From the moment Blanche DuBois walked on the Broadway stage in Tennessee Williams’ “A Streetcar Named Desire,” on Dec. 3, 1947, and admitted, “I have always depended on the kindness of strangers,” her place in the annals of American drama was assured.
Her complex and ultimately tragic combination of Southern belle charm, emotional desperation and capacity for self-deception made Blanche a character no serious actress could resist. Jessica Tandy was the first to play her, opposite that force of nature, Marlon Brando, as Stanley Kowalski.
Vivien Leigh took on the role for the London premiere (directed by her husband, Laurence Olivier) and then played Blanche in the 1951 film version directed by Elia Kazan. On television, Ann-Margret played Blanche to Treat Williams’ Stanley in 1984 and earned a Golden Globe for her performance. Faye Dunaway and John Voight did the roles at the Ahmanson Theatre in 1973. Most recently, Cate Blanchett played Blanche onstage in New York in 2009, and then took home the Oscar for her updated version in Woody Allen’s movie “Blue Jasmine.”
Then there is the opera composed by Andre Previn that had its premiere in San Francisco in 1998. As Previn put pen to score, there was only one woman he had in mind to sing the role of Blanche: soprano Renee Fleming. She sang it that night in 1998, and she has been the only one to sing it ever since. It is her role and she has grown stronger in it with the passage of time, as she demonstrated Sunday as Los Angeles Opera presented the first of three performances of “A Streetcar Named Desire” at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.
This modestly scaled production from Lyric Opera of Chicago, directed by Brad Dalton, is played out on an open stage arranged with an assortment of chairs and a table. The orchestra, conducted by Evan Rogister, is placed onstage behind the singers.
From its darkly tinged opening phrases to its final climactic moment, Previn’s “Streetcar,” accentuated by the Williams-based libretto by Philip Littell, is pure opera theater in which the minimal staging and the strength of the performances hone the drama to a razor’s edge. And at the center of it all is Fleming’s galvanizing performance.
Over the years, Fleming has added nuances and levels of complexity to Blanche that were hinted at, but not fully explored in the first production. We watch as piece-by-piece, revelation-by-revelation, her carefully maintained facade cracks and crumbles. The first crack comes in the aria “I took the blows on my face,” in which she recounts the emotional toll of one family death after another, which led to the loss of the ancestral estate, Belle Reve.
There is the all-important story of her suicide-ending marriage to a young man she discovered to be homosexual (a scene not included in the film), accentuated by the aria “Soft people have got to shimmer and glow.”
We follow her ill-fated courtship by the mama’s boy, Mitch (Anthony Dean Griffey), who is captivated by Blanche’s apparent charms and mystique, in the aria “Give me magic.” It all builds toward Blanche’s final confrontation with Stanley, her rape (the least effective element in the production) and descent into dementia.
Ryan McKinny is a volatile, animalistic Stanley, whose cry of “Stella!” shakes the rafters. There is also the indication that his Stanley, a decorated World War II veteran, is suffering from an undiagnosed case of post-traumatic stress disorder, which partially explains his need for binge drinking and explosive bursts of violence. Watching him with Fleming is like watching a leopard stalk a gazelle.
Stacey Tappan is sympathetic and poignant as his pregnant wife, Stella, a woman who is both brutalized and loved by her husband to the point of sexual rapture. Griffey, who created the role of Mitch in San Francisco, is also excellent as the man drawn to the fluttering figure that is Blanche.
At the time of the opera’s opening, Previn’s score came in for a good deal of criticism. I think much of it was ill-focused and represented a long-held prejudice against composers, especially successful composers, who work in Hollywood and try to cross over into the realm of classical music and opera.
Previn uses a rich musical vocabulary of varying styles and colors to tell the story. There are dark, sultry jazz motifs that embody the New Orleans setting. There are aspects of dissonant modernism that seethe below as the vocal lines sail and intertwine above. In certain moments, one can clearly detect references to Leonard Bernstein and Samuel Barber, while at others, the score takes on the romantic sweep of a Hollywood epic.
“A Streetcar Named Desire” is one the great pieces of American theater. In its operatic incarnation, “A Streetcar Named Desire” presents a memorable piece of American musical theater with Fleming as a Blanche to remember.
Jim Farber is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.
