Last Updated on October 11, 2024
Trouble in Paradise
Oliver Mears’ new production of Leonard Bernstein’s interlinked pair of short operas ‘Trouble in Tahiti’ and ‘A Quiet Place’ in the Linbury Theatre, the chamber opera space at Covent Garden, has been long in gestation. It’s a big moment for Bernstein fans, the first performance of any work by the conductor, composer, educator and sensualist at the Royal Opera House, at a time when Lennie’s profile has been rebooted through the success of the Bradley Cooper film ‘Maestro’.
The two operas were originally written as standalone pieces. The one-act ‘Trouble in Tahiti’, a painfully witty jazz-inflected piece with a libretto by the composer, was started during Bernstein’s honeymoon in 1951, an ironic setting for crafting an opera about marital discord. The opera’s premiere took place on June 12, 1952, at Brandeis University, bridging the gap between his earlier Broadway success “On the Town” (1944) and his later triumphs “Candide” and “West Side Story” (1956 and 1957, respectively).
‘A Quiet Place’ serves as a sequel to ‘Trouble in Tahiti’. Composed in 1983 with a libretto by Stephen Wadsworth, it is a deeply personal and emotionally charged work that explores themes of family dysfunction, grief, and reconciliation. Bernstein had recently lost his wife. the actor Felicia Montealegre, to cancer and the Opera explores a more complex, atonal musical language whilst referencing musical motifs from the earlier work, creating a musical continuity that reflects the characters’ evolving relationships. ‘A Quiet Place’ received its first performance on June 17, 1983, at the Houston Grand Opera. Initially presented as a double bill with ‘Trouble in Tahiti’, the opera received mixed reviews and, following the premiere, Bernstein and Wadsworth incorporated ‘Trouble in Tahiti’ into ‘A Quiet Place’ as a series of flashback scenes thus creating a more traditionally structured three-act opera. However, for this production at the Linbury, Oliver Mears, with the agreement of the Bernstein estate, has reverted to the composer’s original intention of presenting the two operas together, but as discrete works.
‘Trouble in Tahiti’ is a laceratingly funny yet moving study of mid-century American suburbia. The opera focuses on Sam and Dinah, a young married couple whose outwardly perfect life masks a profound unhappiness and inability to communicate as they struggle to navigate the torment of their marriage. The story unfolds over seven scenes, depicting a day in the life of the dysfunctional couple. Their morning begins with an argument over breakfast, setting the tone for their strained relationship. Throughout the day, Sam immerses himself in his work and visits the gym, while Dinah attends a therapy session and watches a movie called ‘Trouble in Tahiti.’ The couple’s young son, Junior whose needs are ignored, is a shadowy witness to his parents’ fights.
Bernstein employs a unique narrative device in the form of a close harmony ‘Greek chorus’ vocal trio – Peter Edge, Guy Elliott and Kirsty Mclean Young – decked out in grey suits and comedy retro glasses. Using a musical language that mimics and extends that of the 1950s radio advertising vocal groups, the trio provides a knowing commentary on the proceedings interspersed with deliberately jarring product-related jingles. Their opening number ‘Morning Sun’ is a swinging dissection of post-war American materialism that bobs and weaves through keys and meter changes in a dizzyingly virtuosic performance punctuated by Gershwinesque clarinet flourishes. It’s a neat dramatic device that lightens the tone of the piece.
Austria-based British baritone Henry Neill plays the part of the narcissistic husband Sam, a Clark Kentish figure in his brown suit and shoes who won’t go to see his son star in a school play as he has a handball tournament. At the gym, a topless Neill gives a muscular and resonant toned reading of his big vocal feature ‘There’s a law about men’, a Nietzschean paean to the Übermensch.
