Redundant, maybe, however the reality is that if each part of Heartbeat Opera’s Eugene Onegin, tailored by Dustin Wills and Jacob Ashworth and newly organized by Dan Schlosberg, weren’t as daring, confident, and ingenious as it’s, the piece’s radical departure from Tchaikovsky’s unique could be onerous to swallow. Because it was, the fast-paced and imaginative staging, the lean and environment friendly minimize, the wild and ever-so-slightly wacky musical association, and the confident performances have been completely convincing: a contemporary and eloquent new studying of a beloved basic.
Lower to only over 100 minutes and with a brand new musical association, the Heartbeat group’s Onegin was remarkably pared down. With simply seven singers within the forged and 9 musicians within the band, together with Ashworth conducting from the violin, gone have been the peasant chorales and practically all the dances (the polonaise, too important to chop, was brutally recontextualized as a menacing whirlwind scoring Onegin’s post-duel dissolution).
The instrumentation itself was definitely unconventional, together with electrical bass and guitar, harp and saxophone in addition to extra standard strings and a clarinet. Surprising musical touches abounded, just like the dreamy, tremolo guitar that gave Olga’s aria an nearly nation western air, or the uncooked fringe of an electrical violin sowing seeds of hazard into the get together music. The phrase that springs to thoughts is “irreverent”—definitely that is no piece for purists—however even essentially the most radical departures within the rating felt undertaken with confidence and objective.
In his program be aware, Wills, additionally the manufacturing’s director, writes that he hopes that this new Onegin will permit audiences to “re-hear the music and story in a profoundly new means.” Definitely, Schlosberg’s association provided a brand new means of listening to Tchaikovsky’s music. What was placing was how eloquently the sounds and kinds of the music matched the goals and aesthetics of the manufacturing as a complete.
The music’s orientation in the direction of surprising sounds and new combos matched the manufacturing’s modular, environment friendly set, designed by Wills, that noticed actors and stage fingers reconfiguring recurring parts (a desk, two rolling ladders, a couple of sheets of drywall) into new set items earlier than the viewers’s eyes. It matched, too, a equally modular and environment friendly strategy to adaptation; Triquet’s verses, for instance, got to Olga (Sishel Claverie), an excellent use of a personality who by no means will get sufficient to do.
In truth, the fast-paced and economical chopping and staging of Eugene Onegin labored in favor of its forged, all of whom have been in superb voice and in a position to join with their viewers. Emily Margevich’s Tatyana was a standout, her voice large and opulent, with a cascading high quality, like a bolt of silk dropped from a balcony. She performed the letter aria with ferocity, sweetness, and a palpable sense of worry at her personal capability for sexual derangement. Edwin Joseph as Onegin made a superb object for her obsession, along with his good-looking seems to be and head of darkish curls. If Margevich’s voice was rippling silk, Joseph’s was like oiled leather-based—supple and darkish.
As Lensky, Roy Hage sang with a ardour and drive that appeared to make clear the extra distressed his character grew to become; a slight awkwardness and constraint in “Ya lyublyu vas” grew to become a ringing, open sound by “Kuda kuda.” Sishel Claverie as Olga had the easy attraction to match her easy low notes. Shannon Delijani and Tynan Davis, as Madame Larina and the Larin ladies’ nurse, respectively, have been scene stealers, enjoying wryly across the edges of the younger lovers’ excessive drama.
Charismatic, assured, and light-on-its ft, this Onegin jogged my memory much less of different opera stagings I’ve seen and extra of my favourite productions of Shakespeare’s performs—productions undertaken from the belief that the staging is a collaboration between the work and the corporate, moderately than a transmission of a steady textual content or rating. This working relationship between textual content and performers can, at its greatest, result in productions that abound with interpretive decisions and that use each second onstage to attract the viewers deeper into their world. Heartbeat’s Onegin, for instance, was filled with sight gags and schticky character moments, like Tatyana lugging a vivid pink current the dimensions of herself round her disastrous get together, or an embarrassed Olga pleading with the band to close down Lensky’s aria.
This identical interpretive autonomy and a focus to character additionally paid off within the manufacturing’s different radical intervention, its explicitly homosexual staging of the Onegin/Lensky relationship. Shifting Onegin and Lensky from an intimate, homoerotic friendship to a tragic love affair added depth to each of their characters, particularly as performed by Joseph and Hage, who had nice chemistry.
Within the get together scene, for instance, the place their friendship quickly disintegrates into an enmity that can finish with Lensky lifeless at Onegin’s hand, Lensky’s wounded volatility was the anger of a person watching the lady he hopes to marry be seduced by the cynic who has already seduced him, whereas Onegin’s instigations learn because the self-sabotage of a person about to lose his lover to marriage and normativity.
It was a compelling studying, and an instance of the “re-hearing” Wills describes in his program be aware; in fact the homoeroticism of Onegin’s and Lensky’s friendship has at all times been part of Tchaikovsky’s opera, however an adaptation that pulls that subtext to the floor presents an thrilling alternative to listen to the queerness of Onegin anew.
If I’ve one quibble with the Heartbeat group’s queer studying of Onegin, it’s that after investing a lot interpretive thought and power into the Onegin/Lensky relationship, it didn’t fairly know what to do with the final act—and with Tatyana. Staging the ultimate confrontation between Tatyana and Onegin on a ramshackle stage-within-a-stage, the manufacturing introduced Tatyana as one other form of queer determine: a diva, trapped by the strictures of femininity, of opera itself, maybe. At one level, she tried to finish the depressing back-and-forth with Onegin by climbing down off the stage and fleeing into the home; the opposite ensemble members, nonetheless, picked her up and set her bodily again down inside the melodrama.
Like every part else in regards to the staging, these metatheatrical prospers have been compelling and well-executed. They struck me, nonetheless, as a barely missed alternative to learn Tatyana not as a metaphor for queer efficiency however as a personality with the identical depth and relationality as Onegin and Lensky. Tatyana, in spite of everything, is already a queer determine—not simply as a diva however as a lady. As Wayne Koestenbaum noticed in The Queen’s Throat, her letter aria is a coming-out, a weak and elegant outpouring of secret need.
“Queerness isn’t a personal situation,” Koestenbaum writes of Tatyana’s aria, “It happens in public. Tatyana divulges, divulges, divulges.” If this glorious new imagining of Eugene Onegin is in the hunt for a mission assertion, it might definitely do worse than that.
Images: Russ Rowland
