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Hydrogen Jukebox
Reviewed by Myron Meisel
Long Beach Opera at CRAFTED Warehouse/Port of L.A., San Pedro
Through June 7
RECOMMENDED:
Allen Ginsberg may not have quite been Walt Whitman, but he was certainly the Walt Whitman of our lifetimes. To paraphrase Andrew Sarris on Orson Welles, while he could be a great bravura poet, he was an incomparable bravura personality.
Prophet, sage, savant and blowhard, Ginsberg redefined the public role of the poet for the postwar age. If verse has always been the literary analogue of music, Ginsberg wrenched his new language into chant and bombast, ever mindful of the melody in the incantory. I have always been unreasonably fond of the very notion of Allen Ginsberg, and of his inimitable voice, even when he overstretched from bard to crooner. His broad shadow obscured many worthy lesser Beats, and he brandished his outsized ego with all the abashed enthusiasm of a truly conflicted Joo-Bood.
Ginsberg collaborated comfortably with many musicians throughout his career, none more felicitously than with Philip Glass, a kindred spirit if an utterly contrasting character. Their 1989 Hydrogen Jukebox, last seen here at Royce Hall in 1991, has been revived by Long Beach Opera in an inspired reimagining by director David Schweizer. Utilizing a vast warehouse at the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, a rectangular space both utterly plain and ripe for enchantment, equally redolent of faded working-class labor and commercial gigantism, Schweizer takes what is essentially a song-cycle of 15 Ginsberg verses and wrangles it into a genuine theatrical, if not dramatic, spectacle. He takes the intimate soul-baring of the verse and animates it into epical gestures well-attuned to Ginsberg’s invocation of large historical forces.
Gone are the Jersey inflections of the author’s own distinctive readings, apportioned instead among the amusing conceit of “six characters in search of a poet,” a cadre of splendid singers, necessarily amplified in the great hall, a parallel half-dozen choreographed “disciples of the poet,” presided over by the figure of the mythic Poet himself (Michael Shamus Wiles). Wiles avoids the least hint of impersonating Ginsberg, instead evoking what may be deemed an Ideal form of a ringmaster of the American imagination (Schweizer being no stranger to animating Plato).
Ginsberg’s cadenced jeremiads are enhanced by remarkably sensitive settings by Glass, still working within his own style yet always on paramount alert to shading and enriching the meanings of the original texts, liberating them to take on a life of their own apart from their creator. As in his soundtracks, and opposed to his operas (LBO has done first-rate mountings of Akhnaten and The Fall of the House of Usher), Glass serves the pre-existing work, as in turn do Schweizer and his dedicated singers. The band configures quite closely to Glass’ seminal touring band of the 1970s, which would play venues like the Roxy on Sunset Strip. Here, are two synthesizers, two percussionists, one player on soprano sax and flute, and another on tenor sax and bass clarinet.
Planted in that the netherland between the grandiloquent and the grandly eloquent, most of Ginsberg’s poems genuinely blossom from Glass’s fecund soil and Schweizer’s savvy landscaping. I found the most personal poems to be, paradoxically, the most topical, such as his ode to his repressed, politically radical Aunt Rose or his tender love-song to Peter Orlovsky. Thankfully, the production recognizes, as Ginsberg himself did, that he could be most funny when his flights of rhetorical fancy exploded in outsized outlandishness.
Granted, the prolific inventive demands of keeping a series of 15 poems varied and distinctive do occasionally force Schweizer into recycling many tricks from his veteran’s kit-bag, but the same is true for Glass and Ginsberg, as it probably is for any durable artist.
In this closing presentation of this season, LBO once again demonstrates its resourcefulness and originality. This 25-year old concoction has now evolved into a period piece, even as, when new, it trafficked in memories of earlier eras. Its social commentary remains trenchant without any need to contort its original context. As with so many cautionary indictments of the past, its outrage and foreboding can seem quaint when confronted with the worsening depradations that comprise our present.
Long Beach Opera at Opera at CRAFTED Warehouse at the Port of Los Angeles, San Pedro; Sat., June 6, 2:30 & 8 p.m.; Sun., June 7, 7 p.m. (562) 432-5934, https://www.longbeachopera.org
