It’s a Wonderful Life: a savvy and sparkling opera
“Hang on, Daddy, that angel’s got no wings”. Quite right, kiddo. That’s Clara, Angel, Second Class, who has to earn her wings by saving George Bailey from committing suicide in Jake Heggie’s opera version of the iconic James Stewart movie, It’s a Wonderful Life.
Spoiler alert if you’re the only person on planet earth who does not know the story of guardian angel Clarence, gender changed for the opera. Good job, too. It allowed the wonderful soprano, Danielle De Niese, to be Clara.
He/she reminds Bailey, whose savings and loan outfit builds houses for the good citizens of Bedford Falls, somewhere in anonymous middle America, what a hole he would have left in the life of the town if he had not been born. Don’t do it, George!
She stops him jumping off that bridge, saves the town from evil slum rentier Henry F. Potter and restores Bailey to hearth and home just in time for a joyous Christmas, earning promotion to Angel, First Class. Huzzah!
Even members of the recently discovered Ticuna tribe in the Amazonian rainforest groan and switch channels when the grinning Stewart yet again bursts onto their Moluca long hut communal black and white TV every December.
Nowadays they give thanks to Elon Musk for their Starlink internet connection and flip to Matt Hancock being persecuted by cockroaches in Oz instead. Or is that the other way round?
If any reader does not know the plot of It’s a Wonderful Life, take a DVD of the movie with you on your spaceship for the return trip to exoplanet, Proxima Centauri b. If Amazon can’t deliver in time for lift-off, here’s the synopsis.
It is a stroke of genius for English National Opera (ENO) to forego conventional Christmas fare – Rossini’s Cinderella, Humperdinck’s Hansel and Gretel, or, if you’re deaf, a masochist, or both Hindemith’s The Long Christmas Dinner – and plump for American composer Heggie’s opera, premiered at San Francisco Opera in 2018 – reviewed in Reaction – for their Christmas bums-on-seats extravaganza.
From the audience’s ecstatic reaction on Wednesday night ENO made a great judgement call. The enthusiasm was deserved. The house was packed, almost a capacity crowd. Not the usual opera crowd either. This production had reached well beyond the Coliseum’s regular clientele, ENO’s mission.
What is the piece? Is it really an opera? Is it an operetta, perhaps a musical? Do we really care? Heggie intended to cross conventional frontiers with this populist work, and he has succeeded. Certainly, it is far from the conventional 18th/19th century familiar opera formula of arias and recitatifs. It is a rich, flowing symphonic structure, full of subtle harmonies and wispy melodies.
Think Richard Strauss or Jules Massenet’s sinuous musical lines and you will appreciate what Heggie is getting at. He, like most composers, is unafraid of pinching good ideas and from time to time Les Miserables was audible. I met Heggie in San Francisco at the 2018 performance and in a two-line exchange he said his intention was to make the piece “accessible”.
So, not for opera eggheads who want their brains scrambled by atonal assaults, but where’s the harm in that? ENO’s aim is to extend the reach of opera and make it less intimidating for a “maybe I will, maybe I won’t” potential audience. With luck their enthusiastic reaction will tempt them back for other fare.
In spite of the cuddly “Oh, shucks” reputation, the opera delivers a powerful contemporary punch. It explores themes of exploitation, even quantitative easing. Bailey Building and Loan extends credit to unlikely borrowers for home building. Greedy Potter regards the extension of credit as immoral. Subprime loans ahoy!
The conductor is Canadian, Nicole Paiement, who claims if she had not been a musical director, she would have been an architect. She has a track record of taking on innovative work – a San Francisco, Opera Parallèle version of The Shining, Peter Maxwell Davis’ thriller, The Lighthouse, and Philip Glass’ L’Orphée.
Take comfort from the fact that if Heggie’s opera had been hokum Paiement would not have touched it with a bargepole. She created a sweeping soundscape that carried the action along and encouraged the ENO orchestra to play with vim and vigour.
The principals were superb. De Niese, a presence onstage throughout as Clara, invisible to the other singers, played the part of a concerned guardian angel to perfection. Her singing parts were not over challenging, well within her capabilities.
There is a wonderful sequence in Act 1. When she removes her cap the action freezes momentarily as she reflects on what the characters mean. The cast responded to the irregular “on, off” sequence impeccably.
