Waiting hundreds of years for a premiere…

ANTONY AND CLEOPATRA – coming soon to Arizona

Last weekend, listening to Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy in the form of Southwest Shakespeare’s single-shot condensation, Blood Royal, I pondered the fact these words had never before been spoken on a stage in Arizona.

Director Jared Sakren had announced prior to curtain that Blood Royal constituted the Arizona premiere of Henry VI. He then added that the company’s upcoming Antony and Cleopatra (slated for spring) would also be an Arizona premiere.

We somehow have the idea that everything “classic” has been done, that the great plays, operas and symphonies have received their exposure to all willing audiences. Not true. Not, at least, in Arizona.

George Bernard Shaw, for example, is grossly underproduced. Southwest Shakespeare recently brought us Pygmalion and Arms and the Man, and Arizona Theatre Company (ATC) once did a Candida. Saint Joan, Major Barbara, Heartbreak House – these have never been staged, so far as I can tell. Ibsen goes pretty much by the wayside as well. ATC did Ghosts about a decade back, and someone must have done A Doll’s House – right? But I can find no record of The Wild Duck or Enemy of the State having been produced here.

We’ve had an opera company for over 30 years, so all the major Mozart operas have been done, one might reasonably assume. (We’re not counting obscurities like Lucio Silla.) But no. When Arizona Opera stages Abduction from the Seraglio in the spring, it will be the Arizona premiere of that sparkling comedy. We’ll have to wait a little longer, I guess, for Idomeneo.

The list of symphonic scores never performed locally is too long to print. But it will soon be at least two scores shorter, courtesy conductor Warren Cohen’s Musica Nova group. Musica Nova’s upcoming season will include the Arizona premieres of Bruckner’s Symphony No. 6 and the Violin Concerto No. 2 of Shostakovich.

We often complain we don’t get enough new art, and I would second that emotion, adding that one can’t get enough new art. But it seems we could use a lot more of the old, too.

– Ken LaFave

Shakespeare vs. Joan of Arc

Southwest Shakespeare’s Blood Royal, a one-evening adaptation of Shakespeare’s Henry VI trilogy, includes among its characters Joan of Arc. I plan to attend Blood Royal this week, and I look forward to seeing how the adaptation treats her, as The Maid of Orleans appears in Part One of the Bard’s original, not as an heroic figure, but as a conniving witch — a partisan of Evil France against the just reign of Good Ol’ England.

It’s only natural Shakespeare would have taken the part of his own country against her age-old nemesis. But it must be difficult today, given centuries of Joan-adoration, to portray her as anything other than a brave and holy warrior of mystical stature. More than a hundred novels have been written on her life, including one by, of all unlikely authors, Mark Twain. “She is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced,” Twain wrote – amazing words from cynical old Sam Clemens. Verdi and Tchaikovsky both composed operas about her, though no one does them any more, and even this year, Rhode Island composer Steven Jobe unveiled his operatic take on the subject.

Joan is the subject of many hundreds of visual portrayals, none of them accurate, since the only painting she sat for has been lost. Southwest Shakespeare’s publicity claims their Joan is “beautiful,” though there’s every reason to believe she was as plain as an ill-fed peasant girl of that era must have been. (The image above is pure conjecture by an artist working in 1485, decades after her death.) And of course there are movies, including the 1957 lemon with Ingrid Bergman looking ridiculously pretty in clunky plate armor, and a recent made-for-TV biopic for which those responsible should be burned at the stake. Figuratively speaking.

The best film by far is Carl Theodor Dreyer’s silent masterpiece, The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), in which a mannish, anguished Joan doubts everything save the persistence and ultimate truth of her own inner vision. It is that vision which got her killed by the Church in the 15th century, and that selfsame vision which got her made into Saint Joan of Arc by the Church five centuries later. Just a matter of perspective, I guess.

– Ken LaFave