La clemenza di Christopher Alden

Go see this opera. Now. Go see it now. Please. Don't do it for my sake. Just trust me.

When I first heard Christopher was coming to town to direct La clemenza di Tito, my first thought was, "Yeah ... hmm, Italian ... Mozart ... sounds familiar ... sort of ... wait, what's it called again?" I went to the library to get a recording and discovered there are actually a couple a-v recordings floating around. A VHS exists of Jean-Pierre Ponnelle's Tito, which, apparently having been hit by the stupid bat, I somehow decided not to watch in favor of a DVD made-for-TV version by the BBC. I grew up on "I, Claudius" (which, confusingly for a first grader, they spell the fancy Roman way: "Clavdivs"), "Upstairs, Downstairs," and "Brideshead Revisited," and came away mightily persuaded of the superiority of British acting. (According to the rule by which things denied us as children become addictions in adulthood, I am now incapable of skipping an episode of Law and Order.) So when I watched this particular Tito and decided it was one of the worst operas ever written, it didn't dawn on me that it was the fault of the production. I assumed, as it has been common to assume since Mozart's death, that it's a completely lame opera. In fact, British television actors just can't sing.

Christopher Alden arrived in Chicago last month announcing that in this new production there would be none of the usual flouting of all historical referents. As he put it, "I'm over that." His Aida at the Deutsche Oper last year is a good example of what he's apparently over. Aida was an exotic-looking maid who worked for an unhealthy little cult of Evangelical power mongers hunkered down in what looked like a Radisson convention center in the heart of gun country, U.S.A. Christopher's particular brand of flouting has over the years attracted a lot of critical attention, and while the majority of people seem to hate what he does with his operas (Berlin booed Aida till they were hoarse, so I think it's safe to say that they're also "over that"), enough people with intelligence and political nerve think he's the greatest thing since sliced bread that he's gotten himself quite a reputation, if a mixed one. Whatever. Press, as we all know, is press. During the intermission of the Tito dress last Thursday, a man on my right mumbled, "Well, there's just absolutely nothing right about this opera," while a woman on my left shrieked, "Whoever this director is, I wanna marry him!"

Part of the problem is that Christopher's reputation precedes him, which means that a cast generally has a pretty good idea of what they're in for before the thing ever gets off the ground. Christopher's instructions to his singers usually ask for a recreation of something like the group therapy sessions in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest: a bunch of crazy people on the verge. You know, one person's trying to figure out how to throw himself out of the window, someone else is losing it in the corner. Which, let's face it, is what operas are written about. But singers, especially accomplished ones in the European circuit, offer up a fair bit of resistance to this. You can't teach an old dog new tricks (like, how to act). But because Christopher's overall conceptions already demand a lot imaginatively of the audience, without everyone's participation on stage it can't get off the ground. In Berlin, there were a bunch of old-school singers rattling around like ghosts in a production where they simply didn't belong. I've always wondered what a Christopher Alden production would look like if his singers dared to act like he wanted them to...

The brilliance of the Chicago Opera Theater model is that, like Rome under Titus, absolute monarchy works when the ruler is a pretty awesome guy. Brian Dickie effortlessly commands devotion and loyalty from the people who work for him, and he's talented at assembling knock-out young singers into cutting-edge casts. COT is the MacBook Pro to the Lyric's PC. It's lighter, it's cooler-looking, and it frigging works. It was a little startling to walk into the first run-through and realize that these singers were literally in their twenties. But far more astonishing is that by opening night (last Saturday) they were all doing a pretty good job of embodying Christopher's wild-eyed schizophrenic thing. The scenic conception is a little lose. If you squint, it looks a little like sixties neo-Greco architecture: Lincoln Center, is how Christopher put it. And the costumes are, I dunno, I guess they're a little confusing. There are togas, but then Servilia has dreds, Titus is in his jammies, and Sextus has a kind of Kenneth Cole/runway thing going on. But the personal dynamic between singers, especially Sextus/Titus, is riveting. It just doesn't get better than this. There's opera, and then there's Christopher's Tito.

Three more performances. No excuses. Go.

Note: For a review of the opera (what you've just read, as Brian Dickie helpfully pointed out, is in fact a "review") see Andrew Patner's take.