Mahagonny falls

LA Opera: Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny
Thursday, March 1, 2007, 7:30pm
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion

I wasn't thrilled with LA Opera's production of Brecht & Weill's Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, which I caught Thursday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Actually, I was rather bored. It seemed like the show was simply dumped onto the stage in raw form, straight from the text to the production - and given the way the text is written (in a wry, wink-at-you kind of way), it doesn't work so straight in an enormous space like the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The Pavilion demands a certain spectacle, or at least something that reads way upstairs. I kept imagining that director John Doyle's concept would have worked brilliantly in a small cabaret-like theatre: short musical scenes, broken up by loudspeaker announcements setting the next scenes, a spare staging where the action takes place for long periods of time in an isolated portion of the front stage. And in fact, things were more interesting when they brought a video camera onto the stage and projected huge live images of the actors onto a mesh screen behind them. Then, I could see their funny facial ticks and I got drawn into the action. Maybe I would have felt differently if I was sitting downstairs, in the super expensive seats downstairs.

This production was much hyped leading up to it: Audra McDonald (OMG!) and Patti Lupone were starring. Major Broadway talent, and Audra with a beautiful, classically trained voice, plus Brecht and Weil - it all sounded fabulous. And have I mentioned that I love Audra McDonald? While the production didn't live up to the hype, Audra and Patti really delivered. Audra's lush voice filled the hall with warmth, and her hugely charismatic stage presence helped. In fact, when she tossed off a simple line "To tell you the truth - no," it fell with more dramatic and effective weight than an entire aria from tenor Anthony Dean Griffey. Yikes. Patti LuPone had precious little to do, but was always making the most of her stage time. She spents much of the opening scene of Act 2 without anything to sing, but hogged the spotlight anyway by playing with a ladel and a bucket.

I went downstairs during intermission to check out the set - turns out I couldn't see most of it from my Front Balcony B seat. Lots of stuff flew in at the back of the stage and hangs fairly high... to me, the show looked like it was being staged super-minimalist on an enormous bare stage. Perhaps another reason I thought the show was so empty and airy. James Conlon conducted the LA Opera orchestra, who were, with Audra, one of the redeeming elements of the evening.

Above, a blurry photo of the curtain before the show. The LA Opera Photo Gallery from the production here.

Next week is ballet week to last week's opera week (this week is rest and recover week). Boris Eifman's Eifman Ballet of St. Petersburg will be in Orange County with two separate programs, and the Los Angeles Ballet begins the 'real' part of its first season with a very exciting program: Balanchine's Concerto Barocco and Agon, plus diverts from Bournonville's Napoli.