'24-'25: Performance #9
If I were a librettist, I'd write one long song just leading up, and one even longer leading down...
Performers:
Cast; Kate Johnson (as Shprintse and Rose), Jennifer Zetlan (as Tseytl and young Tseytl), Heather Johnson (as Khave and young Khave), Megan Moore (as Beylke and young Beylke), Indira Mahajan (as Golde), Gideon Dabi (as Tevye), Ryan Lustgarten (as Arontshik)
Orchestra+; Kelly Kuo (conductor), Shaleah Feinstein (Violin), Tia Allen (Viola), Mitchell Lyon (Cello 1), Yana Levin (Cello 2), Valeriya Sholokhova (Cello 3), Pawel Knapik (Bass), Pascal Archer (Clarinet 1), Nuno Antunes (Clarinet 2 and Bass Clarinet), Justine Hines (Percussion), Jason Wirth (Pianist and Coach), Lorin Sklamberg (Yiddish Coach)
Program:
An Opera Concert/Orchestral Workshop for the in-development production, TEVYE’S DAUGHTERS, by Alex Weiser (Composer) and Stephanie Fleischmann (Librettist), commissioned by the American Lyric Theater. (For more information on how this performance differs from other types of performances, please see the show notes from last month’s InsightALT.)
Position: Front righthand seat; the basement of the DiMenna Center is small, so even the seats in the rear provide good sight and sound lines.
Purpose/Intent/Questions: Having had such a great time at the previous month’s InsightALT workshop, it was the only natural ending to a day spent in the City with my mother.
How’d it go?
To start with, I have to say that I was bringing a lot of biases into the opera concert for Tevye’s Daughters. And, frankly, a lot of future audiences likely will do the same. While I’m not a Yiddishist—I hire Yiddishists—I am familiar enough with the ecosystem of Sholem Aleichem’s Tevye the Dairyman that I don’t treat the 1971 film production of Fiddler on the Roof as comprehensive gospel, even if I admit that my internal image of Tevye may never be de-Topolized. This is to say: the portion of the plot that this opera borrows from the story of “Shprintse,” which might come across as dramatic and maybe beyond the bounds of artistic license to those who only know Tevye and his beautiful daughters from Fiddler, didn’t irk me. That doesn’t mean that I thought all of the liberties taken were in line with Aleichem’s universe—this is a modernized engagement with the work, after all—nor that this work will necessarily make Yiddishists, religious or secular, feel that the story of the family has been meaningfully continued. This work is walking, perhaps quite precariously, uphill in its choices, great and small.
My mother, who only knows Topol’s Tevye, accompanied me for the performance. Her remarks were positive, though she limited them almost exclusively to compliments on the singers—which I will echo and amplify below. Part of my feelings about the work might also stem from my mother’s presence, coupled with the sense that last month’s workshop presented a work far more complete and artistically compelling. This was the end of a long day in the City together, including a trip to one of the best museums1 on offer, the spectacle of Luna Luna, and an absolutely tremendous dinner2. Perhaps the show would have shone more brightly were it the only star in the sky. But who is promising that future audiences will arrived fully starved of art, of story, of things worth loving? Not I.
A quick, no-spoilers overview of the plot: picking up with the famous family from Fiddler, we meet up with the aged, surviving sisters for an 80th birthday party in the Catskills. Their young granddaughter has failed to show up to the festivities, only arriving later, full of shame and embarrassment over a major life decision she has made, worried sick that telling the truth might cause exile from the family—or worse! The opera alternates between the Catskills setting and the horrific tale of Shprintse, back in the alterheim. An effort is made to draw comparison between Rose, the young college-aged woman struggling with an aspect of her love life, and Shprintse, whose own trouble in love is ultimately why she is not present with the celebrating sisters. Rose’s internal work is done in tandem with the revelations about the missing sister.
We’ll start with the good and great parts: I absolutely think that people should try to do this. It’s “brave” art, in the sense that taking something so beloved—and so narrowly ingrained in such a large subset of the population—as the Fiddler universe and seeking to expand upon it is artistically dangerous territory. The source material is so sacred to some people, that it’s impossible for a contemporary artist to do right by it. But Yiddish literature, like the rest of Jewish life, is a conversation between generations. To not engage with it, to not find a way for it to continue into modernity, is a cultural failure. We must find ways to keep our languages, our stories, our flawed heroes, our struggles, our victories, alongside us as we move through time—as we live. Even if I did not find this work entirely “successful,” it is much more meaningful to witness the attempt than to see another regurgitated “safe” production. As an aspiring librettist whose source material is even more centrally sacred to a larger portion of Jews as is Yiddish literature, I feel that this is a shared pursuit. Fleischmann and Weiser are my colleagues at least twofold. We are engaged in the same work, and I will endeavor to learn from their challenges, but I will also do my best to be present for every crumb of success they muster up.
