Peanut. By Ayun Halliday.
Illustrated by Paul Hoppe. Schwartz & Wade. $15.99.
Kyong Mee Choi: The Eternal Tao.
JulieAnn Zavala, mezzo-soprano; Brad Jungwirth, baritone; Samantha Stein,
Allison Hull, Jeff Jablonski and Chadley Ballantyne, chorus; Ensemble Del
Niente conducted by Michael Lewanski. Ravello DVD. $24.99.
Joseph Summer: Shakespeare’s
Memory. Navona. $16.99.
The methods of
presenting dramatic events to an audience are thousands of years old, dating
back to Greek theater and beyond. But they are not immutable. Modern-day
storytellers, aware of changing consciousness and changing tastes in today’s
audiences, are constantly seeking new ways to put their ideas across
effectively. The new methods may take some getting used to for those accustomed
to traditional ones, and in truth many of the new approaches are experimental
and will likely not survive long. But concepts that build on existing dramatic
methods do have a good chance of adapting to modern ways of thinking and being
taken to heart by today’s audiences. Take the graphic novel, for example. An
amalgam of traditional storytelling with comic-book illustration – although the
illustrations are generally done with greater care and attention to detail than
in most comics – graphic novels are proving a durable form and an effective way
of communicating in book format with young people living video-saturated lives.
They are an entertainment medium, but some creators want them to be more – for
example, Ayun Halliday and Paul Hoppe. Their graphic novel Peanut (the title is actually a very realistically drawn peanut)
tackles the serious subject of peanut allergies and related health crises in
the context of a typical high-school story about the new kid wanting to fit in
even if that means creating a fictional persona. The story as a whole is a sort
of “girl who cried wolf” tale in which Sadie, the protagonist, wants so badly
to be noticed and accepted at her new high school that she invents a peanut
allergy and uses it as a conversational gambit with just about everyone –
students, teachers and administrators. Sadie goes to great lengths with her
story, even ordering an “allergy bracelet” online and wearing it at school
(while of course concealing it at home).
The story arc is predictable: she will be exposed as a fraud and
ostracized. And that is what happens, when she eats something that a teacher
believes (wrongly) to contain peanuts, and the teacher panics – along with
everyone else – and paramedics rush to the scene, and soon Sadie is exposed as
a pathetic fraud. But Halliday and Hoppe
handle the situation skillfully enough so that readers sympathize with Sadie’s
plight even while disagreeing with the actions she has taken. It is hard to fit in at a new school, it is difficult as a teenager to change
peer groups, and it is tempting to
find something to make yourself stand out even if that requires a “little white
lie” that you are sure will never be exposed.
Sadie more than gets her comeuppance – although her boyfriend and her
mother do give her considerable empathy and understanding after getting over
how upset she has made them. The story itself is rather too obvious for its own
good, but Halliday and Hoppe deserve credit for effectively tackling a serious
subject – or rather two serious subjects, health emergencies and fitting-in
angst – in a new medium.
Just as graphic novels
build on traditional novels and comic books, some modern sort-of-operas –
Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre comes
immediately to mind – build on musical stage works of the past while forging
new forms of dramatic communication. The
Eternal Tao is in the Ligeti tradition, to the extent that a work revised
as recently as 1996, as Ligeti’s was, can be said to have a tradition. Kyong
Mee Choi uses the trappings of opera to communicate here, but this work is
correctly dubbed a “multimedia opera” because of the way it employs its musical
and stage forces. Everyone is a part of
the whole, yet this is not simply an ensemble piece, because the elements
themselves are used in different, nontraditional ways. The vocalists are as
important as a trio of dancers (Allison Anich, Mei-Kuang Chen and Natalie
Williams) but not more so; there are no grandstanding operatic arias or big
ensembles here; and the work’s constant flux is reflected as much in the
lighting and choreography as in the music. Kyong Mee Choi is not only the
composer but also the work’s visual artist, choreographer, director and
producer, a multiplicity of roles that could easily make this come across as a
“vanity” production. But that is not its effect, and the reason is its thematic
material. A novelistic treatment of individual lives with a single person
assuming all those creative and production roles might not work and would likely
seem arrogant, but The Eternal Tao is
a presentation based on Lao Tzu’s Tao Te
Ching, an endlessly fascinating 2500-year-old work whose 81 short poems
observe the human condition without imposing any particular patterns or sets of
strictures (or structure) on people. The Tao
Te Ching can be interpreted in a nearly infinite number of ways, and has
been, and the choice of it as the basis for this “multimedia opera” is a
particularly happy melding of subject matter with presentation. This is experiential opera, placing the Tao Te Ching in a modern context (and
with distinctly modern-sounding music) but being careful not to impose a set of
required emotional or analytical responses on the audience – doing so would be
out of keeping with the spirit of Lao Tzu. The use of video and electronics as
well as traditional elements of opera staging makes perfect sense in this
context, and while The Eternal Tao is
a lot to absorb and is scarcely the sort of operatic work to which lovers of
traditional opera will immediately gravitate, it is a piece in which form and
function work particularly well together, jointly forging a work that partakes
of numerous traditions without being wholly dependent on any one of them. It has a combinatorial newness even though
none of its individual elements, taken on its own, is particularly
revolutionary. And it is quite effective
in presenting the rather rarefied, difficult-to-pin-down-precisely atmosphere
of Lao Tzu’s masterpiece.
One genius whose works
have invited new forms of presentation almost since they were created is
William Shakespeare, and the Shakespeare Concerts series, which began in
Massachusetts and the U.S. Virgin islands in 2003, is but one recent attempt to
find new or additional ways in which the Bard of Avon can connect with the
audiences of today. The atmosphere of Shakespeare’s plays is actually
established in part through music – there are songs throughout them, and
instrumental music is frequently called for – so the concept of this concert series
is right in line with Shakespeare’s own intentions. The composer most associated with the series
is Joseph Summer, and Navona’s new CD devoted to the Shakespeare Concerts series
intelligently focuses on Summer’s works – including the title piece, a string quartet
that, although brief, is the longest work presented here. Eleven of the 12
tracks on this CD are by Summer; the 12th, The Earle of Oxfords Marche, is right out of Shakespeare’s time,
being a harpsichord work by William Byrd (1540-1623). Summer’s melding of old
and new is quite apparent and skillfully handled, and includes songs relating
to the plays (“Full Fathom Five,” “He Shall with Speed to England”), settings
of a number of sonnets, and pieces that do not use Shakespeare’s texts but that
fit the overall ambience of Shakespearean presentation very well indeed (“On
the Death of a Fair Infant,” with words by John Milton, and “Leda and the
Swan,” with words by William Butler Yeats).
Summer composes music that is accessible and not highly individuated –
he subsumes personal style into the material he is creating, which in the case
of Shakespeare-linked works makes a good deal of sense. The Shakespeare settings here all come from
the sonnets, The Tempest or Hamlet, and it would be nice to hear
music that casts a somewhat wider net among Shakespeare’s plays – and is drawn
from less-known or more problematic ones, such as Measure for Measure or King
John. But perhaps that will come in future CDs – just as the Shakespeare
Concerts series has evolved and developed since its beginning, so may Navona’s
issuance of discs based on it. The notion of using music to explicate and
enhance Shakespeare’s words is certainly nothing new – Shakespeare himself,
after all, did just that. But Summer’s treatment of this material is new, and it is easy to see how it can
bring Shakespeare to a 21st-century audience in some very
interesting ways.
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