ORLANDO/LUNAIRE devised by conductor Ashiq Aziz and director Patrick Eakin Young from G.F. Handel’s Orlando and Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (Opera Erratica/Classical Music Consort). In a shed behind 128 Sterling. Runs to August 28 at 8 pm. $35, under 30/seniors $20. 1-800-838-3006, brownpapertickets.com. See listing. Rating: NNNN
Sometimes you find beauty in the most surprising productions and places.
Orlando/Lunaire, the latest Underground/Opera presentation by Classical Music Consort and Opera Erratica, promises a mash of Handel’s melodic baroque opera Orlando and Arnold Schoenberg’s atonal 20th century song cycle Pierrot Lunaire, a marriage that suggests some harsh sounds and grating transitions.
The location, a metal-and-wood shed in a west-end industrial area, also conjures up hard edges and images of a factory rather than a fancy evening out.
Instead, in the hands of director/designer Patrick Eakin Young, conductor Ashiq Aziz and two fine singing actors, Scott Belluz and Carla Huhtanen, the evening is a marvel of nuanced emotion, unexpected visuals and splendid music-making.
The story, such as it is, involves a pair of love triangles: Handel’s knight Orlando, his beloved Angelica, who loves not Orlando but rather Medoro Schoenberg relies on the commedia dell’arte threesome of Pierrot, Colombine and Harlequin, who are in a similar tangle of unrequited romance.
But plot isn’t what Orlando/Lunaire is about. Instead, countertenor Belluz and soprano Huhtanen play all six characters, their high-soaring voices perfectly suited to switching of roles, with costume designer Heidi Ackerman facilitating the change of dress so that the performers are sometimes male, sometimes female.
Ackerman’s ruffs, farthingales and black-and-gold diamond-patterned fabrics suggest both the playful commedia world and formal 18th century dress.
Alternately loving, pining, jealous, demanding, driven mad by unsatisfied passion -lunacy evoked by the moon is a key image in the text and the staging – the singers move from the spoken/sung Schoenberg cycle to the flowing music of Handel. Their third partner is a dressmaker’s judy, headless and limbless, the perfect image of a figure who won’t respond to sighs, tears or rages.
Young’s fluid, inventive direction, in front of and behind a see-through scrim in the bare-bones shed where the show is staged, makes use of Burke Brown’s naked light bulbs and hand-held lights.
As in his other productions, the director enriches the action and the characters with projections, this time mostly text (all the German of the Schoenberg is translated, much of Handel’s Italian). But he’s also added complementary lines that comment on the text, and plays with word size, how words appear on the scrim and even turns them at times into a overlaid, graffitied wall of lines, suggesting a character’s emotional overload.
Unlike previous works by the company, Young makes little use of pictorial imagery in his projections the exception is a nude torso, shone onto a farthingale and later, to great effect, onto the judy, giving it a new kind of life.
Aziz’s musical direction, blending the sounds of harpsichord and modern piano, is also a pleasure.
The white-faced singers, working close to the audience, confidently give us all the emotions of the music and the text, even in the difficult, cabaret-style Schoenberg songs.
Some context for the characters would be helpful, either in the production or via program notes. The double triangles are the rear of the shed, for instance, could be used more effectively to explain the characters’ relationships.
Still, Orlando/Lunaire is a powerful, evocative work, full of musical and dramatic surprises. It’s a unique piece of music theatre that adventuresome theatergoers shouldn’t miss.
