Dear devotees: It’s come to my attention that many of you received an uncorrected version of Friday’s post, Quiche-o Carlos/Ariadne Rescued? After a total internet outage of 24 hours’ duration that caused the original delay, some glitch in the publishing process sent out the last uncorrected draft, rather than the finished version. It contained a number of references awaiting verification, as well as other corrections detected in the final proofreading, and an inactive link to the Russell Baker column. The error was detected and the updates made within a couple of hours, but if you received the earlier version, by all means swap it out for the finished one. 

My apologies for the inconvenience, and thanks for reading, as always.

CLO

P. S.: But now I find (at 11:55 PM on the 27th) that even after again entering the corrections and viewing them, they did not all update. BUT NOW THEY ARE DEFINITIVELY OK. 

I wonder how many readers’ eyes will light up on mention of Russell Baker. He was the longtime author of The Observer, a regular feature of the New York Times’ op-ed page, purveying a type of humor that, save for an occasional foray by Calvin Trillin, we don’t have much of anymore—keen-eyed and pointed, but always urbane and genial. The Metropolitan Opera’s new production of Verdi’s Don Carlos, sung in French for the first time in the company’s history, put me in mind of one of his most fondly-remembered pieces, whose title I had recalled as Are You Macho or Quiche-o?, but which the NYT archive has down as The Two Ismo’s. Picking up on a little essay by Philip Lopate, Quiche Blitz on Columbus Avenue, Baker writes of “two violently opposed doctrines of social conduct” that are rending the “urban war zone” whose nexus lies directly before the Met itself.^(I) He compiles an impressive collection of distinctions, amusing because they were dead-on at the time, between the styles of the eponymous factions. I could sample them here, but far better that I send you to the source, here.^(II)

The conductor of the new production is Yannick Nézet-Séguin. It isn’t the first time we’ve heard his way with this score. When he led the Nicholas Hytner production (in Italian), some years before his ascent to the Musical Directorship, I wrote of both production and conducting that “they seemed concerned with making a weighty, deep, long work seem less weighty, deep, and long” (see Opera as Opera, p. 648). That is even more the case now. The maestro has found a cast to help him lift further off the weighty and deep parts, though not by any means to lessen the long. And since the cast is what ultimately decides the fate of a performance (and, in this instance, clamps an apparently welcome damper on the presence of N-S’s orchestra), I’ll start there.

The Cast: To pacify in advance any devotees who might be looking on Matthew Polenzani as an eccentric selection for the title role, the NYT hastened to assure us that we wouldn’t be hearing anything so obstreperous as a Corelli- or Del Monaco-like voice. Something subtler, more nuanced, more French would soothe our sensibilities. What this meant became apparent immediately in Polenzani’s voicing of “Je l’ai vue” (“Io la vidi” to you, and I shall continue to translate for recognition’s sake), which, given a tolerance for a mannered approach, could have served nicely in one of Fauré’s purely lyrical songs in a comfortable recital venue with a discreet accompanist. The ridiculous Polenzani vs. Corelli/Del Monaco straw-man setup aside (Del Monaco, I’m fairly certain, never sang the part, and it was not one of Corelli’s best, though of course there were moments that tingled with the visceral excitement of his voice and benefited from his handsome, standup presence), there is an almost horizonless expanse between these extremes. It has been occupied at the Met by a long succession of tenors, beginning with Giovanni Martinelli back in the 1920s, continuing with Jussi Bjoerling in the 1950 production that launched the Bing regime, and coming on down to Roberto Alagna, who sang it there in 2010 and is the Carlos of the 1995 EMI French-language recording from the Théâtre du Chatelet. For my money, Neil Shicoff demonstrated with his Eléazar (La Juive) that a relatively slender but well-supported and equalized voice, combined with an intense acting talent, can make for a satisfying grand opéra tenor hero, particularly of this troubled sort.

With apologies for the late posting, here is the article scheduled for yesterday, February 25.

The Metropolitan Opera has been on hiatus for the month of February, and while there has been some local operatic activity that may figure in an end-of-season appraisal, this has been a quiet time with respect to my current preoccupation, the condition of the canon at the international level of performance. So, as I indicated at the end of my last post, I’m using my space today to take some tracings from the genealogy of Met performances of one canonical masterpiece that has been in this season’s repertoire. And having given deservedly short shrift to the company’s current mock-up of Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, I have chosen that work as the starting point for the journey. It’s arguable, I suppose, whether or not it represents a wider gap between what I know to be a particular opera’s demonstrated potential on the one hand, and what I recently saw and heard on the other than, say, the past fall’s Meistersinger (see “Ha, diese Meister!“, 11/22/2021). But none has made me more keenly aware of what’s been lost, or more interested in defining exactly what that is, and where it went missing along the way.

