f my encounter with opera is to be a kind of irony repression therapy, I should iron out what I mean by irony. Let’s say we can split the world of aesthetic pleasure into three camps: those who can feel; those who cannot feel; and those who feel but have found the tools to cover it up, to look cool. The last camp describes the nonchalant posture known as sprezzatura, an Italian term coined by Count Baldassare Castiglione in the sixteenth century to describe the ideal courtier: skilled in arms, fine arts, music, and dance, but without affect or emotional flourish. You could say sprezzatura is at the root of twentieth-century Gen X/Gen Y/Millennial “whatever” culture that takes nothing that’s too serious too seriously: the culture of irony. Which, by the way, has been declared dead over and again in the past ten years (9/11 was to be the end of irony; the Obama election of 2008 was to be the end of irony), but ironically irony persists. See Twitter: the literature of crank, instant judgment, and smartassery.Living at the far end of Gen X, a totally arbitrary demographic mark that works mainly to separate me from the too-earnest baby boomers (by about a year), I can pin my own taste for cool irony not just to the Finn-trumps-Italian nexus, but to the culture that teaches a boy to raise his eyebrows at the pompous and self-important. Opera is, for me, what cartoons tell me it is: highbrow and elite, the fat tenor Giovanni Jones in “Long-Haired Hare,” who is brought to a lung-busting, collar-snapping, impossible high G by Bugs Bunny, who is dressed as the great conductor Leopold Stokowski and won’t let the singer off the hook until the whole concert shell collapses on top of him; Fred Flintstone (season one, episode five, “The Split Personality”), who suffers a conk to the head and awakes as Frederick, his own opera-loving alter ego. Frederick sings off-key arias to the record player (the stylus of which is a long-suffering, long-billed bird who covers his ears with earmuffs to block out the noise), torturing Wilma and the neighbours, and is finally returned to his senses through the cartoon logic of a second conk to the head (rock, door jamb). Opera is at odds with the cool, lowbrow, but democratic tastes of working-class heroes like Bugs and Fred. No coincidence, they share an age with Warhol and pop art that makes the same joke about the great masters.
But late in life, I’ve come to see that the problem with irony is that it provides a reflexive means for missing the point. Watch “Long-Haired Hare” again, as I did recently, and you’ll see that Bugs is not so much poking fun at opera as he is kicking the stilts from under artistic pretension, the diva (or, in the case of Giovanni Jones, the divo) whose ego gets in the way of his art. In “The Split Personality,” the bird doesn’t hate opera (in fact, he debates with Frederick the merits and flaws of the music); he just hates bad opera. Neither case is an indictment of art, but rather the people who take it too seriously and pervert it. Maybe I’ve been avoiding opera not because I’m not wired for it, but because I’m afraid if I do accidentally fall in love I’ll be on the fast track to twin pairs of glasses and a lavender tie: I fear my own inner Frederick.
ohn Easterlin is a Broadway veteran, a Tony Award winner turned opera star from New York, and a master puppeteer. About my age, with boyish features and stature, and a helmet of hair last seen in the New Romantics craze of the ’80s, he has a seemingly endless supply of long-sleeved, striped rugby shirts that come near to his knees. In early rehearsals, he seems grumpy, brusque, and fidgety. He plays the dual role of the Dancing Master and Brighella, one of the four commedia dell’arte clowns who are busy onstage with tough choreography, antics involving a mix of (deliberately) awkward ballet, Irish dance, and the tossing and catching of props, including umbrellas and plastic pineapples. His partners are three young male singers who play clowns.Running through the act two routine, in which they try to cheer up a grief-stricken Ariadne (whose stand-in for this rehearsal is a towel laid out on the floor downstage), the boys study their feet. Denni Sayers, the choreographer, makes it clear: pointed toes are good toes, flexed toes are bad toes, and all things being equal she prefers good toes.
Armfield, the director, watches from behind a table loaded with scores, binders, Post-it Notes, a jug of water, and a cup of pencils. I have been to a few rehearsals at this point, and always there is a cup of pencils, and no one ever uses them. I assume them to be talismanic, like candles in a church.
The rehearsal hall is a ballet studio in the old warehouse, with one mirrored wall, a sprung floor, the waist-level dancers’ barre. In one corner is the piano, an upright, on which the pianist plays stop-start with the Strauss score, standing in for the orchestra.
“You’re going to take off and land on the same foot,” Sayers says to the group, “and your back leg is in an arabesque. Do bend your leg when you land.” She is wispy as a reed, with a dancer’s physique, close-cropped hair, big eyes, and toes that point in the good way under Patagonia yoga pants. “No, not that leg,” she says to one of them.
“Be facing Ariadne,” Armfield says, and the commedia boys consider the towel.
“I have a suggestion,” Sayers responds. “A bit of Rudolf Nureyev. You hop on the right foot with a little semicircle. If you were doing classical ballet, you’d cross the back foot, so we set up the expectation of Rose Adagio, but what we get is Riverdance.”
In action, it is genuinely funny, raunchy stuff, vaudeville meets German opera: Easterlin swings across the stage in a Groucho Marx strut, wagging a plastic salami. Sayers tells him to bop one of the clowns in the belly with it; he swings hard and hits his partner square in the nuts. The music stops.
Easterlin frowns and walks a quick circle. This is not the way it was yesterday, he says. The moves are changing; he can’t keep track. The first run-through, he mentions, is two days away, and the head of the COC will be there to see it. All this action, it can’t be worked out in time. The other comedians look at the floor.
“The good news,” adds Sayers, “is you’re singing while you do this.”
“Well, fantastic,” says one of the clowns, laughing. Easterlin folds his arms.
