Opera and Theater Reviews: Two Women Who Come Out Firing

La Fanciulla del West

Composed by Giacomo Puccini

Directed by Gregory Keller

Production Designed by Giancarlo del Monaco

Starring Eva Marie Westbroek and Jonas Kaufmann

Metropolitan Opera House

October 23, 2018

The True

Written by Sharr White

Starring Edie Falco and Michael McKean

The New Group

October 21, 2018

Puccini’s opera La Fanciulla del West (The Girl of the West) and Sharr White’s new play The True could not be more different in affect and style. But both were staged in NYC recently in wonderful performances featuring powerful heroines that take no prisoners and struggle to, then finally succeed at success in male-dominated worlds. Both are excellent choices for a year in which women and minorities come to the front in the arts.

The Puccini opera, based on a popular play The Girl of the Golden West by David Belasco, premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in 1910 to popular acclaim, with a star-studded cast featuring Emmy Destinn, Enrico Caruso and conductor Arturo Toscanini. The story is of Minnie, a bartender (and sole female character) in an 1850’s California gold mining town. She longs for both a developing career (very modern!) and a man, and finds the latter in Dick Johnson, aka Ramirez, an interesting antihero who is an outlaw tempted both to steal and to reform, then go off into the sunset with a nice woman. Both characters are more complex than either the typical hyperventilating victimized Puccini heroines (Butterfly, Tosca) or his villainous/clueless men (Rodolfo, Scarpia, Pinkerton). The 1900’s verismo movement, which favored intense emotion and visceral drama in “real” settings was winding down by 1910, so this opera paints a more complex palette of emotions, much more real than “verismo” did. On the downside it lacks the visceral punch of Tosca (1900) and Madama Butterfly (1904), but on the plus side it is more like a modern play in its depiction of the relationship between men and women. Despite its wildly successful premiere, it has never been as popular as the other big operas, perhaps because of its modern lack of conventional arias, emotional ambiguities or because of later snobbery about its Italian-sees-the-Old West theme. It has a lot of commonalities with the earlier Tosca: strong heroines, older men who lust after them (although here Sheriff Jack Rance is not a Scarpia-like sociopath, just a horny conflicted guy), and third act executions that do not quite go as planned (here, Minnie shames the lynch-mob populace and shuts down the hanging of her lover Dick). But Fanciulla is less (melo)dramatic, more orchestrally subtle, and more dramatically nuanced than the earlier one. The opening mini-overture distills the opera’s affect, using big  open chords to portray the West, then inserts a cakewalk (the tango-like rhythm at 1:02), an anachronistic motif to represent America that returns throughout the opera. The cakewalk, originating in slave dances of the mid-1800s, became a popular dance craze in Puccini’s time and was associated with the USA. The first act love duet ends (through about 1:01:40) not with an orgiastic bang like Butterfly’s but with soft, almost Debussy-like soft chords and wonderful, varied orchestral color, all reflecting the characters’ ambiguous feelings and reticence. A nice touch here is the background humming of the miners at 1:00:00, an echo of the women’s’ humming chorus from Madama Butterfly. Likewise, after Minnie saves Jack from the gallows, the end of the opera feels like it will build to typical Puccini hysteria and mayhem, but instead ends quietly, as the couple goes off into the sunset with themes echoing the opening of the opera. Both remind me of the reflective subtleties of the humming chorus in Madama Butterfly. Puccini considered this his best opera, and I think that while its less visceral than a couple of his others, it is his best overall composed and constructed effort, and should be performed just as much as the others.

The Metropolitan production dates from 1991 but looks well. Much like Wagner’s Ring, the opera features big settings (here, the California Sierras) but is intimate in its depiction of personal relationships. The first act saloon was a bit big, looking more like a cathedral interior with bar fixtures. But the second act, set in Minnie’s cabin, combined an intimate humble abode with soaring peaks in the background. 

Act 3, in which Dick is (almost) hanged is set in a strangely apocalyptic ruined town much like the settings of the Clint Eastwood spaghetti westerns of the 1960s. 

That is a bit over the top—the town is described as having hard times, not being trashed by Godzilla. But the overall direction by Gregory Keller was sensitive, convincing, and played up the characters’ complexity while avoiding Old West clichés. The opera was about Minnie and Dick, not about Indians, storms, etc. Dutch soprano Eva Marie Westbroek was beautiful, dramatic, and on point. Her voice carried well in the vast Met, only widening out to a less pleasant wobbly vibrato at the biggest highest moments. Star German tenor Jonas Kaufmann actually showed up (he has a history of cancellations), but had a cold, perhaps explaining why his performance felt a bit guarded and contained. His voice is a bit baritonal for this very Italian role, but he acts convincingly and has matinee idol looks. 

I enjoyed Željko Lučić’s performance as the lusty sheriff. A nice directing touch was having him point his gun at the exiting lovebirds at the opera’s end, then slowly holster it as he forlornly realizes he has lost Minnie. This was a fine night at the opera with a terrific work about a very modern heroine who figures out how to have both love and a career.

The True is also about a strong woman, but for whom the balance of life and career is harder to find. This new play tells the story of political player Dorothea “Polly” Noonan (died 2003) “the most powerful woman in Albany” per Mario Cuomo, and mother of current NY senator Kirsten Gillebrand. This play was a star vehicle for Edie Falco (of The Sopranos fame), who played up the foul-mouthed, uber-aggressive New York elements, but added real complexity to the role. 

Noonan lived in a male dominated political world, where she was feared for her connections to powerful men and to women’s’ voting groups, but was also marginalized and prevented from decisions at the highest level. The play captures an episode in her long career when she managed the re-election campaign of 40-year Albany mayor Erastus Corning, while (probably) having a simultaneous extramarital affair with him. Starr White creates a taut, fast moving drama here, addressing complex themes resonant today (and echoing the Puccini opera). How do women advance themselves in a male dominated world. How do women show aggressiveness to survive in politics while not seeming too harsh? Peggy’s husband loves her, is jealous of her affair (both her affair with Corning and her affair with politics away from him) but hangs with her just the same, a nice flipside take on female partners put in the same position these days. The Corning-Noonan relationship is the heart of the play, and the playwright excellently balances the tension between power, insecurity, sexism, and lust all in play in the relationship. Michael McKean played Mayor Corning with nuance and director Scott Elliott kept things moving with edgy intensity. But the focus was on Falco’s Peggy, a wonderfully complex character. When she is fired by Corning, who is worried about scandal losing his next election, she still works for him behind the scenes despite her anger and resentment. Peggy is constantly balancing her ambition and talent vs. her role as a female underling and as the “girlfriend”, whispered about in Albany circles. The play provides no pat answers to these dilemmas, and the ending of yet another successful campaign intentionally lacks the traditional feeling of joy and climax. This entertaining play is very successful at showing how the operatic theater of politics intertwines with real lives, not always with good results.