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The Beggar’s Opera: Satire for Stumptown

UPDATE: Also read David Stabler’s feature on Stephen Marc Beaudoin’s adaptation of “The Beggar’s Opera” in Tuesday’s Oregonian. David digs a little more deeply into the social politics of the adaptation. See his story here on Oregon Live, or with bigger versions of Brian Lee’s rehearsal photos in The O’s dead-tree edition.

William Hogarth, scene from The Beggar's Opera, 1728. Tate Gallery/Wikimedia Commons

ABOVE: William Hogarth, “The Beggar’s Opera,” 1728. Tate Gallery/Wikimedia Commons. INSET BELOW: Scot Crandal (Mack) and Emily Zahniser (Lucy) in Opera Theater Oregon’s “The Beggar’s Opera.” Photo: Katie Taylor, Opera Theater Oregon

“What think you, of a Newgate pastoral among the thieves and whores there?”

Jonathan Swift, casting about for a fresh entertainment for the London stage, made this modest proposal to his friend and fellow satirist Alexander Pope in 1716.

A dozen years later (people took their time in the 18th century) their friend John Gay picked up the idea, turning it from a pastoral into a satire on Italian opera and creating the succes de scandale of 1728, The Beggar’s Opera.

Thieves and whores there were aplenty, plus a clutch of unfortunate impregnations, a few double-crosses, a near-hanging, and a sardonically happy ending. The satire had targets a mile wide, perhaps the broadest being the notable Whig politician Robert Walpole, and the entertainment managed to stay just this side of the censors and the libel courts. It was witty enough in its savagery that many of its targets seemed to take it all as good sport, laughing with the rest of the audience as they were being lampooned.

Scot Crandal (Mack) and Emily Zahniser (Lucy). Opera Theater Oregon "The Beggar's Opera," coming in October 2009. Photo credit: Katie Taylor, Opera Theater OregonSwift and Pope seem good midwives, or perhaps godfathers, for The Beggar’s Opera, which echoes the incisive mockery and shocking entertainment value of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Pope’s The Rape of the Lock. In addition, Gay’s opera had songs69 familiar tunes given new lyrics that sometimes, to the delight of London crowds, seemed scooped fresh from the gutter.

And it was topical. The allusions flew as fast and thick as anything on The Daily Show, and often with a lot more bite.

Which is where Stephen Marc Beaudoin comes in.

Beaudoin, a young singer and writer who hit town from Boston a few years ago with a degree from the New England Conservatory of Music and a ton of ambition, promptly stirred up a storm with a string of sometimes scathing performance reviews in Willamette Week, Just Out and The Mercury. To some he was the devil. To others he was the voice of truth.

Either way, he hasn’t played it safe. He also performs in Portland frequently, giving his critics plenty of chances to take their own shots. (He performs well enough that those shots generally misfire.) And starting Thursday, the audaciously hellzapoppin Opera Theater Oregon presents his new, freewheeling version of The Beggar’s Opera, which he has adapted and directed, and which has a new score by Michael Herrman of the band Buoy LaRue. It opens at the Someday Lounge in Old Town and later transfers to The Woods, an old funeral parlor turned music hall in Sellwood.

Continue reading The Beggar’s Opera: Satire for Stumptown

Opera’s chamber of horrors: ‘The Medium,’ well done

As the intrepid Mr. Mead has reminded me, a lot of cool-sounding stuff is pounding the boards of Portland’s performance spaces right now:

Bucky Fuller, Adam Bock, Dead Funny, Guys and Dolls, and despite the mixed reviews I’d like to see Artists Rep’s Speech and Debate — there has to be a reason it was such a can’t-score-a-ticket hit in New York.

But last night as I headed to The Someday Lounge, Halloween was on my mind. And not just because of the weekend trip to the pumpkin patch on Sauvie Island (corn maze, plump gourds, rowdy kids, horrific traffic) but because it was opening night of Opera Theater Oregon‘s The Medium, Gian Carlo Menotti‘s hour-plus 1946 psychological thriller of an operatic melodrama (the word, remember, means simply drama with music).

