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ENTERTAINMENT

Review: Fiery 'Frida' offers intensity and immediacy

Mark Stryker
Detroit Free Press

Composer Robert Xavier Rodriguez's 1991 opera "Frida," which tells the story of the tormented Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, is a hybrid piece of musical theater.

Soprano Catalina Cuervo as Frida Kahlo and bass-baritone Ricardo Herrera in Robert Xavier Rodriguez’s opera “Frida,” coproduced by Michigan Opera Theatre and Macomb Center for the Performing Arts.

Perched halfway between the opera house and Broadway, the work features spoken dialogue, amplified singers and an eclectic and clever score pulsating with the spirit of Mexican folk music, swing, classical modernism and musical quotation.

At its best, the production that opened Saturday at the Macomb Center for the Performing Arts — a collaboration with Michigan Opera Theatre — offered the kind of dramatic intensity and immediacy that's too often missing in performances of standard repertory works. It was not a perfect night in the theater, but it was compelling.

Here's what I mean: Near the end of the first act, Frida and her husband, the famous muralist Diego Rivera, attend a party in New York hosted by the Rockefellers and Fords. A tuxedoed Diego cozies up to the capitalists, but Frida, dressed in colorful Mexican garb, is disgusted at the ostentatious wealth in the face of the bread lines outside. Rodriquez's eclectic score slips into syncopated American jazz, with a sardonic edge to reinforce the disparity and Frida's anger.

The tension soon reaches feverish proportion as two deaths unfold in counterpoint across Monika Essen's two-tiered set design. Up top, Diego's "Rockefeller Center" mural is destroyed for its inclusion of a portrait of the Soviet revolutionary Lenin. On the ground level, against a musical ground of eerie dissonance, Frida has a miscarriage — portrayed as a surreal pantomime with dancers, a piñata-like representation of Frida and red streamers symbolizing blood.

Soprano Catalina Cuervo as Frida Kahlo and bass-baritone Ricardo Herrera in Robert Xavier Rodriguez’s opera “Frida,” coproduced by Michigan Opera Theatre and Macomb Center for the Performing Arts.

A projection of Frida's beautiful nightmare of a painting, "Henry Ford Hospital" (which she created in Detroit in 1932 in the wake of her miscarriage), appears. Diego laments that his work has been turned to dust. Frida sings lyrically, "No one sees the pain ... unless you paint it as your soul is torn apart." Director Jose Maria Condemi stages a quiet yet shattering conclusion: Frida throws streamers (her blood) at a canvas.

Frida Kahlo willed herself into greatness. Her life was filled with opera-scaled emotions and tragedy — from the bus accident as a teenager that left her in lifelong physical pain to the infidelities that threatened to overrun her marriage.

But there was something Saturday about the flowing naturalism of the storytelling, the vernacular familiarity of the score, the honest expression of sexuality, the cozy confines of the Macomb Center, and the dynamic performances of Catalina Cuervo and Ricardo Herrera as Frida and Diego that brought these larger-than-life characters and the sweep of their lives down to human scale.

And despite the liberties taken with the facts of Frida's life in the libretto by Hilary Blecher and Migdalia Cruz — her time with Diego in Detroit is never mentioned among many other inaccuracies — the work is an ideal musical soundtrack to "Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo in Detroit," the exhibition at the Detroit Institute of Arts opening this weekend.

Cuervo, a striking young Colombian-born soprano with a strong if sometimes wild voice, inhabited Frida as if she had been born into the role. She sang and acted with a fiery passion that captured the painter's remarkable life force and sensuality. (She performed a long bathing scene topless.) Herrera's powerfully voiced Diego matched her energy. Of the smaller roles, Alexa Lokensgard as Frida's sister Christina brought an especially supple voice to the stage.

The main tableau of Essen's production design is a little messy and overstuffed with symbols and paintings but it suffices. Conductor Suzanne Acton draws lucid and rhythmically lively playing in all kinds of styles from the 11-piece orchestra, which includes accordion and guitar.

The opera loses some steam in the second act. The pace of the plot slows and Rodriquez's score doesn't pick up the slack, turning a little generic and fading into the background. But the bottom line is that strong memories linger.

Contact Mark Stryker: 313-222-6459 or mstryker@freepress.com


'Frida,' by Robert Xavier Rodriguez

Three stars out of four stars

Produced by Michigan Opera Theatre and Macomb Center

7:30 p.m. March 21; 2:30 p.m. March 22, Berman Center for the Performing Arts, 6600 West Maple, West Bloomfield. $65. 248-661-1900. www.theberman.org

7:30 p.m. March 27 and 28, Detroit Institute of Arts, 5200 Woodward. $55. 313-833-4005. www.dia.org

Tickets also available through MOT: 313-237-7464. www.michiganopera.org