Both Neill and Canadian mezzo-soprano Wallis Giunta, who takes on the role of the wife Dinah, are excellent actors bringing to life the nuances of their relationship with painful humour. She floats around in a diaphanous dressing gown explaining that ‘a woman needs so little’ and accuses her husband of being unfaithful with his secretary. In her elegiac song ‘There is a Garden’ – possible a prototype for ‘There’s a Place for us’ – she shows off the glorious top register of her golden sheened voice. In ‘Island Magic’, lampooning the crass American exceptionalism of the movie she has just seen -Trouble In Tahiti – she makes the most of movement director Sarah Fahie’s terrific drunken comedic choreography. The warped love song ‘Why did I have to lie?’ allows both leads to show genuine sentiment. I look forward to seeing Neill and Giunta in major roles on the main stage in the future.
‘A Quiet Place’ is set thirty years later and opens with Dinah’s funeral, bringing together the estranged family members: Sam, their children Junior and Dede, and Dede’s husband François. As they gather, long-buried tensions and resentments surface, revealing a family struggling to communicate and connect in an orgy of Lars von Trier -esque emotional disruption. There are also themes of mental illness and sexual identity that were controversial for the opera stage in the 1980s and a sound language that is much bleaker and more dissonant than that employed in ‘Trouble in Tahiti.’
The opening scene is set at the funeral parlour. Rows of red velvet chairs are bisected by the coffin. Finely characterised minor characters are brought to life by the strong ensemble cast who seem to relish the black humour in a brutal musical and lyrical dissection of people’s behaviours when confronted with a corpse in a box.
Sussex-born tenor Nick Pritchard’s Funeral Director drips with hand-wringing insincerity; English character mezzo Sarah Pring gives us a distraught Mrs Doc stinging her victims with waspish observations. As her husband Doc, the Hong-Kong born British bass-baritone Freddie Tong is long-suffering. Welsh mezzo Rebecca Afonwy-Jones is Dinah’s ‘nice friend’ Susie and British tenor Robin Bailey is suitably opaque as her analyst. Bernstein’s dazzling vocal interplay from these characters – all well sung – leads us to one conclusion – ‘What a f&*ked up family’.
Australian-born, London-based baritone Grant Doyle plays the now much older and jaded Sam, singing with rich-toned passion about his loss of potency in the world. He juggles feelings of confusion, anger and guilt in what is a powerfully dramatic performance.
Showing his versatility, Henry Neill returns as the elder child Junior in denim cut-offs and a fringed buckskin gilet looking like a wannabe member of the Village People. Having escaped to Canada to avoid the Vietnam draft, he compulsively creates rhyming couplets as a way of managing his mental illness but can’t stop himself from disrupting the funeral with a bluesy come-on to his dad – ‘Hey Big Daddy, you’re driving me batty’. It’s a brilliant performance that oozes vulnerability and need.
Yorkshire-born soprano Rowan Pierce plays the younger sibling Dede. Her voice has a bright-toned sparkle and with plenty held in reserve if she needs to move into a higher gear. Pierce gives a strong dramatic reading of her character’s emotional rollercoaster, moving from grief to childish high-jinks, flirting with her father to finding love in the arms of her brother’s lover.
Welsh tenor Elgan Llÿr Thomas has a glorious ring to his voice and impresses as François, lover of both Junior and Dede. He becomes the glue that holds the family together, asserting himself as the voice of reason.
Director Oliver Mears has done a terrific job with the singers in both productions, bringing out the transgressive sexual subtexts of ‘A Quiet Place’ and the humour of ‘Trouble in Tahiti’. The singers were all very fine and are the stars of the future. The new chamber ensemble musical arrangements by Garth Edwin Sunderland work well in the confined intimacy of the Linbury, turning the power and weight of the original orchestration into something lighter but still retaining the compositional vitality of the original. Making his house debut as conductor, Nicholas Chalmers did an excellent job with the opera house orchestra melding the styles and complex rhythmic underpinning of both operas to allow the voices to shine.
Leonard Bernstein is a polarising and complicated figure. For some purists, the way he blends Broadway pzazz with a more refined art music sensibility is a step too far but if you are a fan, which I am, then this double bill is a must-see.
Trouble in Tahiti and A Quiet Place
10 –24 October 2024
Linbury Theatre
Royal Opera House
Bow Street
London WC2E 9DD