Opening Nights
PJerry Springer: The Opera
The Moore, 1932 Second Ave., 877-784-4849, stgpresents.org. $17.50. 7:30 p.m. Thurs.–Sat., 2 & 6:30 p.m. Sun. Ends jan. 26.
In the spirit of this show, I’ll start with my own confession: I was a lot more impressed with The Book of Mormon before I saw Jerry Springer: The Opera, which anticipates by eight or so years the identical combination of bouncy exuberance and relentless vulgarity—sexual, scatological, religious, you name it—that made Mormon such a hit for the South Park guys. Springer is rawer, funnier, more inventive, and hits harder; British creators Stewart Lee and Richard Thomas aim less at the talk-show host and trash TV than at the country that made him a star.
None of this is subtle, mind you; Americans “eat, excrete, and watch TV,” one chorus tells us. And just as you might start to feel smugly above it all (of course other people watched that garbage, not me), they hit us with “With or without Jerry’s show, we’d all end up the same . . . he merely holds a mirror to it.” The show’s not as preachy as that makes it sound, though, making room among the in-your-face camp (tap-dancing Klansmen) for the emotional sucker punch of “I Just Wanna Dance,” which leapt out of the show to become a disco-remixed Pride anthem. Actually being moved was the last thing I expected by this point, but Lindsey Larson as aspiring pole-dancer Shawntel sells the shit out of it.
Thomas’ score whiplashes from Handel-by-way-of-Kurt Weill to ’70s cheese, bargain-basement Marvin Hamlisch; it’d be nearly as funny if not a word were sung. Act 1 is a sendup of a typical Springer episode; in the less-focused Act 2, Jerry’s sent to Hell to emcee a showdown between good and evil. Brandon Felker dials it down as Jerry, all the better to skewer the bland, paternalistic benignity of his hosting style, the ridiculous pretense that his show was therapeutic rather than exploitative. And, of course, so as not to upstage the freak parade. Among the fearless and intensely hard-working Balagan Theatre ensemble, directed by Shawn Belyea, the standout in what-the-fuck audaciousness is Kevin Douglass, double-cast as (take a deep breath) Jesus Christ and a diaper fetishist.
In a show whose curveballs never let the audience get complacent, the biggest surprise comes last. The finale is built on Jerry’s traditional sign-off, “Take care of yourselves . . . and each other”—a genuinely redemptive moment of decency, or calculated smarm posing as one? Jerry Springer, startlingly, sets cynicism aside and takes the host’s side. If it sounds like easy sentiment, a pulled punch, it’s the opposite, the ultimate fuck-you. Paramount among the objects of Lee and Thomas’ contempt—including Americans’ inability to use verb tenses correctly—is our tendency to hold others responsible for our idiocy. So lighten up on Jerry; he’s not to blame. He didn’t make his guests stupid, or make them be on his show—or make you watch. Gavin Borchert
Richard II
Center House Theatre, Seattle Center, 733-8222, seattleshakespeare.org. $25–$48. 7:30 p.m. Wed.–Sat., plus weekend matinees. Ends Feb. 2.
Despite lovely renaissance costumes by Jocelyne Fowler, the entire time I watched Seattle Shakes’ artistic director George Mount in the title role of this stiff yet poetic prequel to Shakespeare’s more famous Henry plays, I was thinking about George W. Bush. Differences between the divine right of kings and democracy aside, Richard’s position wasn’t all that different from W’s: He came to office through family privilege, was surrounded by flatterers, altered laws to suit his whims, bestowed hen houses to crony foxes, and was ultimately replaced by a man of sounder action.
On Carol Wolfe Clay’s austere set, Mount dwindles from a coddled jackass prince to a naked nobody controlling nothing. Forget pathos, director Rosa Joshi goes for cynical laughs—and the approach does work; perhaps it’s the best way to get a modern audience to connect with the somewhat bureaucratic play.