Nozze di Figaro also happens to be an opera with whose performing tradition at the Met, for all practical purposes, I have been familiar from the start, at least where singers are concerned. That is: from the time (1940) the Met took up the opera after a 22-year absence, and any strong connection to a tenuous earlier performing tradition had been broken, most of the singers regularly cast were ones I came to know over the air and in live performance. That was also the time when the Mozart/Da Ponte operas were coming in for revival more broadly—for though they were never as completely on the outs as the operas of Handel (except for Così fan tutte, which was exactly that), they had spent many decades flying well under the Romantic radar. The 1930s had seen long strides toward restoration, of which the longest were the performances at the festivals of Salzburg and Glyndebourne and the return (again after a more-than-two-decade void) of Don Giovanni to regular performance at the Metropolitan. The  Figaros and Giovannis of both Salzburg and the Met had Ezio Pinza in their title roles; for twenty or so years, he set the standard—vocally, musically, charismatically—for these extraordinary characters. The Glyndebourne productions of all three of the Mozart/Da Ponte operas received “complete” studio recordings (recitatives cut to the bone); for fifteen or so years, they had to be considered definitive in the absence of competition and, along with the Beecham recording of Die Zauberflöte, constituted a significant factor in earning for these works their proper standing in the modern opera repertory.

I would describe what’s gone missing as falling into two broad categories. In Category 1 are all the things that interpretations of Le Nozze di Figaro need to have in common, so that we are able to recognize the opera in performance as a work of understood artistically satisfying qualities, and expect that they will be present. These elements are derived from two sources, namely, the musical and verbal text itself, and the things that talented performers have revealed as necessary to its basic fulfillment, and have thus become parts of its performing tradition. Category 2 holds everything that individual performers of imagination, personality, and presence bring to the music and drama of the piece. Since the piece at hand is an opera, much that belongs to both categories is found in its vocal and musical expression; but since an opera takes theatrical form, much else must come from the theatre’s territory. Of course the contributions of extraordinary performers will at times ambush our in-common expectations in a way we receive as revelatory, so that the tradition is supplemented. But that’s not involved in the recent Figaro experience. We aren’t dealing with anything gained, but only with things lost, and going in search of them.

A supportive, congratulatory note before I get to today’s topic: in this uniquely trying season, we must be grateful that our local opera company, the Metropolitan, has forged ahead with performances. There are more dark nights than usual, and reduced attendance at most of the lit ones (I have never seen the auditorium as sparsely occupied as at the Figaro discussed below), so the financial inroads must be painful. But the Met has persevered, and with a  professional and reassuring handling of the logistics forced upon it by the pandemic. It has taken as a given that opera must go on. As must the critic’s task of attempting to accurately record and honestly evaluate the events of the continuance. 

And a note to some concerned readers: a Turandot follow-up, acknowledging the thoughtful responses to my article on that work and taking advantage of materials kindly forwarded by one reader that will help me elaborate on the uncut version of the final scene, was intended as part of today’s post. I’ve decided, though, to look in on the second cast of the run a little later in the season—so it makes sense to amalgamate the follow-up with any remarks I may enter on that occasion. To the subject du jour:

Two cornerstone works returned to the Met’s repertory over the past month. One, Verdi’s Rigoletto, was a new production, and the other, Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro, a revival. Both were staged in a manner that most observers would probably classify as “conservative,” “harmless,” or even “traditional”—that is, neither is of a high-concept, overtly estranged sort. Neither is abstract. Neither denies narrative, or imposes another narrative in place of, or in addition to, the one indicated by the work’s verbal and musical text. Yet both displace the time (and one of them, the place) of the operas’ action, resulting in an ongoing alienation, a subversion of even the possibility of real belief and emotional investment that gnaws at the root of the works while leaving some sprouts and sprigs on view. Since I draw a line of principle between myself and such productions and find so few standing on my side of the line (so widespread is a mindless acceptance of these obvious assaults on artistic integrity), it sometimes seems futile to detail why this fresh example is objectionable, as is the next. However, there is always the potential for the latest specimen striking home with the odd person or persons, in addition to the value of bucking up the morale of any who see the point and find themselves marooned with me. So, I suppose it is incumbent on me to give these specifics some evaluation, insofar as a single viewing can support that.

