A belated Happy Birthday!

I attended the performance last night with some friends, and we all enjoyed it. I've thrown together a few quotes from the program interspersed with personal observations in an attempt to give you some idea of what the performance was like.

First, here's the opening of the composer/arranger/performer's Bio from the program:

"Male soprano Randall Wong has built a distinguished international reputation specializing in both historically informed performances of Baroque and Classic period repertoire and contemporary music. He maintains an active schedule of performances in opera, with symphony orchestra and recital taking him throughout the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia."

Some quotes from Mr. Wong's program notes:

"As a child, I was fascinated with stories and cartoons featuring non-living objects which came alive. Toys, clocks, teapots, all inhabited my personal anthropomorphic universe . . . . All children imbue their toy cars and teddy bears with spark and character. I've always assumed that more mundane objects such as toasters and telephones could also have their hidden personalities.

"Maurice Ravel found souls for armchairs, teacups, and trees in his fantasy opera, L'Enfant et les Sortileges. Edward Gorey created a story of love and death in his Inanimate Tragedy with its cast of buttons, marbles, and pins. The Household Opera continues in this tradition.

". . . . The Household Opera is staged on an oversized version of one such [Victorian Toy] theatre. It has a bank of working mirrored footlights, an overhead light rail, and various "specials" in assorted colors. It unapologetically makes a few concessions to modern technology. Apart from some of the construction materials and electricity, this theater could have come from an earlier age. The proscenium decoration originated with black and white engravings and prints, hand watercolored, cut apart with fingernail scissors, and decoupaged with a lightly iridescent varnish. Later additions included a few pre-colored prints and modern metallic and gel inks. The various scrim effects utilize modern materials: sheer ribbons, Christmas lights, and iridescent cellophane."

The opera, in four short acts, is a variation of the Orpheus myth, with a Toaster losing his beloved Alarm Clock through the evil work of an Egg Beater. The cast includes a Watering Can, a Cheese Grater, a Candle, a battery operated Lantern, and Three Condiments -- Ketchup, Mustard, and Pink Marshmallow Fluff. These were all actual objects, held and moved on stage by two pairs of black gloved hands working from the sides of the stage. There was no masking, so we could watch the "object wranglers" at work, as well as the three singers (sopranos Judith Nelson and Randall Wong, and tenor Scott Whitaker) and the orchestra, an ingenious combination of viola, cello, harp, percussion, and assorted keyboard instruments (harpsichord, chamber organ, harmonium, and two toy pianos).

>From the program notes: "For a genre such as a puppet or toy opera, it seemed appropriate to try to find a unique sound to go with it. The toy pianos, in particular, lend a certain out-of-tune/non-equal tempered charm, an echo from the sound world of the Balinese gamelan." For the apotheosis in The Heavens at the end, when the Toaster sings "I am dissolved in swirling sound," a battery of music boxes was added. The music is a pastiche of "found" pieces and original work. Again, from the program: "I'm very grateful for the posthumous cooperation of Jacopo Peri, Claudio Monteverdi, Barbara Strozzi, G. F. Handel, W. A. Mozart, Franz Schubert, Erik Satie, Maurice Ravel, Arnold Schoenberg, and Alban Berg. However, if they were alive they might not approve . . . ."

The polyglot libretto, in Italian, French, German, and English, comprised texts "freely adapted from Lewis Carroll, Edith Sitwell, John Webster, Dante, Nicola Haym, Lorenzo da Ponte, Alessandro Striggio, Ottavio Rinuccini, D. M. Sarcone, Heinrich Hoffmann, Franz Wedekind, Stefan Zweig, and Colette." We particularly enjoyed an aria set to an Italian translation of Carroll's Mock Turtle's "Beautiful Soup."

The action was rather static on the whole, and the piece was largely introspective. It's difficult to imbue the physical presence of a toaster with soulful qualities to match the voice; although when horrified by the loss of the Clock, it dramatically popped out two pieces of toast on cue. The sets were "Earth, the terrestrial paradise," which resembled many a Victorian forest "cut scene;" "Water, the sea bed" with iridescent cut-out fish behind a blue scrim; "Fire, the mouth of Hell," another "cut scene" with a backdrop of appropriately sinister strips of reflecting substances; and "Air, the Heavens" with star-burst Christmas lights against layers of rather unusual transparent materials. The stage curtain was made of pieces from an old black, beaded evening gown.

The proscenium opening appeared to be about two and a half or three feet wide. I was sitting in the fourth row, and could see well enough, but I doubt those in the last row could experience much more than the music. The performance space was at one end of a gallery, with probably fewer than 100 folding chairs on risers. Off to the side was a display of Mr. Wong's collection of Toy Theatres, several of the currently available Pollock's cardboard stages with his own rather distinctive stage settings, which blend, for instance, donuts with Sleeping Beauty and skeleton figures with a backdrop created of a still from Méliès's film Trip to the Moon.

Overall, the music was fascinating and beautifully performed, which more than compensated for the drama itself being a tad on the dull side. The whole experience was truly unusual and wonderfully creative. And it was a treat to see a Toy Theatre used as a vehicle for such an enterprise -- many of the questions during a Q&A session following the performance lead to explanations of the Victorian antecedents.