the timboucher experience

I recently had the pleasure of watching a cinematic projection of an opera recorded in Valencia, Spain - a production of Wagner’s “Das Rheingold”, the prequel to the epic Ring Cycle, which all told consist of some nineteen hours of operatic mayhem.

While the actual Baltimore Opera Company has gone belly-up in the past year, you can still catch an opera or two screened occasionally at the Charles Theatre, the local art house cinema located just north of the train station. I’ve heard of this phenomenon in other cities as well though, showing operas produced for film distribution at artsy theatres. Trick is, they charge you twenty bucks - twice the price of your average movie ticket. Though, of course, the cost comparison you’re supposed to make as a consumer is with an average opera ticket, which can be many times more expensive.

So was it worth the twenty dollars? Absolutely, though I personally have to maintain my position that staged live events like opera, musical theatre or regular dramas look stupid on the big screen. Playing on the stage, the performer adopts certain attitudes, gestures, postures, faces, tones of voice and inflection to project the sound of their physical body out into the space of the house, hitting the perceptual instruments of the audience members. When you translate a lot of those exaggerated faces to the big screen, something is off. Something looks wrong, it throws me out of the moment, instead of sweeping me up into the arc of the drama.

It’s interesting to note, conversely, that stage performances and the screenings of films share a common legacy: the vaudeville house. Once upon time, in this great land of ours, there existed a loose network of ‘road-houses’ as they are called, theatres (often referred ‘houses’) which catered to touring companies. Itinerant troupes at the turn of the 20th century would criss-cross the continent on a rigorous tour schedule, powered either by the locomotive networks, good old-fashioned wagons or the nascent automobile. The main faire was typically melodramas or vaudeville, the forerunner to the variety show so popular in 1960’s and 70’s America.

Vaudeville houses catered largely to the rising urban working class, country folk who’d moved to the big city to take factory jobs. Automated assembly lines allowed companies to produce goods non-stop, relying on rotating shifts of employees in a cheap and expendable labor pool. These same city dwellers, on their off hours needed something to spend their wages on: entertainment. Vaudeville houses were often noteworthy as sources of entertainment at almost any time of day. (An abandoned theatre on Howard Street in Baltimore still has signs outside that say, “CONTINUOUS PERFORMANCES AT POPULAR PRICES.”) Short acts would rotate performances on-stage throughout business hours so thrill-seekers would always find something watch - not unlike the way that your typical strip club operates today.

Movies as social phenomena were born in this performance environment. Your typical early film was a short piece set to live musical accompaniment and sandwiched between live acts like jugglers, singers or actors performing popular pieces. In Italian, there’s the intermezzo, in French, the entr’acte - brief interlude acts between scenes or between bigger sections of a performance.

In that sense, opera coming back into vogue on the big screen makes a bit more sense. The old Town Theatre (future home of Everyman Theatre), was once a stop for touring Vaudeville acts. Eventually it became a burlesque house, a parking garage and finally a movie theatre. Many old stage theatres across America have suffered similar fates, either morphing into movie theatres or strip clubs (like the old Gayety Theatre, now the Hustler Club), being modified beyond repair or torn down altogether.

With a failing economy, we’re seeing a new wave of theatre closings and companies failing across at least the Eastern seaboard: like Foothills in Worcester (the town of my birth) or the aforementioned Baltimore Opera Company - maybe migrating back to the big screen is a good way to preserve and present to a wider audience a lot of the cultural treasures and wonderful traditions that have become wound up inextricably with things like opera, ‘legitimate’ theatre and other dying performance genres.

In person, I’m sure that many of the facets of Valencia’s “Das Rheingold” which bothered me would have instead been impressive and perhaps even awe-inspiring set to Wagner’s thunderous music. But on screen, I just can’t escape that cool stage tricks and techniques just look lame or cheesy. When I as a consumer of entertainment at movie theatres am used to seeing fully-articulated killer robots blowing people to smithereens (and eating their corpses!), how can I ever accept the giants Fasolt and Fafner’s welded metal cage-costumes with immense jointed metal arms and legs hanging limply down as technicians push the apparatus from in the shadows below? And Loge zipping around on a Segway scooter? Is opera in such a state of decay that it needs to resort to flim-flammery like that? Probably, though I don’t know all that much about it - yet. This was my first opera, and I’m not even sure whether or not to count it since it was just a recording.

It did seem, however, that the elaborate machinery and staging of characters into various devices which allowed them to seemingly float around was just a thinly-veiled disguising of what opera singers I’ve befriended refer to as the “park and bark” tradition of classical opera performance: you basically come out on-stage, stand in your appointed spot, sing your guts out, maybe wave your arms around and then go back off-stage. Not a whole lot of acting, not much emphasis on movement. Exactly the opposite of what people in the industry are saying is the new trend: singers who can move, who can act, who can dance, who can do it all. It’s more along the lines of what you’ll find in the world of musical theatre, of Broadway performances; you could even draw the line back further towards things like Vaudeville and even further to the commedia dell’arte.

Or that’s the line of research I’ve been following lately in my spare time, and I’ll wager that outlook has significantly colored my experience of Wagner’s fantastic almost three hour opera which centers around a dwarf who cheats nature spirits out of their gold to craft a magical accursed ring which drives its owners mad with power and ultimately leads to the fall of the gods. The story’s cool, some of the acting is great, a lot of the singing is magnificent. But I kept getting hung up on directorial choices of how the work was translated across media into film. That and minor technical post-production glitches which, though small (like a square that appeared accidentally at the end of a line of subtitle or an actress’ part being mis-labeled during closing credits/curtain call), made me skeptical of the twenty dollar cost of admission.

There is a way forward though, I think. And like a lot of things right now, the path leads simultaneously backwards. I predict that a hybrid form of entertainment will overtake us all culturally within a few short years, one which successfully blends the best human elements of historical performance traditions with modern media techniques and still-emerging immersive computer technology. Wagner’s operatic work warrants that kind of speculation, I think, as his artistic vision spoke of a “marrying of all arts” within the imaginal space of the theatre. In two weeks (Oct. 25th and 27th), they play the next installment the saga, which is rumored to be three times as long as “Das Rheingold”, with two intermissions. Sounds like my kind of party.

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