Stage 2001: Performances kept spirits strong

Humor, inspiration, innovation, tradition: They were qualities we needed in quantity during 2001, and local stages were prime sources of spiritual refuge and relief.

By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic
© St. Petersburg Times
published December 23, 2001

[Times photo: Thomas M. Goethe]

A high point for opera was reached when Anton Coppola, composer, librettist and conductor, presented his work Sacco & Vanzetti at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center.

It's a little hard to think back clearly on a year that came to be dominated by war, but upon reflection, I must say that 2001 had its moments in the performing arts. Here are a few of my most vivid memories, good and bad.

SACCO & VANZETTI: Anton Coppola's opera, about one of the towering political cases of the 20th century, premiered at the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center. Not only was it a triumph for Coppola, who wrote the libretto, composed the score and conducted the Florida Orchestra in the pit, but it also was a coup for Opera Tampa, the outgrowth of a company formed by TBPAC only five years ago. Coppola's opera, with its romantic score and bilingual text, was superbly sung, and Matthew Lata's inventive staging kept the drama moving.

VERDI: 2001 was the centenary of Verdi's death, and Sarasota Opera brought an electrifying sense of occasion to its performance of his Requiem at Van Wezel Hall. At the exact moment of Verdi's death in 1901 -- 8:50 p.m. on Jan. 26, taking into account the time difference between Florida and Italy -- artistic director Victor DeRenzi brought down his baton to begin an exhilarating traversal of the Mass. Later in the season, the company had a rare production of Verdi's first opera, Oberto.

THERE IS NOTHING LIKE A DAME: Any year that includes a visit from Dame Edna can't be all bad. With her genius for a kind of crackpot intimacy, this Australian housewife turned megastar (the inspired creation of actor Barry Humphries) elevates schoolboy humor to an art form. "You've saved on clothes, haven't you, dear?" Edna asked a woman in the audience at Ruth Eckerd Hall. "What is that you're wearing, a sleeping bag?" Far from being insulted or intimidated, audience members loved the Dame's brand of tough love.

BERG: To hear Cho-Liang Lin's performance of the Berg Violin Concerto, with the Florida Orchestra under Jahja Ling, was like being put under a spell. There is a thick, narcotic quality to the sound of the concerto, a haunting hybrid of dissonance and lyricism. It was fascinating to have it on the same program with Brahms' Symphony No. 3, the epitome of romanticism before Mahler, before Freud, before the carnage of World War I. All those factors paved the way for the rise of the harsh new musical language of Berg and Webern and their mentor in serialism, Schoenberg.

BELLE: Never miss a chance to see a legend. At 75, Julie Harris toured in The Belle of Amherst, her signature role as the reclusive poet of 19th century New England, Emily Dickinson. Hearing this legend was another matter. Purist that she is, Harris did not use a body mike in Mahaffey Theater, and it was sometimes hard to catch her lines. But when she reached back and declaimed one of Dickinson's powerful poems, each syllable was clear as a bell.

CROSSOVER: Ensemble Galilei gives the impression of making a kind of music that its members had to discover by themselves. There are no role models, no pre-existing patterns to follow, for a group of such eclectic instrumentation, from Celtic harp to viola da gamba, percussion to bagpipe to pennywhistle. It plays "early music/Celtic crossover," and there were elements of both classical and folk genres in the concert at Tarpon Springs Performing Arts Center. Especially impressive was fiddler Laura Risk, whose treatment of a Scottish reel had the elegance of a sonata, as if Mozart had come from the Isle of Skye.

CURE: Call it schmaltzy, but Sing for the Cure, an oratorio on breast cancer consisting of songs by 10 composers, was given a passionate performance by the Tampa Bay Gay Men's Chorus and Crescendo: the Tampa Bay Women's Chorus at Tampa Performing Arts Center. There wasn't a dry eye in the theater when the swelling music was combined with video interviews with breast cancer survivors Diana Rose and Roseanne Boyd.

ENCORE: What's the best way to wind up an orchestra concert? By playing more music, of course. A pair of Russian orchestras -- the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra and the Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra -- both prolonged their programs at Ruth Eckerd Hall with one crowd-pleasing bonbon after another.

BOOT HILL: American Stage sent another artistic director packing when it fired Ken Mitchell in October, the third time in the past four years the theater has made an abrupt change in leadership. At least Mitchell, whose track record was uneven but respectable, could take satisfaction in leaving on a high note, having just directed an exuberant stage adaption of three stories by Zora Neale Hurston, Spunk.

GORILLA: Thankfully for theatergoers with a taste for adventurous work, Gorilla Theatre has developed into an innovative producer with its own quirky identity. Two of its shows this year -- Wallace Shawn's The Designated Mourner and the Henry Krieger-Bill Russell musical Side Show -- were essential theater.

HELPS: The bay area lost its most distinguished composer, Robert Helps, who died of cancer at 73 in November. Helps had received a gratifying tribute in February when conductor William Wiedrich and the University of South Florida Symphony Orchestra played his first and second symphonies on the same program at the Palladium Theater. The first was written in 1955, and the second symphony was premiered 45 years later by the Florida Orchestra. Helps, a longtime professor at the school, who attended the Palladium concert, was typically droll, calling it "a once-in-a-universe occasion."

TAYLOR: The Paul Taylor Dance Company made its first appearance since 1989 in St. Petersburg, Tampa or Clearwater. At 71, Taylor is one of the last of the modern-dance pioneers, still creating several new works a year for his marvelous company, which performed at Ruth Eckerd Hall. A Taylor dance has a cerebral, rigorous architecture, but the viewer's awareness of that is largely unconscious, to be figured out later, because the eye is so bedazzled by the sheer beauty of the moment. To see such a generous range of Taylor choreography -- Dandelion Wine, Antique Valentine, Cloven Kingdom and Company B -- was a treat.

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