Kafka's Chimp - 1996 Opera
Production
Reviews
The Globe and Mail -
Monday, August 5, 1996
Musical monkey business
By Norbert Ruebsaat - Special to The
Globe and Mail
Banff, Alta.
The idea of music charming the wild beast
is an old one. but in Kafka's Chimp - a Canadian opera which made its
world premiere recently at the 1996 Banff Arts Festival - the charm works
both ways. Here chimps infiltrate the human world, even as humans try to
'civilize' the chimps, and it's a toss-up who goes more ape than whom.
This is a wonderful piece of music
theatre thanks to composer John Metcalf. librettist Mark Morris and a
creative team that includes director Keith Turnbull, designer David
Gaucher and musical director Richard Pittman. Although it's calling itself
opera, Kafka's Chimp follows a primarily theatrical rather than musical
narrative line.
The story revolves around Red Peter. a
chimp who is shot on the African Gold Coast and taken back to
"civilization" in Europe. To avoid ending up in a zoo, he
chooses to become human. Morris and Metcalf build on Kafka's short story
Report to the Academy to put a new twist on this bring-'em-back-alive
tale.
Red Peter's transformation works, in
part, but the chimp in him keeps popping out. Worse yet, the beast keeps
emerging in the human characters. By the end, a character called the
Director, who wants to present Peter as a fully realized scientific
creation, tears off his clothes and hoots and hollers across the stage,
while the chimp calmly walks off with the lady.
The Director, sung by Michael Douglas
Jones, finds ways to twist his voice into ape-like contortions that are
eerie and funny. The lady, played by soprano Frances Pappas, tries to woo
Peter by reciting the names of her insect collection in Latin, thereby
winning him away from a rival, played by mezzo soprano Allyson McHardy.
The story is simple and beautifully
executed. Metcalf takes pains to make the music carry the action, but not
dominate it. Morris's libretto is witty, deadpan, ironic: a monkey singing
human small talk in full-throated operatic voice is truly funny.
David Gaucher's set is inspired. It
consists of metal scaffolding, stairs. ropes and vast networks of hot-air
ducts which appear to vault into a kind of heaven. Monkey-dancers swing
like spectres into the action. providing an ongoing iungie subplot.
Kafka's Chimp is scored for violin,
viola, double bass, sax, marimba, percussion and piano. In a kind of
parallel subplot, the musicians wander through the enchanted, threatened
rain forest, and when they're not soothing beasts with their seductive
melodies, they're driving the humans wild. In fact, it's the integration
of musicians. singer/actors and dancers in one dramatic sequence that
makes this work so effective.
Kafka's Chimp took six years to develop.
But then Turnbull is known for his dedication to musical theatre, and has
been working for years to convince Canadians that they can mount
world-class musical theatre.
It's ironic that a show of this type -
which is best developed at a place like the Banff Centre - is being
mounted at a time when the Centre, like Kafka's chimp, is trying to save
itself by changing its essential nature. It's the kind of irony that Peter
- played with great self-restraint by baritone Steven Horst - would
secretly enjoy.
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Calgary Herald -
August 3, 1996
Banff Centre has triumph with new
opera
Kenneth Delong, Special to the Herald
The opening night of the world premiere
of a new opera is inevitably charged with a special frisson.
For those at the centre of its creation,
whether as author/composer or as performers, a new opera poses especially
difficult challenges of topic, musical style, vocal writing and staging,
especially given today's climate of artistic ferment.
Thus the cheers that erupted at the
conclusion of the Banff Cetitre's production of Kafka's Chimp were both a
response to the undoubted success of this highly imaginative and
brilliantly executed new piece of musical theatre and for audience members
concerned with its creation and execution, an acknowledgement that the new
opera, so long in gestation, had finally seen the light of day.
The result of nearly 10 years
collaborative effort, Kafka's Chimp is the work of librettist Mark Morris
and composer John Metcalf, with a central involvement from stage director
Keith Turnbull. Based on Franz Kafka's short story A Report to the
Academy, the opera relates the events of how, through careful education
and training, a chimp learns to talk and gradually enters the human world.
The transition from chimp to human has,
of course. its comic moments, especially in the chimp's encounters with
the Opposite sex and in his learning the finer points of the social graces
of 'civilized' life.
Equally fascinating, however, is the
simultaneous reverse transformation of the chimp's trainer from human to
chimp. While the opera is filled with much bemused and frequently witty
comedy, it also contains along the way much incidental comment and
reflection upon the difference between the human and animal worlds.
Following writers like Eric Crozier and W
H. Auden, Mark Morris' libretto is skillfully crafted to include
well-placed opportunities for solo numbers (arias). It also contains
numerous ensembles that bring the central characters together in various
combinations, and there are many clever touches of verbal phrase and
dramatic incident.
These are all woven together with
recitative-like passages to create a drama that unfolds in a natural,
seamless narrative. John Metcalf's score is rooted in contemporary
minimalism, to which is added a measure of jazz-inflected elements to
characterize the animal world of the chimps.
Hauntingly melodic where needed, the
score is especially strong in the matching of music and comedy - the
central focus of the opera. The five singers all have their counterparts
within the seven-member accompanying instrumental ensemble, an element
that permits an added dimension of 'abstract' musical characterization.
This aspect is further enhanced by the use of the musicians as
quasi-actors who move about the stage and engage the 'real' singers in
musical dialogue and commentary.
Although billed as the stage director,
Keith Turnbull is, in reality, a third creator of this opera, so effective
and brilliant is his staging. Endlessly inventive, rich in metaphor and
topical illusion, the opera truly came alive through his amazing blend of
tradition and theatrical innovation.
The singers, most notably Steven Horst as
the chimp Red Peter and Michael Jones as the Trainer, were excellent,
bring to their roles not only an impressive command of vocal technique but
also a strong dramatic presence. The accompanying ensemble too was
polished and eloquent.
The success of Kafka's Chimp is a tribute
to the commitment of the Banff Centre to its ideal of a new music theatre
that integrates music, theatre and action in unexplored ways and that
speaks to the sensibilities of a cotemporary audience. It is most
definitely worth the drive to Banff. Check it out.
(Kenneth DeLong is a professor of
music at the University of Calgary)
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