After Clara, De Niese takes on the uber challenging solo role of Elle in Poulenc’s La Voix Humaine in Dublin, The Narrator in Thomas Adès’ Persephone in Boston, then back home – Glyndebourne – to sing Blanche in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. A new Barry Kosky production, Carmélites is unmissable.
American tenor, Frederick Ballentine, sang George Bailey. A previous ENO outing was in Annilese Miskimmon, ENO Director’s lauded production of The Handmaid’s Tale. He conveyed the conflicting emotions of the troubled Bailey convincingly and always kept the audience onside, even at the moment when he is being mean to his kids, prior to deciding to end it all on the Bedford Falls bridge. Lyrical tenor delivery.
Mary Hatch Bailey, George’s high school sweetheart and eventual wife, was Jennifer France. The British soprano has been described in WhatsOnStage as “the living jewel in opera’s crown”. Umm …. Tosh and hyperbole. These overblown compliments do no favours. She was well cast, more than up to the vocal challenges, and portrayed Bailey’s often troubled spouse sympathetically. France has a whirlwind European CV and is justifiably in high demand.
Ronald Samm, a British tenor, was the blundering, often open-mouthed Uncle Billy, fleeced by Potter of the $8,000 that had the bank inspectors hassling Bailey; Donavan Singletary, a “bright baritone”, who featured in the New York Met’s Porgy and Bess, sang Harry Bailey, George’s war hero brother; and the evil, hiss-boo crypto villain trying to buy up Bedford Falls, Henry F Potter, was Michael Mayes. Mayes got his career off to a flying start in 2018 as Joseph de Rocher in Heggie’s Dead Man Walking in Madrid’s Teatro Real.
The stratagem of blending star singers and up and coming talent, a formula ENO is constantly honing, was well to the fore.
The chorus was excellent, although some looked a tad elderly and round-tummied for high school prom-goers. Never mind. At the beginning they lined up front stage, with initialled sweatshirts spelling BEDFORDFALLS. Cute. But the action quickly descended into a game of scrabble and when some of them next formed up we had DBRLBLLSA. No matter. They delivered the choral chops.
The production was substantially changed from the San Francisco version. There, the action took place on a snowy rooftop, with dormer windows representing different passages in Bailey’s life. Characters emerged, presenting separate tableaux.
I am told this would simply not translate to the Coliseum stage, so Giles Cadle, set designer, created a box with doors stage right and left instead of dormers. In principle, it could have worked, but it looked as if Cadle was working on too tight a budget.
Especially awful was the “old Granville House”, the derelict mansion which the new sweethearts, George and Mary, aspire to make their renovated home. The mansion, which could have been cost effectively represented as a backstage image, was instead a flat-roofed half portacabin intruding from stage left, with a handwritten “For sale” sign on a window. It would have disgraced a Florida trailer-trash park. Ridiculous.
Visual snow effects were truly magical and there was no chance of missing moments when we were entering the world of financial villainy. A huge flat descended – crunch – front of stage with the word P O T T E R extended across the stage in three-foot-high letters. Mr Boo Hiss and other sinister characters entered and exited from a door and elevator.
Here is my biggest gripe about an otherwise top-notch show. In the final scene, when Clara becomes an Angel, First Class and much is made of her graduating to winged status, Daniel De Niese suddenly shot up, supported by wires, from behind the chorus, swinging wildly hither and yon, up and down in a ludicrous simulacrum of angel flight, singing gamely about her enhanced, winged status, but self-evidently, wingless.
What on earth was going on? ENO must have a set of dusty old wings in the props department. Failing that a respectable Yummy Bee set of angel wings is available – five colour choices, real feathers – on Amazon for £17.97. I just don’t get what point costume designer, Gabrielle Dalton, was trying to make by scrooging on the wings. In San Francisco all the angels’ wings were amazing. They even flapped.
“Hang on, Daddy, that angel’s still got no wings”. Sadly, as true at curtain fall as at the opera’s beginning. An annoying glitch in an otherwise savvy and sparkling production.
And Another Thing!
Eno’s fight for survival continues. Discussions are afoot to determine how best to access Art Council England’s proffered £15m lifeline, while maintaining a presence in London.
Legislators are being lobbied. Management recently gave evidence to the House of Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee. The distraction of the committee chair, Tory MP Julian Knight, having the party whip suspended is an unhelpful distraction.
And the Bryn Terfel supported petition, #Love ENO, continues to gather pace. 70,749 signatures – and rising. Go on! Join me. Sign it to keep ENO alive and kicking. Onwards, to 75,000 and beyond.