Long story short. After a thousand-year stint reincarnated as a snake, Madame White Snake wakes up a woman again, with her half-ophidian servant Xiao Quing (whose love she does not requite) in tow. She meets a Xu Xian (a doctor no less, who did well on the civil service exams!), they fall in love, get married, she gets knocked-up, distrust ensues largely due to the meddling of the local abbot Fahai, there’s a big fight, and then everybody dies, save for Xiao Quing who survives to relate to us this classic Chinese fable, adapted for the Opera Boston stage by former trial lawyer and amateur librettist Cerise Lim Jacobs and Chinese-American composer Zhou Long.
That’s how Madame White Snake goes and the local press leading up to this much anticipated premiere (we don’t see too many of those in Boston, do we) hasn’t let us to forget the plot. But, of course, plot is the least important component of opera. It’s only there as a vehicle for emotions to be conveyed in dazzling (or equally somber) displays of music, voice, and visual and atmospheric spectacle. For plots we have movies, novels, plays, and legends such as that which this new work is based on. We don’t need the inefficiencies of opera to tell us a story, but rather communicate the subtleties and pathos of one we already know.
With all the librettos that must be coming out of MFA programs and MacBooks resting on IKEA desks, it’s amazing that it’s this one that got produced because it’s really not that contemporary. That’s not to say it’s not inapplicable to the human experience in its conveyance of Truth and Love, but no more than Mozart or Puccini. It seems, not only foreign in its setting, but in the historicized emotions that power it. Even Zhou Long’s music is, for the most part, romantically conventional, aside from the airy passages played on Chinese bamboo and clay flutes and the celestial music written for erhu that does not, thank God, bear any resemblance to campy incarnations of Chinese traditionalism. The last thing I wanted going into this was the score to a Chinese or Korean TV period drama.
It’s director Robert Woodruff’s staging that brings the production out of the Ming Dynasty and into the 21st century, as well as the other-worldly part of Xiao Quing, the Madame’s unrequited lover (above), sung by male soprano Michael Maniaci that (though the part is rooted in the transvestic traditions of Chinese opera) that takes the production out of this world.
Ying Huang (as Madame White Snake) and Peter Tantsits (as Xu Xian) (Clive Grainger)
From the prologue through the epilogue, Michael Maniaci’s Xiao Quing is utterly captivating. Streaked makeup and a bizarre twist on a traditional Chinese opera costume visually manifest this deeply forlorn and marginalized character, who’s been relegated to a space outside everyone else’s world by his/her unrequited love, survival, and hybrid form. Xiao Quing gets the most interesting music from Gil Rose’s orchestra and Maniaci’s voice is so unique it almost sound not human, thus fitting the role perfectly.
Xiao Quing’s plaintive devotion to Madame is countered by her self-obsessed naive (but sometimes vixen-like) hubris. Her initial transformation to human form leaves her in a peach-colored gown that gives her the look of am anachronistic Hollywood starlet–a Norma Desmond of feudal China. At other times she looks like something that’s just strolled out of an opium den. Soprano Ying Huang, in her Boston debut, was expressive and vocally tantalizing in the role. She embodies ingenue, seductress, and some kind of wrathful demi-God all in one–shifts in character that cleverly account for the different spins China’s history and culture have put on the legend over the centuries. Ying Huang maintained a powerful stage presence with sometimes serpentine motions about the stage and animal-like screeches of frustration and pain.
Ying Huang (as Madame White Snake) (Clive Grainger)
Woodruff’s staging looked like something that we would’ve seen on the Loeb stage a few years back. Actually, David Zinn’s set (built by the ART) and Mark Barton’s lighting isn’t unlike the set of the recent ART Institute production of Hamletmachine in its simplicity and reliance on fluorescent lights and shifting vivid lighting coloring (visible in the photographs here). Take away the lighting, projections, arrays of fluorescent light bulbs, and series of drop-down opaque projection screens, and all you’re really left with is a simple room with pictures of dead kids stuck to the walls that look like they were printed on Opera Boston’s office laser-jet.
Peter Nigrini provided a number of abstract video projects that all appear to have been run through Photoshop filters. While the marriage is consummated behind closed doors, we did get a blurry video of two people making it–a tranquil motion of bodies that echoed the first montage of a nude woman and the sea.
Woodruff’s direction is sometimes playful–Anthony Trecek-King’s Boston Children’s Chorus (uncostumed except for some red face paint) appear around the edges of a doorway in a drop-down screen–to mind-blowing visual spectacle–a mobile of drowned bodies. Subtler, less visual touches include an elegant pause before Act IV (Winter: Betrayal) in lieu of any explicit demarcation and a parallel between White Snake’s meeting of her lover Xu Xian (the weakest and least interesting character musically, sung by Peter Tantsits) in the first act parallels her first portentous encounter Abbot Fahai (Dong-Jian Gong), a punked-out vagrant that doesn’t look unlike a skeletal monster, in the third. Formally, this is one of the stronger components of the libretto and a clever musical and narrative parallel. Each encounter is a kind of snake-ballet, with overlapping dialogue that strobes between conversation and operatic introspection. The two lovers ruminate on love, Madame and her meddling enemy speak of Truth and the path to Nirvanna.
Fahai endeavors to undo the lover’s rapture, and waters the seed of distrust Xu Xian has for his wife. Of course, despite whatever prenup I might’ve agreed to, I’d raise an eyebrow too if my wife disappeared one night a month with her half-snake servant–even if she was just moulting down by the river. The final blow of his meddling is accomplished with an abortive portion mixed especially for Madame, which he gives to Xu Xian. She knowingly takes it and the visually stunning epilogue commences. Madame’s scarlet dress expands across the village chorus (which makes for a well populated stage throughout most of the opera and provides Greek chorus-like interjections), representing the flood White Snake brings upon the village in her fiercely scored and fatal battle with Fahai. Her dress is torn away, exposing her false belly. It must just be something about a woman parading vehemently about a stage with her false stomach showing, but you just know things are gonna go bad for everyone.
Peter Tantsits (as Xu Xian) and Ying Huang (as Madame White Snake) (Clive Grainger)
