Anna Nicole Smith fights back from the grave; How opera takes on the bourgeoisie with Hoffman Tales

March 14, 4:19 PMSF Opera ExaminerCindy Warner

Previous Next

2 comments Print Email RSS Subscribe

Subscribe

Get alerts when there is a new article from the SF Opera Examiner. Read Examiner.com's terms of use.

Email Address   Include other special offers from Examiner.com Terms of Use

Bridget Coffey with Anna Nicole Smith at Camp CoHoLo fundraiser

Anna Nicole Smith's worthiness as news and opera continues.  The celebrity's legacy is still in the making with the arrest of her lawyer/boyfriend and the two doctors feeding Anna’s drug dependency. Here's the video with Howard's mugshot and one of two doctors charged.

The other doctor is 61 years old, old enough to know better one would think. And shouldn’t that lawyer sleeping with his client have had better judgment?  Are they all in bed together?

Here's a campy Youtube video with Anna singing My Heart Belongs to Daddy . . . 

Bridget Coffey, pictured above with Anna Nicole at a fundraiser for children born with AIDs and other blood disorders like cancer . . .  just wrote on my wall on Facebook:

I just got off work and my husband told me that Howard turned himself in for giving Anna drugs or something like that. My heart just sank, because she was her own personality and made me laugh. I don't know what to say, but I could see that happening if that is what happened. Her fault and his if that is true. She had habits and he liked her..

 . . . he probably gave her whatever she wanted or hopefully not worse than that.

That’s just one reason why Anna became the subject of a new opera at that bastion of Anglophile culture, Covent Garden . . . yet we don’t have to wait two years for the production. The real life opera continues as California Attorney General Jerry Brown talks of the stupefying cocktail Anna was being fed by principal enabler Howard K. Stern, supplied by doctors with the use of fake names. I have already heard an anchorwoman call Howard scheming and the doctors something like charlatans so the trial by media begins.

Have we heard this song before?

If you caught Tales of Hoffman, it’s the young poet versus the bank, bourgeoisie and sell outs one after another.

Here's a new video by Carter Krizman, from the Berkeley Opera last Sunday, best viewed in high definition (HD).   It's where the untiringly loyal muse disguised as a man goes head to head with the courtesan. 

Here's the interior of the Julia Morgan Theater with the wine barrel on the left.  Characters emerge into and exit from the magical bar where spirits (of wine and beer) sing to the poet . . .  

Previously in the tale of Olympia, the bank had failed and a scheming inventor tries to pass off an automaton Olympia as real. He will sell her to the lovesick poet Hoffman, who would marry her thinking she’s the scientist’s daughter. In a subsequent dream of the lovesick poet Hoffman, a charlatan Dr. Miracle gets a consumptive singer to strain herself to death and so Hoffman in his desire is thwarted again by his nemesis. The girl sings at the behest of her dead opera singer mother. A painting of the mother comes to life and beseeches her daughter to be a star like herself even if the act of singing would kill her. By the third dream, the object of Hoffman’s affections has become and out and out courtesan.

Here is the mezzo muse outside the historic Julia Morgan theater chatting in the Berkeley sun.  Nora Lennox Martin.

The real Hoffman was a political exile and in the closing scenes of his tales, our anti-hero the poor and disillusioned poet is left with just his muse. She sings to him out of love, dip your pen in your tears and write on our hearts. The muse has finally outlasted the spell over her beloved poet, arguing with him and trying to get him to see straight. In contrast, in the previous dream the living doll he fell in love with turned out to be a robot programmed to say little but “yes” with the same wide eyed smile. Take away the poet’s rose tinted glasses and he finally sees she’s just bits and pieces tinkered together.

Adam Flowers as Hoffman, Angela Cadelago as Stella the opera singer, Paul Murray as nemesis Dappertutto . . .

And the magical librettist at Berkeley Opera, David Scott Marley, or Scott, pictured below. 

He mentioned during intermission Girl of the Golden West.  SFO will also stage Girl of the Golden West in 2010.  Moreover Elaine Padmore of Covent Garden used this Puccini tragedy in comparison with Anna Nicole's opera.

Scott emails this today: 

Berkeley Opera premiered my adaptation of that opera [Girl of the Golden West] two years ago. What I'm doing with Girl right now is preparing a new piano-vocal score in preparation for doing some marketing for it. I certainly hope that there will be more productions as a result, but right now there are no new productions planned.

