AN OPERATIC TRIFECTA, WITH PARALLELS
Opera Parallèle was not content just staging a chamber opera, but rather mounting a troika of simultaneous images in one of the most imaginative productions ever in San Francisco. In the process, it linked a fantasy fairy tale that is millennia old with a vintage 1946 French film as well as a recent Philip Glass score in dazzling counterpoint with one another, assisted by Brian Staufenbiel’s recent movie footage running in between.
The triple play elevated the Glass instrumental ensemble’s unemotional textures as the live singers saw their words synchronized to the (silenced) French movie. Working with daunting material, Director Staufenbiel and his team raised the impact by an order of magnitude while giving views of long-gone French movie stars like Jean Marais emoting silently while live counterparts strode and sang on the SF Jazz stage. You’ve heard of seeing double. How about seeing triple?
This was “Beauty and the Beast” (or, in Glass’ French reprise score, “La Belle et la Bête”) bringing to life a timeless tale. Before you dismiss it as nice-for-the-kids, you should know that the vintage French film was quite sensual in a way that Disney is not—Beauty is attracted right away to the monster beast, a hairy human in royal attire with a fearsome mask that, all together, belongs safely locked in a zoo behind bars. But for Beauty, it’s like catnip.
What starts out as a sister story to “Cinderella” (Yes, Beauty too is put down at home by two arrogant spoiled sisters), the dream-fantasy gains traction when Beauty is led by a white steed into the monster’s palace. This palace (conceived by the great surreal artist-designer Jean Cocteau) features real human faces emoting in the bas relief art work as well as wall-mounted human arms holding candelabras, in motion to accompany Beauty’s exploration. These initial nightmares become part of the magic of a woman falling in love with an ugly, terrifying monster.
In abandoning reality, this bizarre package draws you willy-nilly in to the amalgam, even though each individual component has decided limitations. For starters, the movie reeks of 19th-century romanticism and silent-movie gestures, now quite passé. The black-and-white film has deteriorated badly over seven decades, going from dark to darker and murkier. The ending, featuring the fearsome Beast’s death-morph into a paperweight (human) Prince Charming, evokes laughter. Then too Glass’ instrumental score, as unwavering as a Bach suite, is far too ascetic for such an emotional tale. Glass did however manage memorable French vocal lines for the four live singers featured here in multiple roles. These included Hadleigh Adams as the robust Beast, Vanessa Becerra as the Beauty, Sophie Delphis as BOTH of the arrogant sisters, and the resourceful Eugene Brancoveanu as Beauty’s father, sinking in his daunting debts. Their fine-clipped French diction was music to one’s ears.
Overseeing this modest but highly complex operation was OP’s General Director and perennial conductor Nicole Paiement, drawing on Gallic roots to supplement her passion for contemporary creativity, making a multi-dimensional spectrum grounded on Glass’ familiar soprano saxophones. Paiement had the supremely challenging task of synchronizing the live music and singing to the half-century-old Cocteau film scenes. Once again, a compact, mobile troupe with zest and imagination was running circles around the major-budget grand-opera operations.
The whole opus runs less than two hours, but the impact of these polar Beast-Beauty opposites drawn to one another goes on and on and on. This is a revelatory breakthrough production that deserves to tour the US.
OPERA NOTES—-The best-known predecessor of the tale was by novelist Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont in 1756. The opera was a rarity for the 700-seat jazz center, offering close-up impact with raked seating on three sides of the stage. Projected English supertitle translations were provided.
Philip Glass’ opera in French, “La Belle et la Bête,” live, with the vintage Jean Cocteau movie plus Brian Staufenbiel’s linking modern film, a production of Opera Parallèle ending July 17 at the SF Jazz Center, 201 Franklin, San Francisco. For OP info, contact www.operaparallele.org.