Like a number of directors who have had an impact on the New York opera scene over the past half-century-plus, Bartlett Sher has come to opera from the mainstream American spoken theatre, where he has had a good measure of success with both musicals and plays. He has won a fistful of awards, and been the artistic director of important companies. By now he is also an old opera hand, and he and his frequent design partners (Michael Yeargan, sets,  Catherine Zuber, costumes, and  Donald Holder, lighting) certainly know what they’re doing together. So one recognizes that there is a variety of stage intelligence at work, the question being: is it the right variety? Is Sher’s kind of theatrical knowledge and experience, his way of arriving at insights on character action and concept, of value with masterworks of the 19th-Century operatic repertory? My own experience with his work has been rather sharply divided between the generally-happy-with-quibbles kind (the theatre productions I’ve seen—South Pacific, Golden Boy, Awake and Sing,) and the altogether miserable kind (the operatic ones—the catastrophic collaboration with Es Devlin on Otello, see the post of 1/18/19; Roméo et Juliette, see “Under the Bus: Roméo, Act 1,” 4/13/18; and Two Boys, which I discuss in Opera as Opera).

In my article on the Met’s revival of the Schenk/Schneider-Siemssen Die Meistersinger (see the post of 11/12/21), I promised a consideration of the current season’s second high-density extravaganza of several decades’ standing, the Turandot originally designed and directed by Franco Zeffirelli in 1987. Since there is little of artistic importance to report about the evening (of Nov. 2), and most of that consists of sketching its vocal shortcomings, it has seemed to me more productive to share some thoughts about how we think of these roles (shortcomings by what standard?), and how we feel about this opera (what’s that queasy sensation?) when not swept away by its thrill potential. A brief evaluation of the present revival can be found at the end of today’s article.

In search of a standard.

For operagoers of my generation, the measure of the work’s effectiveness was taken by the protagonist pairing of the Met’s 1961 production, Birgit Nilsson and Franco Corelli. The sheer visceral excitement and aesthetic entrancement generated by those two justified the opera’s continuance for the next decade, and became the remembrance to which successors were compared. In the first seasons of that production, Nilsson remained a fixture except on the rare occasion, while Corelli had plausible alternates in Richard Tucker, Sándor Kónya, and Flaviano Labò. Also early on, the third principal character, Liù, was sung by Anna Moffo, Lucine Amara, Teresa Stratas, Licia Albanese, and, on just a couple of  memorable occasions, Leontyne Price. Those were the voices that reinstated this opera in the Met’s repertory after the company’s first production of it had worn out its welcome thirty-one years earlier.

Puccini’s stated choices for the three principal roles in Turandot were: Turandot: Maria Jeritza; Calaf: Beniamino Gigli; Liù: Gilda dalla Rizza. But the singers eventually contracted for the parts  were, respectively, Rosa Raisa, Miguel Fleta, and Maria Zamboni, the last-named a late substitution for Edith Mason. (By the time of the premiere—4/25/26, at La Scala—Puccini had been dead for nearly a year and a half, and Toscanini was very much in charge of the artistic decisions. But he was aware of Puccini’s preferences, which had evidently included the eventual “creators” as credible substitutions.) With later casting selections in our ears, several of these can seem surprising to us. So a glance at them should be of interest.

