Given the cramped space and boomy acoustics, it was impossible to fully assess the operatic prospects of the singers (besides Dukach: Roy Hage as Anatol, Ori Marcu as Erika, Joshua Jeremiah as the Old Doctor, and Mary Phillips as the Old Baroness), but they were all appropriately cast as to vocal type and technically solid. They also displayed excellent stamina, singing through their roles on three consecutive days of each weekend—I was seeing the eighth show of nine. The instrumental septet was thoroughly professional and Schlosberg certainly in there with them, though the reduction did Barber’s score no favors, further thinning the texture and losing some of the pleasurable interplay in what was left of the interludes.

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On the Vanessa page of the WTF website, we are invited to take a “deeper dive” with Susan Sontag’s famous Notes on Camp, first published in Partisan Review in 1964, then incorporated into the anthology Against Interpretation in 1966. In fact, the essay is reprinted on the website, which rather took me aback, first on copyright grounds,^(I) and then on substance. Sontag defines camp as, first, “a sensibility that converts the serious into the frivolous,” a “sensibility of failed seriousness,” and, second, as “a certain mode of aestheticism” that sees the world “not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization.” It also “sees everything in quotation marks” and is “the triumph of the epicene style.” Sontag also asserts that the creator’s intent does not matter, but it turns out that it does, because she draws a distinction between “naive” and “deliberate” camp, the “naive” sort emerging organically (I’m reminded of Scott Reston’s on-the-nailhead description of Richard Nixon as “phony on so deep a level he thinks he’s sincere”), and the “deliberate” as something intended to be taken as camp. She claims for the domain of the naive much of the traditional operatic repertory, which, she says, could not be “such satisfying camp if the melodramatic absurdities of most opera plots had not been taken seriously by their composers.” And over on the side of the deliberate? “Samuel Barber’s Vanessa, a piece of manufactured, calculated camp,” and on that account far less satisfying. I’m not sure I agree with her assignment of Vanessa to the deliberate camp camp (it leaves me with a picture of Barber and Menotti giggling uncontrollably while they sketch in some of the moments noted above), but she would have known better than I, I suppose. I’m also left assuming that given the “deeper dive” solicitation, Heartbeat is willing, even eager, to have its work perceived as camp.

My own notes on camp (following on S. S.):

1. While busy assigning  camp status to a broad range of art objects, Sontag says “It’s not all in the eye of the beholder.” True, but I think she calculatedly underestimates the extent to which it is exactly that. Except in extreme and obvious instances, the attitude brought by the “beholder” is more of a determinant than any quality inherent in the object. In particular, there are few artworks touched by the Romantic spirit, including even the greatest ones, that are impervious to the assault of a receptor eager for the camp experience, and in search of more artistic territory to claim on its behalf.