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Porgy & Bess exemplifies Gockley's Americanization of the opera since
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Porgy & Bess comes to the San Francisco Opera in June of 2009. Gershwin included in his will an all-Black cast for this American classic, with it's clever, catchy and mirthful tunes sung in English. It goes from a sexy smoke filled dance hall to a lively game of cards outdoors on Catfish Row to a summer picnic on the Mississippi by riverboat to a hurricane. The love between Porgy & Bess takes this route too. Photo: SF Opera.
David Gockley's American revolution of opera though began to emerge with his inaugural season, by the time of Rigoletto. Here's the writer, left, unmasked, with Rigoletto played by Paulo Gavanelli partying with courtesans during rehearsal.
As Gockley's approachable style made most soon forget, his European predecessor demonstrated a gift for attracting European talent only to have productions stretch even experimentaldom by extending into the realm of raunchy. So Porgy & Bess should be a far cry from that Danish production where a gang of punks rush into an abandoned building and some begin to fornicate madly on the ground. Remember Le Grand Macabre by Ligeti in 2004? Porgy & Bess will be something you can take your elderly mother to without dying of embarassment to say the least.
If Gockley is making opera more friendly and approachable for the masses, how has he Americanized the definition of art over these past few years? He gave us Appomatox and even Dr. Atomic. Yet did it start to show in the details of Rigoletto? For example, how many exposed nipples can one justify under the auspices of world class art? Even at the San Francisco Opera, the second largest arts organization in the world?
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To recap. Rigoletto is my favorite opera and for the background actors, the supernumeraries, Rigoletto is as good as it gets. It’s the beloved Verdi tragedy, a morality play with a curse on debauchery. Featuring a tragic jester and the rake of a duke he works for and ultimately seeks vengeance upon for ruining his virginal daughter, all he has in the world.
I have pictures of me and about ten other courtesans wearing thirty pounds of drapery fabric each for the Carnival Party, with Paulo Gavanelli as Rigoletto. However I felt more like Carol Burnett in the funniest moment on television where she plays Scarlett O'Hara. She descends the spiral staircase wearing the new gown she had made to impress Rhett but it’s from drapery fabric. She's still got the curtain rod through the shoulders. "I saw it in the window and I just had to have it."
The thirty pound dress though. One would think it enough to cover the nipples, all of them. Yet each courtesan wore a faux pair, some latex or powder ones painted on to be true to the period in Italy. The courtesans of the San Francisco opera wore fake nipples stuck on top of their real bosoms that bulged over the necklines out of the gowns. Mine were painted with powder. Yet one has to ask, how many nipples does a woman need? No such thing as too many? Ideally where do the extra ones go?
Most went back in the box eventually. Right before the simulcast to Civic Center Park and Stanford University. Those free simulcasts along with the films in theaters and more live events would make Gockley’s new direction of the opera revolutionary with it’s popularization, it’s mass and affordable appeal. In any event just before the simulcast at the opera a wardrobe man came to the dressing room and tried to take back all the nipples. When he tried to offer us band aids, saying accusingly we may be planning a wardrobe malfunction, one of the senior courtesans rebuffed him saying we are not going to suppress the real thing. The opera must have gotten letters. Or was it a case of only getting what you pay for and the simulcast outdoors was free. We shall never know. What is art anyway?
Nevertheless . . . The director of Merchant of Venice had his movie set in the same period as the opera Rigoletto. This is the version with Al Pacino as the merchant. The English director says in the narration that most of the men in Venice at the time preferred boys. So the women by decree had to bare their true identities.
However the opera sold out most nights and one night Gockley announced a patron, Mrs. Littlefield, the French widow on the board of directors and whose husband built the Hoover Dam, had just bestowed thirty five million dollars on the San Francisco Opera. We were in the black. The opera had been in the red for years. Yet the little French widow loved opera and Rigoletto. As the courtesans and courtiers waited excitedly for the ovation to settle and for the curtain to rise, one courtier quipped I hope she gets her money’s worth. Yes, answered another, free tickets. It turned out to be a particularly animated performance.
See ya'll this summertime when the livin' is easy.
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