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Don Carlo Wiener Staatsoper (2019)
Simon Keenlyside, René Pape, Dinara Alieva, Fabio Sartori
I knew it was possible to do a Don Carlo(s) that ran counter to the text and was sometimes infuriating (see also the Willy Decker, which I haven't talked about -- so you can see it didn't make a huge impression on me -- but which I mostly enjoyed) but I did not know until last night that it was possible to do a Don Carlo, with a very very good Rodrigo and Filippo mind you, that was boring.
Things that annoyed me no end:
-THE LIGHTING. I have never actually noticed the lighting in any production until now, and my apologies to all the competent-to-great lighters out there for not appreciating you properly. The lighting was SO BAD. I was straining to see anything a lot of the time, and occasionally they put a character in darkness JUST BECAUSE. Like Carlo in Rodrigo's death scene, which meant every time Keenlyside went over to Carlo he would be in the dark. So if there was any interplay between the two of them we couldn't see it!! GAH.
-THE SET. Which was: a box. With two metal poles dividing the stage into thirds. Sometimes they'd have a chair. There was nothing for the performers to work with! But this might have been okay if it were not for:
-What seemed like a general complete lack of direction or choreography. I know you can do good choreography with minimal sets -- the last 15 minutes of the Carsen Onegin (the set is: A Chair) is a thing of beauty. This was... everyone wandering around the stage aimlessly. Which meant a real lack of setting up the relationships that are supposed to drive the play. It was just... some people singing.
-Rodrigo's costume.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
alcanis_ivennil and I were trying to figure out what it's even supposed to be?? Is he a pirate?? He also appears to only have one set of clothes (everyone but him dressed up for the auto-da-fe).
-Why, why, WHY would you hire Simon Keenlyside, of all people, to sing Rodrigo and then give him nothing to do but park and bark?? He's not even GOOD at parking and barking, so we got a lot of him twitching because he just needs to be Doing Things.
-Restate between Pape and Keenlyside turned out to be really frustrating because they are SO GOOD and occasionally you'd see that shining through and you could see what it COULD have been like if they'd had... any... direction or choreography... but since they didn't it was just a hot mess of them wandering around the stage and trying to make it up themselves (Pape isn't completely terrible at this, Keenlyside is... not great at it)
-Sartori is a decent singer but he really does park and bark
-I admit I am super shallow, but: a) I realize Filippo is kind of horrible and all that but come on, if you were married to Pape's Filippo and had Keenlyside's Rodrigo in your court why would you even bother with Sartori's Carlo b) If you were Pape's Filippo why would you even waste time being jealous of Sartori's Carlo? (There are ways I can imagine this working but this would, again, require direction.)
-Auto-da-fe scene, I swear this is how it came across:
Carlo: I swear to heaven I will be your savior, Flanders!
Carlo: *pulls out a sword that is so short it looks more like a dagger, does not look threatening at all, waves it vaguely in Filippo's direction*
Filippo: Seriously?? OH COME ON. *sigh* All right, guards, disarm him.
Everyone: We don't know what to do! Like, is this a joke?
Filippo: Disarm him, I don't have time for this. I'm not even mad, just embarrassed for you.
Rodrigo: Dude. Just give me the sword. You look like an idiot.
Filippo: Finally.
Carlo: But --
Rodrigo: Look, no hard feelings, but the King doesn't embarrass me the way you do, I'm going to hang out with him now.
Carlo: Nooooooo!
(And, the thing is, if they had done this on purpose and meant it as a coherent interpretation, it would have been athwart the text but an interesting way of looking at it! Like, Paris kinda did this and although I didn't exactly like it I found it interesting! But no, I don't think it was intentional.)
Things that were good about the production (there were a couple)
-NO FIRST ACT, yay (to be honest I porbably would not have ended up watching much of it if they had had it)
-Sartori and Keenlyside's duet was excellently sung, even if they have no chemistry as actors
-The fact that Sartori didn't fling himself about like the other Carlos I've seen meant that the scene between him and the Queen before Restate was much less sexual-harassment-y than it usually is
-Pape's scenes were excellent, he's really good!! especially ""Ella giammai m'amò" was excellent, he got HUGE applause partially because so good and partially because it was the first really moving moment since the thing began
-The Grand Inquisitor was actually quite good and quite scary. Why don't more productions get awesome Inquisitors??
-Keenlyside is so good at his death scene that it was the highlight of the production for me, although (a) boy, Sartori gave him NOTHING acting-wise to work with and (b) Pape came down with a minion IN AN ELEVATOR PLATFORM right afterwards and it totally killed the mood, in the sense that I started laughing hysterically
-To be totally fair, the beginning of the last act (before Elisabeth sings) WAS actually interestingly lit and directed, so was the very end
I knew it was possible to do a Don Carlo(s) that ran counter to the text and was sometimes infuriating (see also the Willy Decker, which I haven't talked about -- so you can see it didn't make a huge impression on me -- but which I mostly enjoyed) but I did not know until last night that it was possible to do a Don Carlo, with a very very good Rodrigo and Filippo mind you, that was boring.
Things that annoyed me no end:
-THE LIGHTING. I have never actually noticed the lighting in any production until now, and my apologies to all the competent-to-great lighters out there for not appreciating you properly. The lighting was SO BAD. I was straining to see anything a lot of the time, and occasionally they put a character in darkness JUST BECAUSE. Like Carlo in Rodrigo's death scene, which meant every time Keenlyside went over to Carlo he would be in the dark. So if there was any interplay between the two of them we couldn't see it!! GAH.
