Theater Review: Farinelli and the King opulently recreates 18th century Spain

Farinelli and the King

Written by Claire van Kampen

Starring Mark Rylance, Iestyn Davis, and Sam Crane

Belasco Theater, Manhattan

December 24, 2017

After seeing so much small-scale off-Broadway theater lately, the opulence of Farinelli and the King hit me with a jolt. The antique Belasco theater (a notorious knee-crusher, built for the patrons of 1907), was resplendent, with its opulent architecture and old-fashioned separate opera boxes cleverly modified; on-stage opera boxes were designed surrounding the performing area, creating a continuous opera box architecture that extended from the audience around the stage itself, creating sort of an immersion in an 18^th century opera house. The theater was artfully draped in rich velvet to hide the art-nouveau décor (inappropriate to 1740), yet maintained its splendor. A small baroque orchestra was upstage, in the balcony behind the actors, dressed in appropriate 1700s attire as well. The lavish onstage décor included Fragonard-like paintings and Rococo statuary appropriate to the period. The stage appeared entirely candlelit, with only subtle use of modern lighting, making it look like Kubrick's innovative film depicting the same era, Barry Lyndon. These period details are important, as one of the main points of the play was to immerse us in its period. This it accomplished beautifully.

Farinelli (1705-1782) was the most famed opera singer of his period, a favorite of Handel and Scarlatti, among others. He was perhaps the most famous of the castrati, in his case due to traumatic primary hypogonadism (a knife) at age 10 by an enthusiastic brother who wished to use his brilliant young boy soprano sibling to further his own composing career. At autopsy many years later, Farinelli was noted to have exceptionally smooth skin, delicate features, and long bones for an elderly man, attesting to the ravages of testosterone. Women around Europe swooned around him in a way familiar to us with modern rock stars. This play deals a bit with his interesting career and history, but gravitates more to his relationship as personal muse to the manic-depressive King Philip V of Spain (1683-1746), grandson of Louis XIV of France, stuck governing an increasingly irrelevant Spain. This debut play by Claire van Kempen who serves normally as a musical arranger for the Old Globe in London, is historically accurate, and provides the impressive star Mark Rylance (Spielberg’s Dunkirk, Royal Shakespeare Company) with a meaty tragicomic role. 

Therein lies its problem. While the play generally takes a chronologic course, first showing us the madness of the king, then how the beautiful singing of court resident Farinelli tames his madness, it has some trouble deciding who or what it is really about. King Philip disappears before the end of the play (how he dies is unclear), and the ending scenes are mostly about Farinelli wrestling with returning to his public career after years as a private singer for the king. The problem is that the early parts of the play do not tell us enough about Farinelli’s character to make this ending interesting, and so the play, stripped of its most interesting character (the king), rather peters out.

While lacking in good dramatic structure, the play is robust in technical accomplishment and diversion, rather like seeing a Handel opera in an old European opera house: a little too long, silly plot, some great music, and uncomfortable seats. The rather bland Farinelli of Sam Crane is sometimes accompanied by a singing doppelganger (the wonderful British countertenor Iestyn Davis), who sings some of Handel’s greatest operatic hits for us, accompanied by a 6-piece baroque orchestra. 

This is a very clever solution to the problem of how to make a biopic about a famous singer—what happens when the portraying actor has to sing when the portrayed voice is a familiar one (e.g. Sinatra, Al Jolsen, Caruso) or famed for some extraordinary quality? Do you dub in the original voice? Here, of course, we have no real idea how Farinelli or any castrato really sounded, since the practice ended in the 1800s. It almost certainly did not sound like the countertenor Mr. Davis, who was outstanding but still sounded like a man singing in a developed, beautiful falsetto range. From what we know, the actual countertenors had huge but rather eerie voices. So it might have been more realistic to have an appropriately dressed female soprano double as Farinelli here, as Richard Strauss does in Der Rosenkavalier with female sopranos playing male roles. All that said, the way that the playwright and skilled director John Dove had the two Farinellis play off one another was clever and nicely managed. There were some spectacular entrances of the “singer Farinelli” (e.g. dangling as a spirit from wires) to give us a nice taste of baroque opera staging, and the “actor Farinelli” would not just vanish during these arias, but respond to the music while standing nearby. Reflecting playwright van Kampen’s background in music, the arias and dances were well chosen and seemed to entertain an audience which was not there to see real opera. I heard a number of attendees at intermission who enjoyed the music, no matter how “weird” it was to hear a man singing so high.

My main critique is about the overall intent and focus of the play. It seemed to occupy an uneasy ground between play and musical. It was not dramatic and meaty enough to stand as a play, yet the musical excerpts did not really forward the plot as should happen in a musical; instead they vaguely illustrated the emotion ongoing during the plot. In this way the play was very similar to most opera before Mozart, as well as early 1930s musicals: flimsy plot with nice tunes, but not particularly connected as music-drama as Richard Wagner or Stephen Sondheim would do it. The plot was largely a variation on an old model: king meets castrato, king loses castrato, king gets castrato back. The problem is that in the play as in history the king died and the castrato retired, neither a very dramatic ending for the play. I think the playwright should have really thought about taking a little historical liberty to provide a better ending. It seemed as if the arc of the plot was less important to than the wonderful sets, music, and historical ambiance, all of which matched the period opulence we associate with British productions like Downton Abbey and Merchant-Ivory films like Maurice and Howard’s End. Ultimately this was a spectacular but not fully integrated goulash of star vehicle, madness comedy, baroque music concert, and history play, never really settling on any one of these in a fully satisfying way. But in the end, I walked away on Christmas eve into 12 degree cold, knees aching (from those narrow rows), with the beautiful Handel arias and sumptuous eighteenth century setting whirling about in my brain, a worthy Christmas gift indeed.