Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen” – Fun at Puck’s Club FQ with Long Beach Opera
Kim Jones as Tanya and Cedric Berry as Ron; in the background, Marc Molomot as Puck. Photo by Liz Lauren
“The Fairy Queen” Goes To Vegas
a 17th Century masterpiece, reworked by Culture Clash and Long Beach Opera
Find any book on the history of opera, and Henry Purcell shows up in the first chapter. But the English composer (1658-95) was somewhat of a lone voice in a country where opera didn’t catch fire until years later when Handel came over from Germany.
What Purcell did accomplish during his brief life was one short opera, “Dido and Aeneas,” and four semi-operas, the latter a mix of music, dance, and song that was loosely strung together. These include “The Indian Queen” and “The Fairy Queen.” In the mid-1990s, Sir Denis Forman wrote that “The music of ‘Dido’ reaches across the centuries and speaks to us as directly and as movingly today as if it had been written last week.” I think this was borne out in 2014 when LA Opera performed the work, and suddenly three centuries vanished just like that.
Based on Shakespeare, well, sorta…
Long Beach Opera has presented over 110 works since its founding in 1979, first under the stewardship of Michael Milenski and since 2003 with Andreas Mitisek as the company’s artistic and general director, and sometimes conductor as well. LBO is nationally and even internationally known for its selections, some bold, some almost tongue-in-cheek, ranging from the recently discovered, like Vivaldi’s “Motezuma,” to the recently composed: The U.S. premiere of “The Perfect American,” by Philip Glass, is coming in March.
Culture Clash and LBO director Andreas Mitisek (lower left). Photo courtesy of Long Beach Opera
The company has staged “Orpheus and Euridice” in the former Belmont Plaza Olympic Pool and last season “Fallujah” inside the Army National Guard. Expect the unexpected is one of their slogans, which brings us to LBO’s collaboration with Culture Clash on a new production of Purcell’s “The Fairy Queen,” which debuted in 1692 (and doesn’t seem to have any connection to Edmund Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene,” a long poem dating back to the 1590s).
Interestingly, the first production Mitisek conducted at LBO (in 1998) was Purcell’s “The Indian Queen.”
“That was reconceived by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, who’s a friend of Culture Clash,” Mitisek says. “Somehow I guess there’s a little connection here with Purcell again, and we have Chicano artists participating.”
Culture Class–Richard Montoya, Ric Salinas, and Herbert Siguenza–is among the most highly regarded performance troupes in the country, whose works include “Chavez Ravine” and “Water and Power,” performed at the Mark Taper Forum, and “Peace,” performed at the Getty Villa. And so their being creatively involved in a rethinking of “The Fairy Queen” is not something to let slip under the radar: The work opens Sunday, with two more performances the following Saturday.
Fun at Club Puck: Ensemble members Kira Dills-DeSurra and Zacharias Niedzwiecki. Photo by Liz Lauren
A night in Club Puck FQ
I’m with Andreas Mitisek in the company’s rehearsal space on Pacific Avenue in downtown Long Beach, and wondering how the collaboration with Culture Clash came about.
“I contacted them because I just like what they have done,” Mitisek replies, “and I always wanted to find something to work with them. When I came across ‘The Fairy Queen,’ which I think is just gorgeous and has the most beautiful music and songs, that was a good opportunity to work with people who are used to rewriting and also creating a contemporary relevance. I wanted to make it a piece that also reflects a bit of the multicultural world we live in.
“I told them I had this idea of setting it in a nightclub as a modern version of the woods. You go, you disappear, and it’s dark; and all kinds of things happen in those places. People get drunk, and they wake up the next morning and they say, What happened?”
In other words, Shakespeare takes us into the forest but Mitisek takes us to Sin City and especially to Club Puck FQ (FQ for Fairy Queen, of course).
“So we have Ron and Tanya, which is Oberon and Titania,” Mitisek continues. “It’s an African-American couple (sung by Cedric Berry and Kim Jones) that goes to Las Vegas to celebrate Ron’s birthday. In our version, instead of fighting over a little boy like in the Shakespeare play, Ron has a little fling with a dancer, and that creates the conflict between the two.”
Additionally, there are two more couples that check in, one gay, one straight. “And then it becomes interesting when they switch sides.
“You won’t see ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’” Mitisek says; “you will see characters and elements from the play that you know. Ron and Tanya in our case, and Puck (Marc Molomot) who is the driving factor in ‘The Fairy Queen’ here, and of course in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ with the potion that he hands out.”
It’s this potion that causes so much havoc.
Marc Molomot performs as Puck, “the club owner (who) pulls all the strings.” Rehearsal photo
Puck first appears as a sleazy club owner. As Molomot himself phrases it:
“This character goes on quite a journey in the beginning. He’s a character that, my mother said, You were so cruel I wanted to hit you over the head with my purse!” By the end of the opera, Molomot adds, Puck “becomes quite magical and he’s actually such a believer in love.”
