Almost everyone comes in Salome Want something they shouldn't be. A king wants his stepdaughter, a servant longs for a princess, a princess who wants the prisoner to be equally fascinated and repulsed. We also look at them with horror and shameful charm, attracted by Strauss' scores and Salom himself. It's an annoying piece, but the description of desire is too powerful to include.
Strauss' opera is an adaptation of Oscar Wilde's shocking drama, about desire and depravity, but more importantly, about eye. The first scene with Narraboth (here sung by David Morgans of Sterlling's voice) and the page, establishes a core issue. What does a longing gaze do to its obsession? The moon is a beautiful princess. No, she is a dead woman. Salome's interest in Jokanaan expanded. Jocanna's eyes were like a bunch of grapes. No, they are like twisting snakes. Everyone speaks in the metaphor of changing objects. This transformation can be as beautiful as violence, imposing new shapes on another person.
By the end of Elizabeth Dinkova's Heartbeat Opera's sly, brilliant new work, it's clear that everyone in Salome's fearsome incest family is responsible. If she was a monster, it was because they looked at her and turned her into one.
Salomé is a challenge for a small opera company for practical and political reasons. Practicality: How to reduce a huge Strauss band to fit a small theater. Politics: How to deal with the core and center of opera, this is the dance of the seven veils, which makes Salom naked before Herod and all of us. Heartbeat, never directly works, has found a clever solution.
For the former, music director Dan Schlosberg (perhaps the smartest arrangement of his generation) has withdrawn eight clarinet operas, the biggest being the doubling of other wind instruments or Triple, and percussion teams including bells, bells and drums and drums. It's crazy – as crazy as Aubrey Beardsley, as crazy as Oscar Wilde – especially the work done by Jacob Ashworth. For the latter, Dinkova turned these seven veils of dance into resistance. Here, Salome will not be stripped; Herod Do. From then on, everyone danced the terrible tune of the princess.
See also: Peter W. Kunhardt, Jr.
All of this put me in the biggest challenge: who should play Salome, how? Summer Hassan is a great choice, especially Dinkova's exciting view of the material. Here, Salome plays young, and her styles tilt perfectly. Wearing a corset top and elastic pink tutu, she could be six to sixteen years old. She often hides under a table or crawls like a dog. Salome is a woman disguised as a girl, and a girl whose woman's desires are forced by other people's desires. Hassan is brave and seductive in turn, her voice is monstrous and vicious. Her final scene with (very realistic) decapitating is disgusting. At one point, she pushed her finger into her bloody mouth, more shocking and inward than the kiss we all know is coming. Hassan himself seemed to be close to vomiting.
Her fascination with Jokanaan, who appears on dirty panties and a torn polo shirt, with red and swollen eyes, more like a response to her terrible home environment. She was tired of being looked at by men, and she was fixed on a man who could not stop her gaze. She collapsed when he turned around and hatred was stinged by desire. Nathaniel Sullivan, like Jokanaan, has a healthy, enthusiastic voice (which helps his character have the cutest music Strauss can inspire ). The princess violates his will and judgments, and his jokanaan is tempted by the princess. He just nearly rejected her and welcomed the principal as his punishment.
Herod did not try to resist Salome, and his desire for her was completely removed. The king sang with a wonderful and completely vain-free performance by baritone Patrick Cook, the king is more fulfilling and fanatical than ever before. Herod is a pathetic pedophile with his cartoon-like victory and indecisive weakness humor. Cook was resisting, and he couldn't look away. His wife, Herodias, is an elegant and soft Manna K. Jones, in stark contrast to her husband. She is the only character who can see things clearly. To her, the moon was just the moon, and Jocana was just a dangerous political prisoner who should be removed from office. But she was smart enough to know how powerful the power of longing to gaze was. She may not like what Herod thinks of her children, but she will use it to her advantage.
Dinkova is adapted to the writing and the line of sight in the opera house. Narraboth monitors everyone (particularly Salome) on security cameras, showing us space outside the opera house. Jokanaan's prison is a glass box in the center of the stage. We can pass it directly to his painful bare legs, while his beheading is hidden only by the blanket. In the moment before his execution, he nodded in agreement with Jeremy Harr's servant-executor, who was the biggest part of the influence.
Dinkova also makes sure the audience sees more important than women than women. Herodias are covered in yellow satin, blue tulips with bicycle shorts underneath. Jokanaan, wearing dirty panties and a torn polo shirt, removed to wash himself. Herod sang the second half of the opera in his underwear.
In the dance of Seven Veils, all characters end up in Jokanaan's prison cell, where we see them spinning in the back of the glass and the camera's inorganic sight. Finally, the page (an affected and angry Melina Jaheris) shoots the entire family, not just Salome. They are all co-conspirators. After all, the eyes require more than one person, audience and viewer.
You need to view the works of Heartbeat's normative works. Their relentless innovation and lightweight flexibility with opera Canon means they can take the text more seriously than traditional works. By allowing these operas to change, they give these works another power and allow them to be truly modern. Dinkova dares to objectify Salom by all of us. Try it and you will eventually expose yourself.