My next writing project is an adaptation of Rossini's 'La Cenerentola', which is the Cinderella story. I'm setting it in China a thousand or so years ago. It will premiere at Berkeley Opera but it's too early to set a date -- I've only written maybe 25% or so of it. It's going to be a comedy, somewhat in the style of my 'The Riot Grrrl on Mars' and 'Bat out of Hell', but also with a bit of a moral to it as well. It's going to be aimed at families, something that I hope will be fun for adults and children both (though not necessarily in the same way of course).

So.  Getting back to Olympia, the scientist's living doll in Tales of Hoffman.  What a gadget.

On that note I just checked out the DVD of Dr. Atomic from my local library.  Here's a clip of Gerald Finley singing as Oppenheimer.  It's about the gadget, a code named atomic bomb.  The two disk set has credits for SFO for commissioning the work, which enjoyed it’s sold out world premier in San Francisco in 2005.  Adams implies the atomic explosion by a bright glow with the cast gazing into the Heavens. On the DVD Adams says he was informed that showing an explosion would be in bad form.

It has some nice features including interviews with John Adams and the stellar Peter Sellars. This is about the 1950s environment of paranoia and an inquiry into how these geniuses could ever come to develop the gadget. That’s the atomic bomb making humans technologically capable of destroying the Earth. During this time all kinds of babies were being born to the scientific community there in the desert, right when the scientists and staff were creating the hugest instrument of death ever created, to be dropped on civilians. 

Sellars says he is not passing judgment, he is looking into the moral question of how things happened since it's a watershed moment in history. Yet he said once again we are in a state where the leaders don’t know how to do anything but wage war and they don’t do it very well.  So at the end of the opera the characters are looking up into the sky at the powers that be and saying we are hope, you should have hoped us. We are dreams, you should have dreamed us . . . after the bomb drops a character asks for water and says in Japanese . . .

 . . . what was that?

So what distinguishes Oppenheimer’s tortured mind from Wotan’s tortured heart and soul in Wagner’s Ring Cycle? Mythical Valhalla would burn only for a new order to emerge like a phoenix. In the real world of Adams and Sellars, humans not the gods have the ability to destroy the Earth with a weapon of mass destruction. Are the two worlds so different? Wotan became humanized with his conflicting emotions over protection of his family and his castle. Nevertheless in Valhalla the gods had the power of the supernatural, Wotan the autocrat didn’t need any gadget to impose his order. Yet he still lacked control of his subjects and his family. In contrast, Oppenheimer and his detonation was in a race with the weather and didn’t have total control of his environment. Yet he had cooperation. 

Sellars seems to say this kind of destructive power is not for humans to have and it's not for humans to decide.  Humans cannot save the world through a demonstration of power.

Note SFO stages the climactic Die Walkure next June with Mark Delavan and Seattle has the whole festival this summer with Greer Grimsley.

All in the days before the internet. Now activists have more access to each other directly and have websites and on-line petitions for non-violent change and hope. Even the most powerless victims of the economic crisis have each other and they do not see the world through rose tinted glasses any longer. Even the Reverend Jesse Jackson has started lobbying for an equitable remedy. Barbara Boxer had even joined Hillary Clinton in sponsoring a bill to get students their consumer rights back. Now we have www.ReduceTheRate.org. Student loan victims have www.StudentLoanJustice.org and Californians have www.StudentLoanJusticeCA.org.

The Reverend says the banks dealing in student loans are scalping loans just like tickets. Student debt in particular has gotten so oppressive that the more you go to school, the worse off you are. So rebel!

For more info:  www.BerkeleyOpera.org and www.SFOpera.com

Photos and HD video:  Carter Krizman

Photo of Anna Nicole Smith and Bridget Coffey:  Bridget Coffey

Tone deaf diva touches and eviscerates

Tales of Hoffman sells out in a good not bourgeois way

Anna Nicole and subject of celebrity a worthy one

Anna Nicole Smith weapon of mass distraction

The bourgeoisie and thwarting love

Francesca Zambello to direct Die Walkure

Wotan shares his dressing room

Sacrifice of Brunnhilde

Opera tackles weighty issues

Greer Grimsley Impressions, Passions, Stand by Me, Dreams

Anna Nicole Smith opera

Tosca featured in film Milk

Tosca and how opera's embattled stay in fighting shape

Siggy team player part I

Siggy part II
 

Oscar Wilde and the 'love that dares not speak it's name'

SFO unveils Salome for 2009

SFO's summer of love 2009

Opera announces 2009/2010 season

Contact the writer at SFOperaExaminer@Yahoo.com