Here is the full version of my Monday May 10 Chicago Sun-Times review of Chicago Opera Theater's opening performance of Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer's Three Decembers Saturday night May 8, 2010, at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park. Frederica von Stade and Jake Heggie will present a recital of mostly American songs Monday night May 10 at 7:30 p.m. at the Harris as well. COT box office: 312.204.8414.
Bland work send off a great mezzo
Here is the full version of my Monday May 10 Chicago Sun-Times review of Chicago Opera Theater's opening performance of Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer's Three Decembers Saturday night May 8, 2010, at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park. Frederica von Stade and Jake Heggie will present a recital of mostly American songs Monday night May 10 at 7:30 p.m. at the Harris as well. COT box office: 312.204.8414.
Bland work send off a great mezzo
Heggie's mundane 'Decembers' is the wrong goodbye for von Stade
BY ANDREW PATNER
Three performances remaining through May 16 only.
RECOMMENDED -- for Frederica von Stade
SOMEWHAT RECOMMENDED -- overall
Although it offers only three productions a year, and this year, due to the economy, only four performances of each production, the intrepid Chicago Opera Theater has a more eclectic season than that of any full-season grand house.
This year's array started last month with the success of Rossini's heard in Chicago but once before -- in 1863 -- opera seria, Moses in Egypt, followed immediately by another triumph with the baroque Giasone ("Jason"), the first local professional staging of any opera by the 17th century composer Francesco Cavalli.
[Sara Jakubiak (top) plays the daughter of a Broadway star (Frederica von Stade) in Three Decembers.]
Now through Sunday, COT rounds out 2010 with a "new and final" version of a contemporary American work, Jake Heggie's Three Decembers, first performed in 2008 in Houston (as Last Acts) and in San Francisco. Streamlined to 95 minutes with no intermission and with a key song substitution, the work even features its hard-working composer (Dead Man Walking and the new Moby-Dick, currently running in Dallas) at one of the two onstage pianos.
It has the additional draw of being a showcase for the much loved and admired American mezzo Frederica von Stade as she winds down her 40-year career to retire at 65, while she still has her allure. Heggie wrote the work for her, and these performances are her farewell to leading roles in fully staged operas. (She'll be back, at Ravinia's indoor Martin Theatre, this summer to play the comic maid Despina in Mozart's Così fan tutte with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.)
The problem here, and it is not a small one, is that despite excellent support from two young singers -- baritone Matthew Worth, especially, and soprano Sara Jakubiak -- and fine playing of Heggie's score by an onstage 11-member orchestra led by pianist/conductor Stephen Hargreaves, von Stade's presence and her impending departure from the stage are the only reasons to see this production.
Heggie is a smooth and technically able composer. He loves the voice, and von Stade is a longtime muse and friend of his. A number of his songs for the recital hall are not bad (you can hear them in a COT program with Heggie and von Stade tonight at the Harris), but he is wholly unoriginal in opera or music theater, and the book to Decembers is a cross between a turkey and an albatross.
Some playwrights successfully celebrate ordinary people. Some others unveil the emptiness of our own lives. Nothing wrong with either tack. Terrence McNally, though, on whose unpublished playlet Decembers is based, offers a world of the clichéd, the dull, the self-pitying, and the uninteresting. There isn't a moment in the story of a major Broadway actress (von Stade) and her adult children (Worth and Jakubiak) that is not obvious, predictable, and juvenile. And the openly gay playwright once again offers nothing but offensive and trite depictions of upper-middle-class white male gay life.
Librettist Gene Scheer takes this triteness and keeps it unpoetic but settable to music for Heggie. These stories of troupers trying to balance career and family have been told so much better and more beautifully by Stephen Sondheim in such songs as "In Buddy's Eyes" and "The Glamorous Life." This comparison is only made worse by the Decembers score sounding like watered-down and repeated Sondheim.
See this to say addio to a great American artist of opera, concert, and song. But don't expect either an opera or the next great piece of American music theatre.
Comments