Having sat/slept through the current production of “Otello” at the SF Opera on Sunday, as freebie seat-partner to a local critic, I can safely say that in a show such as this — close to its Shakespeare original, intensely dramatic — the play’s truly the thing. If the drama doesn’t work, neither does anything else.
That accounts for my strange inability to refrain from nodding off. I could barely keep my eyes open, as the stage zoomed in and out of focus and the music morphed mentally into strange and compelling riffs and variations. It wasn’t all soporific by any means. The orchestra played superbly, courtesy of our wonderful new music director Nicola Luisotti. The stage setting is terrific, reminding me of that video version of Othello with Ian McKellan playing one of the best Iagos in my memory. Many of the principals are quite effective, in particular the Iago, who came across quite well save a truly awful bit of utterly phoney melodramatic-bad-guy maniacal laughing at the end of act 3.
The direction was problematic in that it seemed to be mostly the “stand here and sing, then cross to stage left” variety. Man, did they just stand there. Sometimes they went upstairs. Sometimes they went downstairs. Sometimes they sat down for a while. Otello even lay on the floor for a while. But mostly they just stood there.
And the Otello himself didn’t work, surely through no fault of his own but a victim of poor casting. Othello, as a drama (using the spelling with an ‘h’ to distinguish Bill Shakespeare from Joe Verdi), becomes tragedy only insofar as we see a mighty warrior, a great hero, cut down and destroyed by a near-insignificant, yet pestiferous, personality defect. It’s as though a great sequoia falls from a patch of fungus. It all seems so unfair, so pointless, such a sickening waste of something impressive and wonderful. Thus only an Othello who is truly the military colossus of Venice will do, the embodiment of the leader of men, a commanding über-male who drips testosterone and exudes authority, as much a stud in the sack as he is on the battlefield.
Without that, Othello descends into cheap melodrama, more along the lines of some pathetic trailer-trash redneck getting all likkered up on Saturday night and doffing his old lady with the 12-gauge after she’s been making sluttish with the guys down at the local gin joint. This being a regular occurrence throughout the Bible Belts of our finely educated and sophisticated republic, it hardly ranks coverage on the local evening news, much less being immortalized in classical tragedy.
The SF Opera’s Otello is undoubtedly one hell of a fine singer, but he simply does not look, or act, the part of Othello. He’s soft, spherical, cuddly, average height, downright cute like a teddy bear. His acting abilities are sharply limited and most of the time he came across as a stick. That’s a pity, because the show died. Iago’s fine performance was completely misplaced, as he schemed to destroy what appeared to be an ordinary, inoffensive, downright nebbishy guy who was about as heroic, or tragic, as a Fig Newton.
Minor quibble: I am no expert on the subject of murder by asphyxiation, but I am reasonably confident that a mere ten seconds of pressing an eider-down pillow over somebody’s face will not do the trick. Especially not if your victim starts singing again shortly thereafter. Then she dies. Of what? Presumably she has choked to death on a goose feather, or suffered a severe allergic reaction to the laundry’s fabric softener.
However, I will say this for the production: I had a nice nap. And the brief dustup in the audience a few rows behind me, at the beginning of act four, was almost worth the admission price (free in my case.) During the lovely little orchestral prelude that opens the final act, a clutch of babbling ladies kept up their babble, presumably on the assumption that instrumental stuff isn’t important, this being the opera and all where nobody gives a shit about music. People nearby began shushing them, but they kept right on. Finally an exasperated gentleman snapped out: “shut UP!” to which one of the ladies responded tartly “don’t you tell ME to shut up!”.
Alas, the curtain rose and therefore we were robbed of the possibility of fisticuffs and hairpulling in Orchestra Row N. It certainly would have been more entertaining than the enervating still-life onstage.