However, when he first learned that the work was being set in Vegas, and that his character was a club owner, casino owner, hotel owner, etc., it was during the time of the Trump-Clinton presidential debates (the production premiered in Chicago last November). There was the idea or maybe even the temptation to model Puck after Trump (a casino owner as well, right?). “I didn’t want to go there,” Molomot says. “It would have been very easy to do that, and do a caricature of him, but I chose very clearly not to do that.”
Having watched a good portion of one of the rehearsals, I believe that audiences will find Molomot’s Puck to be devilishly engaging and even delightful.
“We also have Shakes the poet,” Mitisek says. Sung by Torrance resident and frequent LBO performer Roberto Perlas Gomez, this is somewhat of an embellished role, since in “The Fairy Queen” he’s merely described as a drunken poet, and not the immortal Bard. Throughout the work, Gomez staggers back and forth across the stage and quotes some of Shakespeare’s actual lines.
Old music, new concept
Denis Forman also wrote, in his book “A Night at the Opera,” that “no one since Purcell has ever succeeded in putting our lovely but hard-to-sing English language to music with such adroitness and certainty of touch. He had exactly the measure of what the human voice could do and he could write a tune.”
The Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra, conducted by Martin Haselböck (who Mitisek knew back in Vienna), is the go-to ensemble for early classical music, and they’ve performed with Long Beach Opera on previous occasions: Purcell’s “The Indian Queen,” Handel’s “Semele,” and Vivaldi’s “Motezuma.”
Long Beach Opera Artistic and General Director Andreas Mitisek. Photo
“I think the most important difference between ‘The Fairy Queen’ of Henry Purcell and our version,” Mitisek says, “is that he wrote none of his music for the ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ characters. The songs back then were interspersed between the play scenes. So what I did was to assign the sung music to (various) characters within this new version. So now everyone gets to sing songs, and duets, as the characters in the opera.”
Will the audience find this confusing? Well, the answer seems to be yes and no.
“If they’ve seen other productions of ‘Fairy Queen,’” Mitisek says, “they will recognize the music but not the story.” Rather, the basic outline remains the same. “In our version, Puck is the club owner and he pulls all the strings. So, it’s inspired by ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’”
Asked what he’d like his audience to know beforehand, Mitisek says:
“Throw away the idea that it’s opera and just come and have an experience that is contemporary, has great music, and is highly entertaining in all regards. I think you’ll have a great time discovering some of the lines that go through our production that are similar or very different from the original.”
In the heart of the action
Although the opera is being performed in a rather traditional venue (not a parking garage this time, or the Grand Hall of the Aquarium of the Pacific), it will have one key advantage over the Chicago production, which put the musicians in front of the audience in the orchestra pit. At the Beverly O’Neill Theater (formerly the Center Theater), the orchestra is situated in back of the stage.
“As you know,” Mitisek says, “the first row is right in your face. Also, for the singers, it’s a different approach, because you have to be more expressive, more intimate.” “There won’t be a barrier with the orchestra, so we can really interact or break down the wall with the audience,” Molomot says. “And I think that’s what this piece needs.”
“The Fairy Queen” is the season’s opener, to be followed in March (12, 18) by “The Perfect American,” a fictionalized account of Walt Disney’s final days, composed by Philip Glass, who is entrusting Long Beach Opera (in a co-production with Chicago Opera Theater, where Mitisek is also the general director) with the work’s first U.S. performances.
“And during Gay Pride Week,” Mitisek says, “we perform ‘As One’ (May 13, 20, 21), a transgender story which, again talking about relevant issues that people might not know about, [tells] stories of people who are having a journey, like we all have a journey. It’s just a different one.”
The season closes with “Frida,” composed by Robert Xavier Rodríguez, based on the life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. It’s also a site-specific work, to be performed at MoLAA (the Museum of Latin American Art) on June 17, 18, 24 and 25 (also at Grand Performances, Los Angeles, on June 23).
Marc Molomot as Puck, center, with ensemble members Kira Dills-DeSurra and Zacharias Niedzwiecki. Photo by Liz Lauren
Not a standard opera season by any means, is it?
In many cases, LBO’s operas are only performed two, three, or four times. Why not more? Why not 10 or 12?
Mitisek has a simple and straightforward answer: “Opera is the most expensive thing, besides going to war.” It’s a battle in itself just to raise funds in order to hire singers and musicians, to pay the technical crew, not to mention the costs of costumes and sets.
Even so, Long Beach Opera has not only weathered the tide of fate and fortune, but continues to discover and promote remarkable works, operas we might not know about let alone ever see. The company is an invaluable asset for culture locally and afar, and they have enriched us immensely.
The Fairy Queen, by Henry Purcell, adapted by Andreas Mitisek with Culture Clash, is being performed at 2:30 p.m. on Sunday, plus 2:30 and 8 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 28, in the Beverly O’Neill Theater, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. Tickets, $49 to $150. Call (562) 470-7464 ext. 101 or go to longbeachopera.org. ER