These days, when people think of Menotti they tend to think of his autocratic reputation in the legacy of the two Spoleto festivals, in Italy and South Carolina. Or they think of Amahl and the Night Visitors, his 1951 television opera, which has become a Christmas-season staple. But although Christmas is coming, the goose ain’t fat yet. This is the time of haunts and ghouls, and The Medium is in perfect pitch with the season.

Continue reading Opera’s chamber of horrors: ‘The Medium,’ well done

Thursday scatter: of foxes and hen houses, etc.

An egg crisis is ravaging the hen house.

They’re disappearing.

And the foxes are shocked, shocked.

While the hens bemoan the loss of their little ones — several survivors have been running around crying that the sky is falling — the foxes have gathered the whole barnyard to declare that Something Must Be Done. Trust them: We Must Act Now.

The head fox has declared that the true victims are the foxes themselves, who have been cruelly deprived of their stockpile of eggs. To avert catastrophe, the foxes’ hoards must be replenished: The hens must lay 700 billion new eggs, right now. The farmer, blinking owlishly, agrees. One wise old fox, who yearns to live in the farm house, has declared that he will Suspend All Other Activities while he Helps Find a Solution. That solution will be found by foxes, and foxes alone. And the solution is that the Hens Will Provide.

Meanwhile, no omelettes this morning. And for music lovers, the rooster doesn’t much feel like crowing, either. Where’s Aesop when we need him? Where’s George Orwell?

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NEW GUY AT THE GUGGENHEIM: Those who can curate, curate. Those who can curate well, lead museums. At least, that’s the mini-trend among major museums in New York.

Following the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s appointment earlier this month of European tapestry curator Thomas P. Campbell to replace the venerated Philippe de Montebello as director, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation has named Richard Armstrong, director of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, as the Guggenheim‘s next director.

Like Campbell, Armstrong rose in the ranks on the strength of his curatorial qualities, not his showmanship: His specialty is contemporary art, a good fit for the Goog. And the ever-busy Carol Vogel, in her report for the New York Times, suggests that after years of expansion in Bilbao, Venice, Berlin and (coming in 2013) Abu Dhabi, Armstrong and the Guggenheim are ready to shift their focus back to New York. Another good report comes from The Art Newspaper.

Is it possible that sober financial times are bringing more prudential museum leaders? De Montebello, of course, has combined prudence, measured daring and a brilliant commitment to the art for more than 30 years at the Met, following the mercurial reign of supershowman Thomas Hoving. At the Guggenheim, Armstrong will follow high-rolling Thomas Krens. And when the Portland Art Museum‘s Hoving-like director John Buchanan headed south to take over the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the museum board replaced him with Brian Ferriso and charged Ferriso to quiet the waters and keep things on an even keel.

The question is, will an even keel fill the cruise ship with customers? Is generating excitement gauche, or is it part of what a museum is about? To what extent does a museum exist for insiders, and to what extent does it have a duty to appeal to the general public?

These are uneasy times, and leading a major — or modest — museum is no easy task. To Armstrong, Campbell, Ferriso and their compatriots, then: Good luck, be wise, balance well, take risks, and don’t forget the public.

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HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SOMEDAY: Someday Lounge, that is. The Old Town Portland night spot and hub for interesting alternative arts has turned two and is celebrating with a bunch of events this weekend. The one that catches our eye is the premiere of Pig Roast and Tank of Fish, a documentary about Portland’s Chinatown (which is more or less where the Someday coexists) to be shown at 7 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 28. Here’s what the Lounge has to say:

Portlander Ivy Lin directed and produced Pig Roast & Tank of Fish. “I’ve always wondered why our Chinatown went from being the second largest in the U.S. to almost like a ghost town. It’s in the heart of downtown, with that beautiful gate and garden and nothing much else,” says Lin. “Earlier this year, 70 Asians showed up at a city council meeting to testify against the the siting of another homeless shelter on Block 25 in Chinatown. I was not even involved with the Chinese community then, but I was very moved and this event became the inspiration for this project.”

This documentary is the first-ever motion picture to acknowledge the history/legacy of Chinatown, Portland’s oldest neighborhood where the pioneers of many ethnic communities once called “home.” It includes some rarely seen footage of ongoing cultural/social activities behind closed doors…Chinatown is not dead!

See you there, Friends of Art Scatter.