opera

West Edge Opera presents a daring “Powder Her Face”

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She is a highly sexed woman …”

West Edge Opera is getting a reputation. Last year it was Lulu, this year it’s Powder Her Face. Both productions brilliantly directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer. In Powder Her Face, Pulitzer’s no-holds-barred direction allowed the audience another seamless journey through depravity, this time via the rancid sexual romps of 1950s England, as presented in Thomas Adès’ opera about Margaret Campbell, the scandalous Duchess of Argyll.

While Alban Berg’s Lulu embodies the corrupt society of late 19th-century Vienna through its heroine’s amorality, Powder Her Face presents, finally, the dilemma of beautiful women who are allowed license for transgressive behavior in a sexually repressive society, that is until they no longer have money or physical allure. That may not have been the original intent of the composer and librettist, but it is a noticeable theme in the West Edge Opera production.

Powder Her Face is Adès’ first opera, a commission from London’s Almeida Theater, which the composer shared with novelist and librettist Philip Hensher. Adès was 24 when the opera premiered in 1995. His music is vivid and excessive, and was written for 15 players. Along with strings, clarinets, brass, keyboards and harp, there is an array of percussion instruments and a few bizarre found instruments, including fishing reels and electric bells. A Swanee whistle adds ironic slides to the sound field. Maestra Mary Chun brought several of her musicians from the new music ensemble Earplay to the production and kept the difficult music in line and under baton.

The opera’s overture begins with a jazzy tango that sounds slightly sour and aggressively predatory. Dissonance rules, and the music rushes, tumbles and falls as abruptly as it rises. Into the stage set of a hotel room dominated by an enormous bed stumbles a figure in mink coat and long red gloves, followed quickly by a blond in a French maid costume. It’s the Electrician and the Maid, sung by tenor Jonathan Blalock and soprano Emma McNairy. The year is 1990 and the pair ridicules the Duchess, who is about to be evicted from her posh hotel for nonpayment of bills.

The Duchess, sung by Laura Bohn, enters and, seeing the brash interlopers, is humiliated. She demands they leave. They comment that the Duchess’ perfume, the expensive and inappropriately named Joy, “evaporates into air./ Like everything.” When they leave the Duchess’ thoughts turn to her days as a young and beautiful woman, connected to an unreachable class that is capable of ignoring conventional morality with impunity. But marrying requires that she sacrifice her autonomy. The Electrician as Lounge Lizard comments, “she has the look of one who will let herself be beaten for money.” Eventually, she marries the Duke of Argyll, sung by baritone Hadleigh Adams. The French horn resonates ominously during the wedding.

One unchanging lyric soprano sings the role of the Duchess, while the other three singers share a number of roles from Rent Boy to Judge, Rubbernecker to Journalist. McNairy’s parts have a tessitura that is hair-raising, and the famous onstage sex scenes (for both sexes) are characterized by spasmodic and challenging vocalization. Something like baroque ornamentation gone awry. There is irony here, and an adventurous musical wit.

The Maid tidies up after the wedding, singing a long aria on being rich: “Fancy being her … I’d eat breakfast in a tiara/ … I’d eat nothing that wasn’t lovely in aspic and hard work for someone.”

The Duchess’ infidelities are finally revealed to her husband during a tawdry encounter between the Duke and his Mistress, costumed as a schoolgirl: “Naughty naughty Daddy.” Under the Mistress’ prompting he finds the Polaroids that reveal the Duchess in flagrante. In real life these Polaroids were crucial in the divorce trial that led to Campbell’s social destruction. The trial reached the courts in 1962, and members of the government were implicated. The John Profumo scandal kept the courts from pursuing possible participants, and the four-and-one-half-hour sentence shivered over the Duchess’ promiscuity. The opera turns the words of the presiding judge, Lord Wheatley, into a succinct aria, “She is a woman who has no scruples, and the morals of a bed-post.” And the production decorates it with the Judge’s ongoing sexual delectation.

This excellent production moved deftly through the eight scenes and epilogue that comprise the life of Margaret Campbell, providing clear evidence that this small East Bay–based company can take on the most challenging of operas, both musically and theatrically, and handle them with panache and precision.

– Jaime Robles

 

Photo: Laura Bohn (center) as the scandalous Duchess of Argyll with Jonathan Blalock and Emma McNairy in West Edge Opera’s production of Thomas Adès’ opera, “Powder Her Face.”