this fucking place and Fidelio, Washington National Opera
The two things in the subject line are related, I promise.
I've been an annoying contrarian for a really long time. I went to college in Los Angeles and was so tired of hearing about the entertainment industry (purely by osmosis) that I rarely watched tv or movies and never went to a taping or stood outside the theater (which was across the street from my school) during the Academy Awards. I may have been in the background of something because somebody was always filming on campus, and I had roommates and friends who majored in subjects like film production and theater, but for the most part I avoided all of it.
I've never liked or followed politics, either, but after 25 years in the DC area I might actually hate it. Maybe someday I'll write about why, but for now I can sum it up with a lunch I had with coworkers on Monday. Two of them were excited that the election was too close to call and spent the entire lunch talking about various scenarios and wanting people to predict outcomes. There was entirely too much at stake in this election for me to treat it like a sportsball program, and it turned my stomach a little bit to see the glitter in their eyes and their flushed faces. This city is full of people like this.
How these things are related is that Washington National Opera's production of Fidelio might be the most DC production I've seen them stage, and I saw their opera about national monuments. Fidelio is the story of a woman who pretends to be a man and gets a job in the prison where her husband is being held for speaking out against an authoritarian regime. [One theory of the opera's origin is that the author of the original story worked in a jail during France's Reign of Terror.] It's really a love story, and a very earnest one at that. Love will set you free, good triumphs over evil--in the final chorus they actually sing "love is freedom!" It's morality for children. I think it probably says something about Beethoven that he was drawn to the story (he was also initially a Napoleon fan), and he had at least two librettists work on an adaptation.
What made this production so DC is that the "Background" part of the playbill mentions the United Nations and Amnesty International, two organization that definitely did not exist during Beethoven's life. Before the curtain went up and during intermission, the screen displayed the opening lines to the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights while different articles of the declaration appeared below. Of course, the production was set in a generic early-20th century European country with a Brutalist palette of drab gray and khaki (admittedly appropriate for a prison).
I enjoyed most of the music. None of the arias moved me, but the trios and quartets were absolutely lovely. Sinéad Campbell Wallace was a fine Leonore, if a bit colorless on the high notes. Meanwhile, Tiffany Choe had some really nice color and liveliness in her singing but wasn't very powerful. In a bit of stunt casting, Don Fernando was renamed The Prime Minister and performed by Denyce Graves doing her best Michelle Obama impression (white pantsuit, up do). Jamez McCorkle was the star of the men as Florestan; too bad he was only heard for the last hour.