[ssba]
Marilyn Forever
Reviewed by Myron Meisel
Long Beach Opera at The Warner Grand Theatre
Through March 29
RECOMMENDED:
The paradoxes of Marilyn Monroe provide the basis for her enduring fascination: She assiduously cultivated a celebrity image contrived of caricature, and she maintained rigorous control of it, even as that image belied her vulnerability and debilitating insecurity. She was master, mistress and victim, inevitably self-destructive yet emblematic of a kind of willed empowerment that still commands identification and fantasy. Drawn to powerful men, confident and unprecedented in her blatant sexuality — in on her own joke and still inescapably the butt of it, Marilyn had all the elements to command her own destiny save for her fatal inability to be, and ultimately, to live, as herself.
Of course, that’s only one point of view, and Marilyn remains amenable and pliable to fit nearly any perception one might care to project upon her. Subject to an ineffable amount of analysis throughout her immortality, it has grown nigh impossible to approach her without inevitably exploiting her. Paddy Chayevsky’s dissection in the film The Goddess (1958, starring Kim Stanley) didn’t even need to wait for her suicide to begin the free-for-all.
The U.S. premiere of Marilyn Forever, given by the ever resourceful Long Beach Opera, composer Gavin Bryars and librettist Marilyn Bowering approach the quandary with great compassion, more concentrated on the poetry stimulated by her predicament than on psychological insight or biographical hagiography or expose. LBO artistic director Andreas Mitisek, who directed and designed the production, chose to split the role of Marilyn Monroe into two different sopranos singing as, essentially, the public (Jamie Chamberlin) and private (Danielle Marcelle Bond) Marilyns, the latter disheveled in the bedroom of her guest house on the night she died.
Deftly, Mitisek divides her arias between them, periodically having them sing in unison, each in her separate stage space. It’s hardly a radical concept: the stratagem has been employed before, even in a crass television movie where Ashley Judd played Norma Jeane and Mira Sorvino as Marilyn. Lee Gregory has the unenviable task of embodying all the men in her life, a tactic so reductive that it renders them indistinct where they were in fact domineering.
Bryars has had a laudably varied career, moving from playing advanced jazz on bass with Derek Bailey and Tony Oxley under the nom de guerre of “Joseph Holbrooke” in the 1960s, to the tutelage of John Cage and Cornelius Cardew, to composing a proposed set of five books of madrigals based on early music vocal forms. Ever the proud Yorkshireman, always up to the challenge of a job of work, Bryars evinces a distinctively Northern sensibility even as he hews to myriad esoteric models with a rough-hewn aestheticism, an avant-gardist of the laboring class. His seminal 1975 masterwork, “Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet”, featuring a looped and manipulated sound bite discard of a tramp’s intoning the hymn against various minimalist gestures, was banned from play in my house when other family members were present (a honor shared with Lou Reed’s Metal Music Machine, ironically from the same year): Perhaps the later version with Tom Waits might have found better favor.
Bryars has long been partial to the lower instrumental tones, and his score here eschews any violins whatever, written for clarinet (mostly bass clarinet), bassoon, horn, percussion, 2 violas, cello and two basses, one of which is onstage and played at the opening performance only by Bryars himself, as part of a quasi-jazzy trio including local lights Gavin Templeton on tenor sax and Gary Fukushima on piano. It provides a velvet cushion of anxiety on which the voices rest and float.
No music associated with Monroe is interpolated (even the inevitable “Happy Birthday” is recomposed), instead feinting at occasional suggestions of curdled pop tunes of the era, outfitted with wildly inauthentic lyrics that hardly break the stride of Bowering’s preciously crafted style. This is a true opera, no hybrid or genre crossing, despite Bryars’s attitude for invoking styles without engaging in them.
The result is an essentially Romantic impulse rather rigorously restrained within contemporary compositional modes. The sense of mood may be distinct, but our relation to those moods remains acutely ambiguous. While the music tends toward precise effects, the lyrics trend to lapse into more generalized expressive ideas. It’s an intelligent, even sympathetic, effort, naggingly haunting yet maddeningly elusive in its impact. An eminently practical effort, relatively easy to mount or travel, Marilyn Forever has too much integrity to compromise its vision notwithstanding its highly commercial hook.
This Long Beach Opera rendition makes the most of the score’s virtues. Both Marilyns traverse the rather treacherous lines with the same apparent effortlessness that Monroe herself affected in her own characterizations. (It is ironic that, as her own personality was most thoroughly disintegrating, she was doing her finest work of all in her last three pictures: Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot, George Cukor’s Let’s Make Love, and John Huston’s The Misfits.)
Above all, the physical aspects of the show are extraordinarily rendered, as well-orchestrated as the score itself. Adam Flemming has become one of the go-to video designers on the local theater scene, with a long history with LBO’s most advanced endeavors. His work here, which could have readily been mired in cliché and icon, boasts distinctive shapes and angles, greatly enhanced by the use of simultaneous images of the Marilyns in actual performance, the cameras on either side of the stage. The sophisticated fragmentation sensitively mirrors and enhances the sensibility and thrust of the operatic score, creating an environment in which the drama can unfold as conveyed through the music and voices.
Long Beach Opera at The Warner Grand Theatre, 478 West Sixth Street, San Pedro, Sunday March 29, 2:30pm, 562-432-5934, https://www.longbeachopera.org
