Chicago Opera Theater opens 2012 season with . . . a musical! By Shostakovich!

 Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, "Sunday Show" cover, April 8, 2012

 

Chicago Opera Theater conjures up Shostakovich's 'Cherry Trees' in Millennium Park

Resident conductor Platt returns to lead rare musical

'MOSCOW, CHERYOMUSHKI'

• 7:30 p.m. April 14, 20, 25, and 3 p.m. matinée April 22

• Harris Theater, 205 East Randolph Drive

• Tickets, $27.50-$125, check with box office for additional discounts

• (773) 704-8414; chicagooperatheater.org

BY ANDREW PATNER

Little in either the biography or most photographs of Soviet-era composer Dmitri Shostakovich shouts out, “Let’s put on a show!”

However, like many Russians, the often dour artist, who died in 1975 at 68 after years of broken health, was a man of many parts.  Among his prolific output of more than 200 works, a number of them powerful and tragic symphonies, string quartets, concertos, and song settings, there were also lighter pieces, some of them inspired by or written for film and theatre.  Weekly visits to local music halls and musical theatre houses helped keep his nervousness and well-earned fear of political and personal persecution somewhat at bay.

In 1958, with two prominent satirists, he wrote his own musical comedy about workers hoping for flats in a new, cheap public housing development: Moscow, Cheryomushki. It's Good Times meets Avenue Q meets Rodgers and Hammerstein and The Communist Manifesto, “We’re Living It” edition.

“This is an exuberant example of a serious composer at the top of his game making a wholly enticing diversion out of his artistic vice of musical comedy,” said Chicago Opera Theater resident conductor Alexander Platt, who will be conducting the new production for COT in its Chicago première.  Starting in 2001, Platt, who now heads four orchestras in Wisconsin, Indiana, and North Dakota while remaining based in Chicago, led some of COT’s greatest achievements, including Kurka’s The Good Soldier Schweik, Britten’s Death in Venice, and John Adams’s Nixon in China.  The four performances at the Harris Theater in Millennium Park run from Saturday through April 25.

“It’s a dense and complicated score -- this is Shostakovich.  But even if you did not have the hilarious goings-on on stage, the incredible design -- a sort of Khrushchev-era Mad Men -- and these wholly appealing young singing actors, the humor and sheer wackiness of the music comes out through the score itself," Platt said.  "It just jumps out of the jazz band/chamber orchestra of 14 we’ll have in the pit.”

This reduced scoring, presented here in two acts totaling about 2 hours and 45 minutes (including an intermission), is the work of Shostakovich expert Gerard McBurney who doubles as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s artistic programming advisor and “Beyond the Score” creator.  

“Gerard gets every reference -- whether it’s Borodin or Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich’s own hugely popular Fifth Symphony or the soundtrack and style of Jolly Fellows, a smash 1934 Soviet musical comedy film, if you can imagine,” Platt said.  “And his arrangement not only allows this piece to be presented in theatres -- it also takes it closer to much of the source material and the hapless-seeming characters on stage.”

This musical version was created in the 1990s for the small and unusual British Pimlico Opera.  For this staging, COT general director Brian Dickie, launching his last season with the company with his 23rd (!) Chicago première, commissioned a young team of director, translator/adaptor, designers, and choreographer to give the work a fresh feel and also to get away from some of the weightier ways it has been produced.

“This is not Brecht,” said Platt.  “And it’s not dark like The Threepenny Opera.  Of course there are darker aspects -- people struggling to make ends meet and find a place to live in a hopeless, tottering system. But everyone in the initial audiences in Moscow already knew all of that.  Shostakovich was giving them a way to laugh at their situation.”

The ensemble cast is studded with top young members and alumni of Lyric Opera of Chicago’s Ryan Center.  Mezzo Emily Fons plays museum guide Sasha, whose husband, Masha, is sung by baritone Adrian Kramer, from the Canadian Opera Company’s training program.  Their two characters dream of actually being able to live together in their own room.  Tenor Paul LaRosa and baritone Paul Scholten, who play more sinister figures, are joined by bass Paul Corona as the payoff-expecting building super, Barabashkin.

Returning rising performers include bass Matt Boehler (a chilling and hilarious Leporello in COT’s 2008 Don Giovanni) and soprano Sarah Heaton from last year’s Death and the Powers: The Robots’ Opera.  Three other singers bow, the whole cast selected by talent-spotter Dickie.

COT and Lyric stalwarts chorus master Errol Girdlestone, choreographer Eric Sean Fogel, and lighting designer Julian Pike round out the team of emerging director Mike Donahue, librettist Meg Miroshnik, and set and costume designer Anya Klepikov.

Immediately after stepping outside of himself with Cheryomushki, the then-53-year-old Shostakovich orchestrated/completed Mussorgsky’s great, dark opera Khovanshchina and wrote his central Seventh and Eighth Quartets, and, a year or so later, his Thirteenth Symphony, Babi Yar, his most stinging criticism of the Soviet Union and of anti-Semitism.  Those are different worlds from this work, which is more akin perhaps to the composer’s 1927 “Tahiti Trot,” his own version of “Tea for Two” from that gravely political and oh-so-socially-conscious American musical, No, No, Nannette.

Now, thanks to COT, Shostakovich's "Bird Cherry Tree Town" will at last bloom in Chicago.