THE great
thing about Graham Vick’s promenade performances
for Birmingham Opera Company is that they are so
easy to leave, which a decent number duly did. At
least that freed up floorspace in this old
car-works in an industrial inner suburb of
Birmingham in which scurrying extras barge through
the audience trying, with varying success, to
involve everyone in the story.
It’s a high-class pro-am set-up Vick has here:
ten singers and orchestra backed by 200 locals as
chorus, dancers and backstage staff. The result is
a wrenchingly moving and life-affirming
Candide with the mad vivacity it had in the
heads of its fabulous group of creators
(Bernstein, Lillian Hellman, Sondheim, Dorothy
Parker et al) before it was so disastrously mucked
around.
This is Voltaire meets Brecht, with no satire
underplayed. If you thought Optimism was a stupid
philosophy confined to the 18th century, prepare
to meet it again in the hands of our old friends
the Yanks.
Viewers wishing for the “balance” beloved of
newspaper letter writers will be disappointed:
from Dr Pangloss’s first lecture, via Billy Graham
parody (“Everything that is, is good”) to
rampaging soldiers and self-justifying politicians
(“Are our methods legal or illegal?”), to a priest
in a tank (“See the new domains of God!”), it is a
pretty violent attack. But it’s not unduly limited
— Voltaire took a dim view of the whole of
humanity, particularly those in power: no prizes
for guessing where he’d stand on current
liberations.
Mark Wilde is the perfect ingénu, floppy hair,
ghetto pants and baby-blue All-Star hi-tops,
sweetly baffled by his misfortunes, touching in
his laments and finally roused to bitter despair
when he finds his beloved Cunegonde (the very game
Donna Bateman) whoring herself in Venice. This is
the only bit of Voltaire significantly changed,
and it works a treat, set in a red hell of lust
and degradation and perfectly setting up the
resigned, uplifting finale.
Andrew Slater carries the show as the narrator
and Pangloss in his various avatars, spitting out
his bitter songs while remaining genuinely comic.
But this really is that abused term, a true
company event, from Yannis Thavoris’s inventive
designs to the punchy orchestra under Stuart
Stratford and the tangoing extras.
Total opera, full of anger, disgust, great
music that has rarely sounded so fresh, and the
far from simple joys of being alive; absolutely
unmissable.
Box office: 0121-440
3838