The greatest of kudos go to the effort, to the willingness to rise up and attempt the impossible. Of the central stories of our people, there is of course the struggle of Jacob3 with the mysterious entity that bestows upon him both a permanent limp and a new name. The entity says, in blessing Jacob with the name Israel, that the origin of the name is that Jacob has fought with the Divine and with man and has prevailed—but we know from the past few lines that neither party “prevailed” over the other. The fight was a draw. But winning—for a Jew, for a human—is to refuse to give up, to stay engaged in our struggles. That’s what it means to prevail.
(Pontification over… back to the show!)
The next greatest praise goes to Lorin Sklamberg, the Yiddish Coach, who succeeded in rendering a group of contemporary opera singers into shtetl-dwelling, feh-slinging, evil-eye-averse Jews from times long past. In particular, Indira Mahajan was the most compelling—and most intriguing—Golde who I have heard across many productions.
Gideon Dabi, our Tevye, seemed cognizant of the massive footprints created not just by Topol, but by generations of men seeking to tread his same path and reinforce his version of the character. A strong, beautiful voice, Dabi seems to know all of who Tevye has been, and made him his own without straying far from the path of tradition.
Ryan Lustgarten—wow. Wow. The whole story of Arontshik and Shprintse is easily thought of as more melodramatic than can be countenanced by reality—far less the realities of a rural, Jewish Europe many yesteryears ago. But if a man started singing to me the way that Lustgarten sings his part as Arontshik… I don’t need to apologize to my mother because she was likewise impressed with him.
This production featured a lot of visuals that were not present for the workshop, and I do have a bias against operas that necessitate “seeing” something with our physical eyes rather than understanding it with the eyes of the heart. The music and libretto did not feel confident in and of themselves, but I also am not certain that full staging would have convinced me otherwise. While the libretto had moments of great beauty, it also seemed a bit too deep into its own navel.
Some people won’t like the “woke” (i.e. realistic) angle that the later portion of the story takes.4 My only issue with it is that it was drawn out to an extent that seemed a bit ham-fisted. I can’t imagine an adult who enjoys opera—or even one who is merely opera-curious and able to follow painfully mundane conversations in English—not “getting” the alluded-to matter long before it is spelled out on stage. Dramatic irony is great in a comedy, when we’re invited to laugh at these dumb characters who can’t see the obvious. In a drama? It’s paternalistic. I don’t think this show is meant for very young children, but the puzzle has one and a half pieces, at most.
The music set me ill at ease, and not in a constructive way. In prose, we routinely harp on the maxim, “Show, don’t tell!” Opera is not quite the same creature. Weiser’s work, for whatever reason, seemed unwilling to make a contribution in its own voice, constantly relying on auditory “pointing,” letting the audience know “something dramatic is about to happen over there, on stage, with the singers or the set,” rather than participating individually, telling us very little and instead insisting that it would be shown elsewhere. This is an area where, again, I feel that my expectations might have been warped by the previous month’s workshop, by Barnes’ absolutely unhinged level of skill and talent when it comes to making instruments speak, joke, and cry as unnamed characters alongside the singers. Weiser clearly knows how to write music, but the music for this show came across as quite flat, not providing sufficient counter to elevate tension in the libretto, not creating images where the variously stipulated bodies of water and forests and Shabbat tables were lacking.
My impulse, and my hope, is that this piece is simply a longer way’s off from debut than the previous month’s work. As opening night approaches, I think that some of the kinks will be worked out to create something that only offends half of the cult of Topol’s Tevye.
People sometimes sell the National Museum of the American Indian in NYC short because it’s a “satellite” location for the Smithsonian in DC, but every drop in the collection is an ocean. I highly encourage making at least a half-day of it!
Nizuc not only offered wonderful food, but the service was possibly the best I’ve ever had in New York City. They’ve secured their position for pre-show eats and sips before events at DiMenna or elsewhere in Hudson Yards.
Is it as earth-shattering as the “woke” angle in Conclave? No, absolutely not. But that doesn’t mean that people won’t be thoroughly shooketh by the encroachment of inconvenient facts on the quaint cross-stitch image of the shtetl-born that is so prized in some circles. My cultured Boomer mother didn’t bat an eye at it, but I can easily imagine a lot of feh-facedness from older—and younger—Yiddishists I know from synagogue, from work, and from around the grapevine.