovanni at the Sydney Opera House. It was stunning. One of the best operas I have ever seen.

Don Giovanni is a character that you love to hate. He is a gallivanting, narcissistic cad who preys on women...literally thousands of women. In the opening scene, he gets in trouble when he is challenged by a girl's father who he ends up killing in the duel. Instead of going away to another unsuspecting female pool in another country, he stays in the same area. He is hunted by an ex-lover after making his presence known to her by propositioning her inadvertently. She is torn as she is still captivated by him but knows he is no good. Then he aggressively pursues another woman on her wedding day by neutralizing her groom. The betrothed of the girl whose father he killed vows revenge to prove his love. For those keeping score at home, that is a soprano, a mezzo-soprano and an alto (three female leads) and two fiancées (a baritone and a very high tenor) all out to get Don. Not to mention Don Giovanni's own manservant who does not like him either. In the end, a statue of the father he killed in Act I raises the powers of darkness to come and drag Don's soul into the depths of hell.

 Mozart really knew how to write music. The score is great. It has both intense music and melodic interludes. The vocal arrangements are stunning. Some scenes have 5 operatic leads all singing harmoniously together.

The voices were absolutely incredible in the Sydney production! Teddy Tahu Rhodes played Don Giovanni. He is amazing in this role!  With his powerful baritone voice and stage presence, he blew everyone else out of the water . The actor portraying Don Giovanni needs to be overpowering.  He is also competing with the other five leads. Teddy succeeded.

The remaining cast members were all extremely strong and powerful in their own right. Donna Anna was played by an Australian and lit up the stage. Zerlina's voice was beautiful. I could have listened to them all night. My other favorite was listening to the sweet tenor who played Don Ottavio (Henry Choo). His voice was so soft and sweet. Don Ottavio is shafted the whole show. I felt sorry for him. His voice reflects the tenderness of the character. Amongst such depravity, he is the only really sympathetic character in the play. 

They must have spent their entire budget on the vocal talent. The sets are fairly minimal with just a big space on stage with doors/balcony. But we did not go for the props. The show was fantastic with all of the full voices. The last scene was strangely blocked. Don Giovanni almost escapes from the hands of death (strapped to a coffin) and then gets grabbed a different way for no apparent reason other than to use the trap door in the stage floor. I guess they wanted to show off the one fancy part of the set. It is saved by the entire back part of the set crashing to the stage floor. Drama drama drama.

We sat in row Q on the floor and the seats were fantastic. Row Q is just about the best row in the house. The first ten rows are directly under the surtitles so you can't see them and the overhanging balcony obstructs the view from the last 4 or so rows. The sound is perfect. We were just right and not even any porridge spilled.  There was, however, some cooked chicken (and silverware and cups) flung across the stage in the second act when Don Giovanni is acting like a slob. He's and eating and drinking as much as he is tossing around, and he's throwing anything he puts his hands on. But Row Q was outside the splash zone.

I have come to think that with La Boehme, Macbeth and now, Don Giovanni, that opera is all about plotting and death.

Verdi's Macbeth - Sydney Opera House

After our success with La Boheme, we decided to try for rush tickets to Macbeth at the Sydney Opera House.  It was showing on a Tuesday night and luckily it was a VERY slow night at the Opera House.  Normally when you buy standing room tickets, you expect to stand.  But since about half of the upper deck was empty, we were able to sit in the balcony about 9 rows back. YEA!
At intermission we moved down to row 3.  We were surprised at how big of a difference the 6 rows made in the view and the sound...we felt so much closer even though the original seats were fabulous.

Bubble bubble toil and trouble...

For those of you who slept through high school English, Macbeth is Shakespeare's classic story of a power hungry man who becomes Scotland's king by the traditional means...regicide.  The story includes his equally power hungry wife who goads him into the murder when he begins to lose his nerve.  One killing leads to many many more.  And how can a story be made better...yep...a coven of witches.  The original play has just three, but this production had an entire coven divided into three groups.

We knew nothing about the actual score, but Verdi's music was so much better than we expected.  It helped the story progress and was interesting.  It had some truly dramatic moments and flowed really well.  No symphonically induced napping.

The voices were incredible. Lady Macbeth and Banquo were both outstanding.  Although the leads had magnificent voices, the big stand out was, surprisingly, a more minor character, Macduff.  His mellow voice was a high baritone or low tenor with  a fabulous tone.  He did not get much stage time, but he he stole every aria he sang and ended up getting a huge round of applause at the end.  He actually seemed quite surprised by this.  
Note that seeing the opera won't help anyone struggling with Shakespearean English because it is all sung in Italian.

It was a nice night out. Is that wrong to say that for a show all about murder?

La Boheme Opera - Sydney Opera House

La Boheme was playing at the Sydney Opera House.  Puccini's opera is the classic love story about two friends in love with two very different women.  They are Bohemians who struggle with passion,  jealousy and ultimately, health and death. The Sydney production set the story in 1930's Germany.