-THE SET. Which was: a box. With two metal poles dividing the stage into thirds. Sometimes they'd have a chair. There was nothing for the performers to work with! But this might have been okay if it were not for:
-What seemed like a general complete lack of direction or choreography. I know you can do good choreography with minimal sets -- the last 15 minutes of the Carsen Onegin (the set is: A Chair) is a thing of beauty. This was... everyone wandering around the stage aimlessly. Which meant a real lack of setting up the relationships that are supposed to drive the play. It was just... some people singing.
-Rodrigo's costume.
alcanis_ivennil and I were trying to figure out what it's even supposed to be?? Is he a pirate?? He also appears to only have one set of clothes (everyone but him dressed up for the auto-da-fe).-Why, why, WHY would you hire Simon Keenlyside, of all people, to sing Rodrigo and then give him nothing to do but park and bark?? He's not even GOOD at parking and barking, so we got a lot of him twitching because he just needs to be Doing Things.
-Restate between Pape and Keenlyside turned out to be really frustrating because they are SO GOOD and occasionally you'd see that shining through and you could see what it COULD have been like if they'd had... any... direction or choreography... but since they didn't it was just a hot mess of them wandering around the stage and trying to make it up themselves (Pape isn't completely terrible at this, Keenlyside is... not great at it)
-Sartori is a decent singer but he really does park and bark
-I admit I am super shallow, but: a) I realize Filippo is kind of horrible and all that but come on, if you were married to Pape's Filippo and had Keenlyside's Rodrigo in your court why would you even bother with Sartori's Carlo b) If you were Pape's Filippo why would you even waste time being jealous of Sartori's Carlo? (There are ways I can imagine this working but this would, again, require direction.)
-Auto-da-fe scene, I swear this is how it came across:
Carlo: I swear to heaven I will be your savior, Flanders!
Carlo: *pulls out a sword that is so short it looks more like a dagger, does not look threatening at all, waves it vaguely in Filippo's direction*
Filippo: Seriously?? OH COME ON. *sigh* All right, guards, disarm him.
Everyone: We don't know what to do! Like, is this a joke?
Filippo: Disarm him, I don't have time for this. I'm not even mad, just embarrassed for you.
Rodrigo: Dude. Just give me the sword. You look like an idiot.
Filippo: Finally.
Carlo: But --
Rodrigo: Look, no hard feelings, but the King doesn't embarrass me the way you do, I'm going to hang out with him now.
Carlo: Nooooooo!
(And, the thing is, if they had done this on purpose and meant it as a coherent interpretation, it would have been athwart the text but an interesting way of looking at it! Like, Paris kinda did this and although I didn't exactly like it I found it interesting! But no, I don't think it was intentional.)
Things that were good about the production (there were a couple)
-NO FIRST ACT, yay (to be honest I porbably would not have ended up watching much of it if they had had it)
-Sartori and Keenlyside's duet was excellently sung, even if they have no chemistry as actors
-The fact that Sartori didn't fling himself about like the other Carlos I've seen meant that the scene between him and the Queen before Restate was much less sexual-harassment-y than it usually is
-Pape's scenes were excellent, he's really good!! especially ""Ella giammai m'amò" was excellent, he got HUGE applause partially because so good and partially because it was the first really moving moment since the thing began
-The Grand Inquisitor was actually quite good and quite scary. Why don't more productions get awesome Inquisitors??
-Keenlyside is so good at his death scene that it was the highlight of the production for me, although (a) boy, Sartori gave him NOTHING acting-wise to work with and (b) Pape came down with a minion IN AN ELEVATOR PLATFORM right afterwards and it totally killed the mood, in the sense that I started laughing hysterically
-To be totally fair, the beginning of the last act (before Elisabeth sings) WAS actually interestingly lit and directed, so was the very end
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I am protesting on behalf of his abdominal muscles!
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Shirtless!Keenlyside clip? I'm on board for that!
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GN1Ufx62LuY
The Tempest doesn't have him shirtless exactly, but wearing this skintight thing that I feel is mostly functionally equivalent:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lblXrXJN9-k
(this one you probably just need a couple seconds' worth to see it, not that you care about the music but it's kind of blah, and I don't like what SK does with his voice to sing it; it's one of the only things SK has done where I have not bothered to watch it)
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Which makes me sad for all non-shirtless/non-open necked white shirted Rodrigos everywhere, and for this particular misuse of the Keenlyside abs. How disappointing, Weiner Staatsoper!
Pape came down with a minion IN AN ELEVATOR PLATFORM right afterwards: NO, REALLY? BWAHAHAHA.
(Speaking of sexual harrassment, I didn't see Netrebko, but I did catch The Man! Will fill you in when not dying of jetlag!)
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ahahaha, that's from that Don G that we were talking about a while back, with the naked shot of SK that was (I think) on barihunks :) The one that my 80-year-old RL opera friend from church lent me, (which is why I don't have a link for you) and I found that super hilarious. (To be fair, I think a life spent watching/collecting opera has made her somewhat more blase about such things than the average church member, and also she has so many DVDs at this point that she might not have remembered how... provocative... that one was.)
Rodrigo did have a white shirt, although covered with a weird brown jumper. And Pape had a gorgeous open-necked white shirt in his aria :D
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1o7b0hluYg
It all looks so cheap too. And with Dima as Rodrigo, he really does look like he's cosplaying Geralt of Rivia.
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I do actually think they did a better job on the blocking/choreography here -- like, I can see that they were sort of thinking about the metal rods being a way to signify dividing people from each other, so at least there's some sort of method. In the 2019 it was mostly just a hot mess of people wandering around and/or singing at the audience, ugh.
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