Composer John Harbison's The Great Gatsby is a disappointment. Produced by Ensemble Paralléle and playing at the Yerba Buena Center for the Performing Arts through Sunday, February 12th, the opus is not the operatic adaptation the fans have been waiting for. What's missing – is F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Harbison's score pushes the fine line between the pursuit of complexity for complexity's sake and the onslaught of caterwauling. His libretto is a loose toss-up of scenes from Fitzgerald's 1925 novel, familiar certainly, but fuzzy in the details. The Great Gatsby ranks at the very top in Best Novels of the 20th Century. Harbison's libretto sits right above the story's surface, refusing to delve much deeper than the book jacket, and lacking workable solutions to the actors' collective question about finding a motivation for being in the room. Stage Director Brian Staufenbiel played good traffic cop and avoided the answers. Bring your Cliff's Notes.
Fans of the many film versions – particularly those who attended the Noir City Film Festival a few weeks ago at the Castro Theatre and cheered the 1949 version starring Alan Ladd and Betty Field – will recognize that tenor Marco Panuccio and soprano Susannah Biller are simply mis-cast as Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan.
Marco Panuccio is not the "Jay Gatsby" type. The actor assigned to Fitzgerald's character needs to be a candidate for People's "Sexiest Man Alive" issue. It will account for Gatsby's sudden impact upon every other wealthy guy in fashionable East Coast society – and the women who want them/use them. That level of Charisma Quotient alone will compensate for and fill-in-the-blanks of any patchy script, such as this from Harbison. Panuccio does not ring the chimes. Beyond that, his voice is abrasive and his faulty placement is at times very reminiscent of "Dudley Do-Right". Add to this list a lot of quirky pronunciation and irritating habits such as tagging the sound "uh" to final consonants, like Bambi learning to pronounce "bird". Bir-duh. It gets old – fast.
On the surface, Susannah Biller's appearance would seem to make her an ideal choice for "Daisy Buchanan" – the wistful southern belle who floats in a reality where money can provide solutions to everything, including dealing with the pain of a meandering husband or being imprisoned simply because she was driving too fast and killed her husband's lover and sped off without slowing down or looking back. Biller is not Fitzgerald's type either. Her portrayal lacks Daisy's gentle sophistication and enduring charm. Moreover, her upper register remained strident and painfully metallic throughout the entire performance.
Ensemble Paralléle distinguished itself last season with Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein's Four Saints in Three Acts, along with a stunning production at the Herbst Theater of Philip Glass's Orphée (based on the 1950 screenplay by Jean Cocteau). A driving motivation behind this production of The Great Gatsby was to debut composer Jacques Desjardins' re-orchestration of Harbison's original 1999 score, that being a reduction of 80 musicians down to 30. The intention was not to make the musical experience smaller, but more intimate. Even so, especially when considering the 757-seating capacity of the dual level Novellus Theatre and the large width and depth of its stage – the effect proved to be far from intimate. In fact, the experience was distant and cold.
Comments