I looked into tickets which ranged from 65 to 280 AUD on the website but I could not find any seats under $150.  We had previously been to the theater and found out (what is not advertised) that sometimes they sell discounted standing room only tickets for that day's performance.   Sometimes people stand in line well before the box office opens.  The best part is that the standing room tickets are full view tickets where you can see the whole stage as well as the surtitles (which are not subtitles because they are above the stage).  For La Boheme, the $150 seats are restricted view, so we decided to try our luck with standing room tickets on a Thursday night.

We were lucky that Thursday morning. There was only one lady in line ahead of me and she didn't want all ten available tickets.  The tickets were less than the lowest price that I had seen listed.  Yea!

Matthew came home from work and we dressed up, donning our most comfortable shoes.  As we took the ferry over from McMahon's Point, it was hard to believe we'd actually be going not just in The Opera House but in the actual Opera Theatre.  We were both excited.

The inside of the Sydney Opera House echoes the shapes from the outside.  The bathroom stalls are even wavy.  We felt very grown-up to ascend the stairs up to the main level.  Since we would be standing for a long time, we sat on a bench just outside the ticket taker until the very last moment.

I was amazed at the intimate size of the theater but due to the shape, there are many restricted view seats.  Since the theater is so steeply sloped, the stage is viable even in the back.  The standing tickets were great...one of the best places in the house.  We could see everything well.  There is a little half wall in front of you that you can lean against.  At intermission, we quickly found a couch to sit down on and helped ourselves to the water provided.   After intermission we were pleasantly surprised when the usher told us that we could sit anywhere there were seats available (I guess they figured that if they were not there by then, they were not coming).  Yea!

La Boheme
The music and voices were amazing.  The staging was sometime great and sometimes just plain strange. In Act II, the restaurant scene for Muzetta's Waltz was incredible. There were so many things to see.  In Act III, the staging was just... well... strange.  It was supposed to be in a guardhouse that had a fenced courtyard but it looked more like a jailyard for no discernible reason.  It was just odd.  I felt like there was something missing in the story, but evidently Puccini's edited out a scene that helps the story flow.

Another thing I questioned about this production was that the scene featured on some of the advertising posters has a woman up against a wall with a man leaning into her and rain falling.  The posters have an emotional resonance.  I loved the poster.  But this scene did not exist in the presentation we saw and the couple featured on the poster were not in the opera.  It was not just different performers...that scene did not exist. Strange and somewhat disappointing.

We enjoyed discussing the show on our way home.  Matthew had announced before the show how he had discovered that the musical Rent was loosely based on La Boheme.  I laughed and said "not so loosely". He agreed after the first scene that loosely was not the right word.  We watched the DVD of Rent 2 nights later so he could see it.  I like that they had all but 2 of the Original Broadway Cast in the movie instead of hiring Hollywood stars. Anyway...

Overall we enjoyed out night seeing La Boheme at the Sydney Opera House.  We enjoyed the show and were blown away by the voices.  We had a fabulous night out.   Glad I wore comfortable shoes!

Love Never Dies - The Musical

Love Never Dies from Andrew Lloyd Webber was showing at the Regent Theater in Melbourne.  We decided to treat ourselves to a night at the theater.

Regent Theatre Foyer

     The theatre is beautiful. The walls are carved and ornate having a regal air. Just beautiful. The painted ceilings and window boxes in the foyer with large sweeping curtains added to the rich vintage feeling of the Regent Theater. It was impressive.
Love Never Dies is the follow on story to the phenomenal Phantom of the Opera that opened in the West End in London 1986 and is the longest running musical on Broadway to date.
The story of the Phantom and Christine continues 10 years later at Coney Island where the phantom is now running the freak show. He has never lost his desire for Christine. Christine is a world renowned soprano. She accepts an invitation to come to New York to sing, not knowing that the Phantom is behind the invitation. She brings her family including her husband, Raul whom she had run away with at the end of the original story. He has not become the ravishing hero that he once was.

Inside Picture of Pamphlet

The show is visually stunning. Everything was big with lots of colors and interesting things to look at in every direction. It was impressive and mesmerizing to watch.

There were a couple of musical highlights, particularly some of the interplay of voices in one duet and one quartet. I did not feel that had the depth of music that most of Webber's other musicals have. I was not singing a song from the musical days later. All of the main performers in the show that we saw had beautiful voices and sang marvelously. It was great that no one person stood out. They all were strong.

The story, however, is...well...lacking and that's putting it very nicely. There are multiple story lines and not all of them make sense. It felt like they were trying to make a soup from everything in the fridge without paying attention to what was going in and they just hoped that it would taste good. But in the end, the flavors didn't blend at all. In my opinion, the story was not well thought out, the plot was weak, and it relied on the original story to carry the show. It seemed like this amazing artist just wanted some cash so he churned something out based on a previous success and did not care about the quality. I was disappointed. At one point, when one of the biggest twists was introduced, I lost the story as I searched in my own memory asking "What? WHAT?" "When did THAT happen in the original story?" It is not a good thing to have happen while watching a performance...to spend more time in my head than paying attention to what was happening onstage. Matthew and I exchanged notes at intermission and he was just as perplexed as I was. The second act tried to tie everything in a neat bow but they had already let too many things unravel.

Overall, it was a nice night out listening to beautiful voices and watching amazing sets in a beautiful theater...too bad about the story.