Jeritza/Raisa: Two quite different singers, neither of them Italian. But then, Italy was not really rich in dramatic sopranos at that time (the most tonally and technically complete of them, Giannina Arangi-Lombardi, was just emerging from her contralto beginnings, and not yet established as a dramatic soprano); Gina Cigna, who later sang the role on the opera’s first complete recording, was just getting started, too. The most logical native candidate would have been Bianca Scacciati, who did go on to “create” the role for both Rome and London shortly after the world premiere. She had a big, cutting voice, intensely vibrated and prevailingly bright, that certainly encompassed the part’s range, and her recording of “In questa reggia” is persuasive. But Puccini knew what he wanted, namely, the hot temperament, theatricality, emotionality, and sheer glamor of Jeritza, whom he’d seen often in Strauss, Wagner, and his own operas, above all Tosca. That she was not particularly Italianate in either vocal method or pronuncia, and could be wayward musically, was obviously of secondary importance to him. (He was also  a fervent admirer of Jeritza’s frequent colleague/competitor Lotte Lehmann, another emotionally open singer who could be musically adrift at times. He knew what the priorities must be for his music and characters.) Jeritza’s was another essentially bright voice, its vibrato not nearly as prominent as Scacciati’s, its calibre of the Jugendlich variety as then defined (i. e., stronger than the singers we hear in such roles now), its tone capable of purity when not being flung about. The Polish soprano Raisa I have always found difficult to pin down from her records. Her voice is often enough described as voluminous to establish that as one of its components. Even allowing for the change from acoustical to electric recording technology, her singing seems to have undergone more than the normal timbral and technical alteration over the duration of her career—taut and sometimes brittle early on, more loosely held and not as firmly centered toward the top later. Very impressive passages are followed by unfocused ones. Clearly not as glamorous or demonstrative as Jeritza, she nevertheless apparently had true prima donna presence, and the vocal calibre and range for the part. Toscanini had thought highly of her since leading her in the premiere of Boito’s Nerone in May of 1924, and her performance in Turandot was considered nearly ideal by musicians and critics. Both these sopranos left significant American trails in this role, Jeritza for the entire four-season run of the Met’s first production, and Raisa in Chicago, where she was for many years the reigning dramatic soprano. Though they also left extensive discographies, neither recorded anything from Turandot.

Today I am pleased to present an article by my longtime colleague and friend Will Crutchfield on the lack of new operas of sufficient appeal to refresh our repertory on a more than one-and-gone basis. Since my own focus here is first and foremost our operatic canon and its performance, this is a topic I only occasionally engage with, and then generally with small satisfactions. Will explains below how his piece has made its way here, but I very much hope that its life will extend well beyond this posting, because although of course our tastes and opinions are not identical, I think it packs more sharp, independent analysis and supporting evidence into concise form than anything I have seen on the subject—and as always, his writing is clear, pithy, and engaging. A price we pay for Will’s valuable work as Artistic Director of Teatro Nuovo, as conductor and coach, is the loss—except for infrequent forays like this one—of Will as critic, at a time when bold, knowledgeable criticism is badly needed. With that, I’ll turn this space over to him.

Will’s note – Several years ago an editor asked me for a “new-opera” essay, the idea being to combine general reflection on 21st-century challenges with some commentary on the novelties that were then current or recent. I wrote most of the piece, but then begged off from the assignment when it had already exceeded usable length and was still unfinished.

By now it’s significantly out of date, but discussion with CLO of some still newer operas prompted me to dig out the draft for his amusement, and he saw some merit in it. In case any of his readers might like to see it too, I’ve put together a few unfinished paragraphs (the discussion of “plan B”) from notes sketched at the time – but haven’t updated the body of the piece, which still reflects the scene as it appeared then.

The new-opera problem (Nov. 2017)

Let’s skip the introductory recitation of woe and start with a question out of left field: what if there is no such problem? How can concern about opera’s health even come up as a topic? The hottest ticket in New York – the most economically productive cultural enterprise currently underway here, the Talk of the Town – is a new opera. It plays to capacity houses every night; people wait months to get seats. Where’s the crisis?

Anyone rash enough to say why Hamilton is not an opera is welcome to try. Actually, let me save you the trouble:

• Because it’s in a different musical idiom? Pretty weak; if “opera” can encompass idioms as diverse as Vivaldi’s and Mussorgsky’s, Miranda’s is not even a stretch.
• Because it is aimed at widely-shared tastes in the expectation of monetary return? Goodbye Mozart, Verdi, Puccini.
• Because it doesn’t have a full symphony orchestra in the pit? Write off the whole Baroque repertory then, along with The Turn of the Screw, unless we can acknowledge the category of “operas with a smaller band.”
• Because the singers are miked? But the contracts for Nixon in China stipulate that its singers must be miked, and meanwhile the original singers of Kiss Me Kate, South Pacific, Show Boat, and Lost in the Stars were not miked. So, those are all operas, but Nixon and Hamilton aren’t?

