Come to the cabaret. That’s the invitation that Long Beach Opera is extending with its current production of Francis Poulenc’s 1958 telephone opera, “La Voix Humaine” (The Human Voice).
It’s Friday night and the former bank building known as the Federal Bar on lower Pine Ave in Long Beach is alive with the clatter of plates, raucous conversation and the Lakers finishing their dismal season on a bank of television screens.
Downstairs in the converted cavern known as The Underground Club (formerly home to the bank’s vault), the mood is distinctly different. Meant to approximate the sultry sophistication of a Parisian cabaret, it is the site chosen by Long Beach Opera to present Poulenc’s opera about a frantically distraught woman on the brink of suicide.
Adapted from the 1930 play by Jean Cocteau, “La Voix Humaine” is a portrait in despair and desperation, as a jilted middle-aged woman struggles to hang onto the lover she has lost, her only lifeline a telephone.
Cocteau’s play, with its sole character, single setting and one significant prop, represented a radically pared down theatrical response to critics who had accused his work of incorporating too many on-stage effects.
Poulenc’s operatic adaptation, referred to as a tragédie lyrique, maintained the sparse simplicity of Cocteau’s play while accentuating it with an expansive orchestral score that included strings, winds, an elaborate assortment of percussion instruments, two trumpets and harp. His intention (the composer noted in a preface to his score) was that the entire work be bathed in the largest orchestral sensuality (L’œuvre entière doit baigner dans la plus grande sensualité orchestrale).
Long Beach Opera’s production, which reduces Poulenc’s orchestration to a single piano accompaniment, is more of a dip than a bath. And while the musicianship of pianist Kristof Van Grysperre is able, the solo piano is a pallid substitute for the orchestral coloration, alternating dissonances and drama-defining motifs that illuminate Poulenc’s modernist score.
There is, however, a dramatic trade off. Because what the production lacks in orchestral luster it compensates for with a level of dramatic intimacy you can never experience in an opera house.
Soprano Suzan Hanson, who inhabits the role of the opera’s sole character, Elle, seems to be making a career of playing distraught women — from Medea to the mother of an Iraq war soldier suffering from PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) in LBO’s recent production, “Fallujah.” Her performance as Elle is a star-turn. And because Hanson is so close to the audience on the small stage that represents her Paris apartment (complete with a framed painting by Cocteau), not a single fidget, sigh, smile, tear, dulcet or piercingly loud high note of her harrowing performance is lost.
From the moment Hanson makes her tipsy entrance, clothes askew, hair tousled, the room a shipwreck of scattered clothes, we know we are in for a bumpy ride. And bumpy it is as Elle slingshots between suicidal despair, fantasies of love regained and fits of rage. She also suffers with the agony of spotty telephone reception and maddening interruptions (remember party lines?).
Andreas Mitisek’s direction, though sometime too frenetic, skillfully defines the rise and fall of the drama and the whipsaw fluctuations of Elle’s emotional state whether she is inhaling the lingering aroma left behind on her lover’s sweater, frantically trying to reconnect with him when the line is broken, or systematically laying out pills for a potential suicide. It is a painful process to watch.
Hanson is the latest in a long line of actresses and singers that have taken on the demanding role, including the French soprano Denise Duval, who sang the premiere in 1958, and screen star Ingrid Bergman who played the part in the 1966 film version of the play.
Hanson’s Elle is well into middle age and throughout the performance she gazes into the mirror. One moment all she can see are her wrinkles and graying hair. Then she’ll struggle to put on a smile in an effort to summon forth the vibrantly attractive woman she once was. And while the performance benefits from Hanson’s diction-perfect rendition of the hard-edged English translation, the piece itself, so decidedly French in its original form, suffers.
“La Voix Humaine” is a high-wire act, vocally and dramatically, performed without a net. The range of emotion is extreme, as is the role’s tessitura and vocal dynamics which vary between conversational recitative and all out operatic explosions. It is one of the most exposed roles in opera as the singer has no one to interact with except a series of imaginary conversations and exasperating interruptions. Hanson’s performance is a tour de force as we watch her emotional state decompose before our eyes, one desperate crack at a time.
Since “La Voix Humaine” is only 50 minutes in length, LBO has chosen to fill out the performance with a pre-opera recital of short pieces by Poulenc and Erik Satie. The combinations of songs and rearranged sonata movements are performed by Grysperre on piano, baritone Robin Buck (who also serves as narrator and French dandy), violist Seulgee Park and cellist Christopher Brown.
As I was leaving I couldn’t help wondering what Poulenc and Cocteau might have thought of the performance? No doubt they would be amused by how incredibly phone-dependent we have continued to become. While on a relationship level, they might not be surprised to find that so little has changed.
Jim Farber is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.
Want to go?
Rating: 3 stars
Where: Federal Bar Underground Club, 102 Pine Ave., Long Beach.
When: 7 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday.
Tickets: $67.25-$137.25.
Information: 562-432-5934 or longbeachopera.org.
