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Tosca Cafe drinks to doomed lovers; World Stage returns to Vogue Theaters April 19
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'Here is the kiss of Tosca' declares the young opera singer to the sadistic baron . . . "and killed by a woman".
It’s a Tosca kind of Satuday night in the Fillmore. I feel anonymous, sitting here in a brightly lit cafe with old pop songs playing and tables with a few other single patrons. Let's hear some saxophone. I just listened to some of La Traviata, Violetta beseaching Alfredo, my Alfredo, always love me, she cries ardently. As I love you . . . Farewell to you! Anybody who has known the loss of the love of their life due to circumstances beyond their control knows that kind of pain. Even if it wasn't real. Even if it went so horribly wrong, so painfully wrong one prefers to just live modestly alone, a shadow of one's former fun loving self and getting older. Somehow I would rather be safe than sorry now. No more high risk, I've bailed myself out long ago.
This spring Saturday afternoon I wandered over to North Beach alone. Watched young couples and old, tourists, homeless looking locals . . . and pushed my nose against the glass door of Tosca Café. Open five p.m. until two a.m. Dark and dingy inside like the inside of the sunken Titanic, a remnant of a bygone era like the Condor Club up the block and full of ghosts.
Tosca Café isn’t really a café at all. One should know better just by the name. A tragic place where one needs something stronger. It’s a bar. The menu posted at the door lists only drinks, most of which cost six or seven dollars. Although you can have a coffee drink, that’s the spiked kind, for seven dollars. If you can get by with a beer, that’s four or five bucks. Tosca Café sits next to Larry Flynt’s Hustler Club. Across William Saroyan Alley, Jazz at Pearl’s. There’s a casting agent I have gone to see around there. She calls one of the cafes “Café Gigolo”. The beat bookstore stands across the street with it's cramped aisles and creaky wooden floors. The Stinking Rose restaurant nearby.
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Tosca Café is the location of an ill fated Sean Penn movie about a dead president. Does anybody remember an independent film called The Assassination of Richard Nixon? For that I worked as a film extra to about one in the morning, sitting at a table for two in what is really Tosca. I don’t remember the dingy faded paintings on the wall then. I was sitting underneath where it hangs at the entrance. A petite girl with black hair and pale skin flopped into the chair next to me. She wore just a white terry robe and peeled open a womens' magazine between takes. The director and Sean Penn and all the lights were set up at the corner of the bar. I peered over curious about what she was reading. Extras sit and read and chat all day long. It turned out to be Naomi Watts.
Above where Naomi sat that day hangs a painting of Tosca.
Tosca in her finery, tiara and cloak, coming to the church to visit the painter and her doomed lover Cavaradossi. He’s painted a beautiful blond young woman that haunts Tosca, Tosca knows those eyes from somewhere. She feigns jealousy and lingers, lingers. A cross stands in the background. A sign of their blessed union or a sign foretelling of the martyr in the making. Tosca is a religious woman in any event. Her strength will be tested against the sadistic seduction of a corrupt police official, after the escaped political prisoner Cavaradossi has just given sanctuary to in the church.
In the Assassination of Richard Nixon, Sean Penn sits alone at the bar as his estranged wife waits tables. An obnoxious drunk taunts her and instead of Sean taking a swing at the man, he tosses his drink in the man’s face as a woman would. My job was to laugh and flirt with my date as all the other happy couples did in the restaurant, in juxtaposition to Sean’s increasing alienation. In a kind of Jody Foster case where John Hinkley goes after the president in her name . . . the end of his marriage seems to push Sean over the edge of sanity and he plots to kill Nixon. He tries to make political allies with the Black Panthers.
This was years before he won the Oscar for Milk, where Tosca features prominently. Where his character Harvey Milk makes a political alliance between the teamsters and the gays.
Anyway here I am alone in a café myself in the Fillmore, the pizza place kitty corner full of young families with toddlers on their laps. The Vogue Theater is about six blocks up Sacramento Street and will have operas and ballets showing this spring and summer. Sunday April 19 is the first part of the Ring Cycle, Das Rheingold, the myth pitting power and the pursuit of gold against love. It’s the World Stage series, including Eugin Onegin by Tchaikovsky on Sunday May 17 . . . here is SFO's Tosca singing the letter scene from Eugin Onegin . . .
. . . the World Stage Series at the Vogue Theater continues with Don Carlo by Verdi on Sunday July 5; Il Viaggio a Reims by Rossini on Sunday July 19; and Il Puritani by Bellini on Sunday August 16. So there’s something for everybody from die hard Wagnerians to lovers of the coloraturati and bel canto. See www.voguesf.com.
Note there’s some competition on opening day, Sunday April 19 as Century theaters present from the Met a documentary called The Audition. www.metopera.org/HD Live.
For more info: www.SFOpera.com, www.metopera.org/HD Live, www.voguesf.com
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