All these distinctions are non-starters. One older argument, which used to natter on about spoken dialogue vs. through-composed music (and used to collapse over Die Zauberflöte, Fidelio and Carmen), doesn’t even raise a whimper here: Hamilton, like Sweeney Todd and a growing list of others, has through-composed music from curtain to curtain. New opera, by any reasonable definition – by any defensible amalgamation of the definitions commonly put forward over the years – is thriving.

1: REMINDER: This Sunday, Dec. 12, at 3:00 PM, EST, we will offer a second video forum as a final followup to the series produced by Bel Canto Boot Camp, based on the opening section of my book, Opera as Opera. The previous forum left many viewer queries and comments unanswered—we will pick up on some of those (with more invited), with a focus on what I’ve termed The New Vocality and its implications for the future of our artform. As before, the forum will be moderated by Will Crutchfield and hosted by Eventbrite. There’s no fee for registration. The most direct route is to the BCBC home page, here. I hope you’ll join us.

2: At dermerker.com, the fine opera blog written and curated by my colleague Thomas Prochazka, a current post is: About Singing, Or: Conrad L. Osborne and Others on Chest Voice. This article is available both in German and in English translation. You’ll find many other items of interest on Der Merker’s home page, and Thomas’s site is always a great way to keep track of doings in Vienna and around the region, always from a vocally informed viewpoint.

3: ANOTHER REMINDER: Next week, on Fri., Dec. 17, I’ll be presenting a guest column by Will Crutchfield on the topic of “the New Opera problem.” Is there one, and if so why, and what can we do about it? It’s the pithiest exploration of those questions I’ve seen, all contained in a single blog post. Don’t miss it.

FINALLY: Since the release of Opera as Opera onto wider distribution, a couple of readers, here and on the Continent, have written to tell me that orders sent through Amazon are sometimes greeted with a “temporarily unavailable” notice. I am assured that these are only re-stocking incidents, and that the book is indeed obtainable through Amazon and other sanctioned vendors. However, if there’s too much of a delay, the book can always be ordered at this site, by clicking on the Opera as Opera page, or by going to the fulfillment center’s site here .

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Before getting to today’s topic (the Met’s revival of Die Meistersinger and two recent recordings featuring some of its principals), one announcement and one recommendation. The announcement: with the third printing of Opera as Opera, I have entered into a broader distribution agreement, a business move delayed by the bankruptcy of our original printer and distributor, and then by revenue uncertainties attendant upon the pandemic. This will make the book available to the libraries and retail outlets who are contractually bound to order only through designated suppliers, and will release it to online sales through Amazon, Barnes & Noble, et al. It will also improve accessibility for overseas customers by reducing the exorbitant shipping costs for them. Individuals can of course continue to order directly from this site, but will now have other options as well. 

And the recommendation, for all readers ready to reach a bit beyond our mainstream opera concerns into closely related musical and cultural realms:  My longtime colleague Joseph Horowitz has just published a fascinating exploration of what he perceives as the swerve in American cultural history that has separated us from the roots—including African-American and Indigenous musics—that might have nourished a more vital American musical language, and has led to the divorce of our “popular” and “classical” genres. Of course the thesis will arouse debate, but I believe Horowitz, building on his several previous books on American musical history, has made a persuasive case, grounded in literature and the fine arts as well as music. The book’s called Dvorak’s Prophecy and the Vexed Fate of Black Classical Music, and it’s published by W. W. Norton & Co.

With the special circumstances of what we hopefully designate as our first post-pandemic opening behind us, we have a season of repertory opera underway at the Met. Aside from that first production, which I wrote about last time, I’ve been to two performances of well-aged revivals—a Turandot (about which I’ll offer some thoughts in a future post) and a Die Meistersinger, which I’ll write about here. This is a time of stringent testing for the EuroAngloAmerican canon, and for the presentation of its works in a repertory system. Such a system relies on a body of repeatable, renewable works, and in the case of these productions, “renewable” means “capable of revivification by the performers,” not by auteuristic conceptualization or revisionist counterargument, and unaided by the spurts of attention that accompany a new production or a work’s premiere.  The season-to-season churn of core repertory works, fed by the attractions of repeat appearances by favored performers along with anticipated arrivals of new ones, is what finally determines the viability of an institution like the Met.

