![]() Thankfully, southern blue collar rocker Zach Williams doesn't seem to feel any pressure on Rescue Story, the follow-up to his massively successful debut, Chain Breaker. You only have one album to compare the new material with, and a very short runway with which to satisfy the fans won over with the first batch of material. Movie Reviews (Main) > Movie Reviews (Main)įollowing up a successful debut album is one of the most daunting tasks in all of popular art.Indie Reviews (Main) > Indie Reviews (Main).The distinctly American darkness of “A Quiet Place” may be more relevant than we’d like to think. They are still suffering, in a cycle you could see continuing to the present day. Look closely at the four of them: Sam and Junior, reunited François and Dede, who scoots, visibly uncomfortable, away from her husband. The only way forward for them is forgiveness - not the most common way for an opera to end, but a recollection of a classic: Janacek’s “Jenufa.” In Warlikowski’s staging, Bernstein’s uneasy final chords accompany an image of Dinah’s family sharing a sofa. There were more innovative American operas that premiered in the 1980s: Philip Glass’s portrait of resistance in “Satyagraha” or the grand, nearly mythic treatment of leaders in Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and in John Adams’s “Nixon in China.” “A Quiet Place” benefits from no longer being so directly juxtaposed with them it is now easier to meet on its own terms, neither avant-garde nor as eager to please as Bernstein’s earlier works.Īnd while it can sometimes feel like a rote regurgitation of postwar culture and its miseries, the ambiguous ending is something of a departure from those clichés. Other things that have aged poorly, though, are baked into the text Dinah’s misery-driven alcoholism is more worthy of sighs than sympathy. The opera’s conflation of insanity and homosexuality has long been one of its problems, but Warlikowski helps slightly by treating Junior’s queerness as coincident with, rather than the cause of, his arrested development. Junior enters the funeral in a garish, pink-and-purple cowboy outfit - a choice that makes sense later when he is represented as a boy wearing the same costume, being held and then rejected by his mother. In it, she is the face of the post-World War II American ideal, but with the empty expression and double-edged smile of a James Rosenquist painting. It’s one of several ways Dinah is present in this production, which opens with a video (by Kamil Polak) of her fatal car accident - likely a suicide, almost certainly under the influence - and, for the rending Act I postlude music, projects a portrait of her above the coffin and crematory. But Warlikowski casts a silent actor (Johanna Wokalek) in the role, and she haunts the stage throughout, in a blending of time and memory that mirrors the non sequiturs of the libretto’s slides into reverie and role play. Dinah, one half of the unhappy couple of “Trouble in Tahiti,” isn’t in “A Quiet Place,” which begins with her funeral. Warlikowski is otherwise largely deferential to the libretto - with a few affecting interventions. Spaces like these - designed by Warlikowski’s frequent collaborator Malgorzata Szczesniak, and typical of his productions - can feel at once expansive and suffocating, and his characters tend to behave accordingly, both exposed and trapped. It takes place in a single room, faced head-on, of towering walls and with sets simultaneously familiar and impossible to place: that era’s fashions, surrounded by sleek, futuristic panels. To further avoid seeming dated, Warlikowski’s staging, while set in 1983, is not a facsimile of its time. That, too, made for a bloated evening, in length and in a maximalist scoring for over 70 musicians, including electric guitar and synthesizer. Bernstein and Wadsworth revised “A Quiet Place” to be a single, three-act work, with “Trouble in Tahiti” incorporated as flashbacks. “A Quiet Place” - the story of a matriarch’s death, and the reconciliation it brings her broken family, inspired by Bernstein and Wadsworth’s own losses - was originally created as a sequel to Bernstein’s satirical, jazzy one-act “Trouble in Tahiti,” from the early 1950s they were first presented together as a punishingly long double bill. It remains full of flaws - mainly, clichés of mid-20th-century American ennui - yet in its current form, it is also a piece of subtlety and suggestion, a short story with the weight of a novel, an example of masterly craft and postmodern style. And in its best moments, the work gives you what Bernstein described on TV: the ability to make you feel the emotions he had when he was writing an at times painfully personal opera. At the end of Act II, Warlikowski adds a scene in which a boy sneakily watches that episode of “Young People’s Concerts” after his parents go to sleep.
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