The plot in short: Smug King Richard II from the House of York is challenged for the throne by his cousin, Henry Bolingbroke, House of Lancaster. Richard banishes Bolingbroke (David Foubert), around whom the forces of the Earl of Northumberland (Reginald Andre Jackson) rally to overthrow Richard.
At the time Richard II was written, this would have been a major dilemma for everyone, as it took divine matters into human hands. In our present age of revolving-door politics, it means little. Still, the production deftly milks scenes in which characters in the middle, such as John of Gaunt (Dan Kremer) and the Duke of York (Peter A. Jacobs) weigh divine right against popular might. With charming understatement, Kremer’s Gaunt attempts to comfort his son Bolingbroke about the upsides of banishment. The distinctly nuanced Jacobs manages to carry off the extremely improbable notion of a father seeking the death of his own son to punish the lad’s support of the old regime.
This is not a revival that’s going to score a strong emotional response with the audience. On the page, at least, Richard II is an interesting precursor not only to the Henry plays, but also to the more mature study in failed kingship that Shakespeare would write a decade later—King Lear. Margaret Friedman
PRigoletto
McCaw Hall, 321 Mercer St. (Seattle Center), 389-7676, seattleopera.org. $25 and up. 7:30 p.m. Wed. & Sat., plus 7:30 p.m. Fri., Jan. 24. Ends Jan. 25.
To anyone still inclined to oppose updating operas, modernizing their period settings, Verdi himself provides a counterargument in his 1851 Rigoletto. Nominally set in the 16th century, it opens with a party scene at the palace of the Duke of Mantua; and right away Verdi provides a perfectly anachronistic minuet in Mozartean style. If you can accept a 200-year jump forward in a piece of dance music, you should have no problem with Linda Brovsky’s Mussolinization for Seattle Opera.
Fascist imagery, deco furniture, and Marie Anne Chiment’s lovely vintage costumes place this Rigoletto in the 1930s, like the renaissance a high point in Italian history for the abuse of power. Portraying, grippingly, this corrupt society’s emotional toll is Marco Vratogna as the title court jester—self-loathing in his sucking-up to power, guilt and anguish running through every passionately full-voiced line. As Gilda, the daughter he cherishes and shelters (to a fault), Nadine Sierra sings with a marvelous lightness, youthful in timbre if mature in body, flexibility, and assurance. The same is true of Francesco Demuro as the Duke, who seduces her; so well-matched are they in vocal weight that it shades the drama with a cruel irony: They’re perfect for each other in musical terms yet inevitably doomed by the libretto. Bringing his distinctively colored voice and imposing stage presence as killer-for-hire Sparafucile is Andrea Silvestrelli, memorable as Fasolt and Hunding in last summer’s Ring and a very welcome returnee. Judging by the thrill that rippled through the audience at the end of his first scene, his was the evening’s most impressive performance.
Rigoletto is generally seen as a step forward among Verdi’s operas for, among other things, its unpadded and flowing dramatic action, not chopped up into discrete and formal set pieces, as had been the practice. As if to close the door on earlier Italian-opera conventions and show the ghosts of his ancestors how it should be done, Verdi takes the bel canto approach one last time in Gilda’s “Caro nome”—in a way, Rossini’s greatest aria. Its expressive method is a throwback—less a matter of sweeping melody or dramatic thrust than of palpitating ornamentation of the vocal line, emotion taking wing via the throat. Sierra sings a good bit of the aria lying on her back, surprisingly, and doesn’t shy from exploring its eroticism, making love to the image in her head—she thinks the Duke is a poor student named Gualtier—with every caressed roulade.
Even this aria—usually a moment of innocence, a respite—intensifies the opera’s misanthropic take on human nature. Power corrupts, but so do lust, money, fear, the thirst for revenge, and whatever it is Gilda wants. Verdi indicts everyone—nobody in Rigoletto is honest; even Gilda, Little Miss I-met-him-in-church, is kidding herself, willfully blind to the Duke’s caddishness even after she discovers what he really is. It’s all pretty dark. And a heck of a compelling show. Gavin Borchert
E
stage@seattleweekly.com
