As I mentioned in my last post, I have graduated to extremely bad German speaking (from zero German speaking) and I rain down with my bad German on this helpless city. ME, NO I, YES!! THAT IS IT, IS THE ONE, I MEAN, TO WANT IT IS ME NOW!! is how I order a croissant in the morning. To say no, I mean the croissant on the left with the giant hotdog bursting out of it, I say: WHAT CAN YOU DO WITH THAT? THE CHOCOLATE IS NOT HERE WITH ME, PLEASE: IT IS RESTING THERE! I gesture toward my mouth, toward the joy that pends eating hot dogs with croissant wrapping.
In this new month of Goethe classes, the number of Americans is up to three. I vocalize freely on behalf of the three new Japanese students. They do not yet speak extremely bad German. I will help them. I am at the top of my game.
I visited the Berliner Ensemble for their final production of Waiting for Godot. Naturally, we saw Warten AUF Godot, so I have learned that one waits AUF someone. The acting was peerless.
I also saw a second Neuenfels production; he has wormed his way into my heart. One had the feeling that this particular Rigoletto was under rehearsed -- much as the Nabucco had been three weeks earlier. But that also seemed to be part of the fun; as though part of the production process were to get the singers and crew into the theater at midnight the night before and pull an all-nighter painting sets and drinking scotch. The opera has the same tripped-out feeling as certain music albums that are only possible because of drugs. The costumer for instance was, I believe, chosen on the basis of his ability to costume an entire cast using only what you could find in the party section of Walgreens. Rigoletto shows up in the second act wearing a woman's pink, satin bathrobe, backwards, and a Crusades-era helmet that looks like it probably belonged to a Gondolier in a 1977 Gilbert and Sullivan production.
The asthetic reminded me in so many ways of my mother's production of The Pirates of Penzance with her 3rd, 4th and 5th graders last summer in Springfield, Nebraska. If there's a difference between choreography disguised as chaotic silliness and chaotic silliness disguised as choreography, you couldn't tell. Frederick is here assaulted by the 5th-grader Pirate King.
Mom, you would also have liked the male chorus of bees in Nabucco.
Last night I went to a Müller-esque, non-operatic Tosca at the Volksbühne. (Folks, there are a lot of theaters in Berlin; you have to be here to believe how many.) For my super cheap student ticket I sat front row, center and got covered with exploding fake blood capsules, champagne, beer & spit. It was disturbing and awesome. The man to my right had a huge glob of stage blood on his left eye for the rest of the show. Only shards of the opera made it safely into this particular version. That is, only the more ludicrous sections of the original plot (the painting of the Magdalena became a sci-fi-ish virtual, "live," i.e. moving, projection of a woman and a dancing baby) and the more sentimental/memorable bits of Puccini's score: when an aria seemed inevitable (in the music theater sense where the acting peeters out and there's nothing left to do but sing), the actors earnestly but hoarsely brayed out the original vocal line. To see the only person capable of imitating the actress playing Tosca squawking out a Tosca aria BETTER THAN the actual actress, ask Christopher Alden next time you run into him.
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