We'll never know what Queen Victoria would have thought of the use to which Randall Wong has put the toy theater we call Victorian. These erstwhile home entertainment centers seem so much more fun than modern-day multimedia outposts, but they're very hands-on and labor-intensive. Thus it was that Wong's Household Opera, which played three nights at the Z Space, deployed several singers, musicians and stagehands to tell the story of a toaster's tragic love for an alarm clock. Perhaps this absurdist whimsy would have been a bit too post-modern for Victoria's taste.
The fanatic Mr. Wong, a male soprano who alternately sang, conducted and played the harp, concocted his inanimate love story out of the found texts and melodies of luminaries like Lewis Carroll, Edith Sitwell, Stefan Zweig, Satie, Schubert and Schoenberg. He also hand-decorated the theater's proscenium (three feet by four feet) and took considerable care in creating stage pictures through the use of iridescent cellophane and Christmas tree lights. The amazing thing is just how beautiful they were.
Two guys in black (Christian Heppinstall and David Zechman) sat on either side of the stage-within-a-stage and embued the characters with life by wiggling them. Kudos to soprano Judith Nelson and tenor Scott Whitaker, who supplied the voices for such things as the evil eggbeater and a devilish trio of condiments: ketchup, mustard and Pink Fluff, an industrial goo unavailable on the West Coast. Unseen musicians (Paul Hale, Susan Harvey, Todd Manley, Janice Negherbon) produced surreal and lilting sounds from a harpsichord, chamber organ, harmonium, marimba, cello, viola and multiple toy pianos.
What did it all mean? The audience's capacity to dream with its eyes
wide open is the single greatest force in theater. Besieged by technologies
that leave increasingly little or nothing to the imagination, we tend to
forget how infinitely pleasurable are those forms dismissed as archaic.
Visionary throwbacks like Randall Wong, with the aesthetic courage to share
a bizarre vision, deserve all the encouragement they get.