And we are at a juncture where both demand (from audiences) and supply (of high-functioning performers) are in serious question. On the demand side, we wonder whether the already tenuous hold our artform has had of late on the habit of attendance (or the inculcation of that habit in new prospects) may have suffered an economically fatal rupture from the pandemic and the complex of social, political, and environmental crises it has set into such bold relief. While I feel reasonably certain that the blocs of empty seats observed in the upper regions of the house at these performances (and reported on at others) are primarily due to the caution we all feel about returning to public events and the steep drop-off in tourism, the longterm effects of these disruptions will take time to assess. And over on the supply side, we suffer not so much from the factory-to-warehouse-to-consumer blockages that afflict so many sectors of the economy as from a simple lack of supply at the source. At the opera-singer warehouse, there’s not enough of quality and durability, ready for shipment, to keep us in stock.

The post scheduled for today, Nov. 19, will be published on Monday, Nov. 22. It will deal with the Met revival of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger, whose cast includes a new Eva (Lise Davidsen) and Pogner (Georg Zeppenfeld), with Michael Volle as Hans Sachs, conducted by Antonio Pappano. I will also take a look at a couple of recent related recordings—Pentatone’s Fidelio under Marek Janowski (with Davidsen as Leonore and Zeppenfeld as Rocco), and Davidsen’s latest operatic recital disc for Decca. Plus thoughts on the work, on singing, and on opera’s efforts to recover and move on. Thanks for your patience.

CLO     

After nearly nineteen months of silence, the Metropolitan Opera Company returned to live performance on September 27. The opera was a new one, a revised and expanded version of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which had its premiere at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis in 2019. The music is by Terence Blanchard, a jazz-oriented composer noted for his work in film, and the libretto is by Kasi Lemmons, based on a memoir by Charles M. Blow, a columnist for The New York Times. I attended the second performance, on October 1. Since this opera is the first by African-American creators to be produced by the Met, and since it was leapfrogged forward in the schedule to become the season opener under the extreme social pressures of the past year-and-a-half, it bears a burden of emotionally charged expectations, as well as a confusion of celebration and resistance as a signifier of the ongoing diversity offensive. Neither of these has any bearing on the artistic merit of the opera, so I’ll try to set them aside, and evaluate the piece and its presentation on the basis of my experience with it, with some words on the social and artistic implications of the occasion as afterword.

Perhaps it was not wise to introduce the work with words that at once leaned on ancient religio-cultural resonances and suggested impending provocation. As the fully-masked, vaxx-credentialed audience took its place (a rather subdued vibe in the hall), the Biblical quote that is the source of the opera’s (and memoir’s) title greeted us from the forecurtain. Our lesson of the evening was drawn from Chapter 20, Verse 9 of the distressing Book of Jeremiah, wherein the Lord threatens the visiting of all conceivable punishments upon the Israelites for their disobediences and false prophecies, then delivers them into the hand of King Nebucadnezzar for the years of the Babylonian Captivity. Derided for speaking aloud the word of the Lord, Jeremiah protests: “If I say, ‘I will not mention him, or speak any more in his name,’ there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and cannot.” This entire lamentation, Verses Seven through Eighteen, which careens among fears of persecution, assurances of the Lord’s protection, cries for vengeance, praise for the Lord’s deliverances, and curses on the day the prophet was born, is of the utmost unhinged eloquence. Settling into my seat, I prepared for a challenge flung in my face, a disturbance and an outcry—a Jeremiad. Another heavy expectation.

But Fire creates no such effect. For the most part it plays as a low-key, domesticated coming-of -age drama, not unpleasant but neutral in tone, with a happy ending in a sort of apotheosis of self-identification. It recounts the story of Charles (Will Liverman), a child “of peculiar grace”; his mother Billie (Latonia Moore), trying to hold the poverty-level household together while handling the no-good pater familias, Spinner; the sexual abuse of Charles by an older cousin, Chester; and Charles’ eventual victory in coming to grips with his rage and accepting his nature for what it is. Along the way, there’s a scene in a chicken-processing plant, a confrontation in a dive, an evangelical baptism, tentative searchings for heterosexual love, and a fraternity hazing. All this plays in a more or less naturalistic manner, but is framed by the presence of two allegorical figures, Destiny and Loneliness, rather as in Baroque opera, who hang around the course of the action. These are both sung by Angel Blue, who also, perplexingly, takes on the love interest character, Greta, who is a direct participant in the plot—the levels of reality wobble here, for anyone paying attention to such matters. Which I reckon we’re not supposed to do.