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GELFAND’S WORLD - Opera goers don’t get many chances to hear a masterpiece created in the 20th century, but there are the Philip Glass pieces such as Satyagraha -- about Gandhi -- and Akhnaten – about the pharaoh who introduced monotheism to Egypt. Akhnaten received its west coast premier in 2011, presented by the Long Beach Opera. It was generally acclaimed as a terrific production and a masterpiece of musical invention. As an audience member, I remember viewing it that way and reacting to its overall charms.
L.A. Opera did its own Akhnaten in 2016, using sets, costumes, and the overall staging that was originally created by the English National Opera. I missed those performances, but L.A. Opera has brought it back, and is right in the middle of a production run that goes through Mar 22.
As everyone points out, it isn’t your standard piece in which the soprano and the tenor trade arias until the soprano dies (but musically) in the final scene. In fact, composer Philip Glass wrote the male lead for a countertenor, which is a male voice who sings up in the range where female singers usually go. The words in this opera are taken from original sources created in the time of the pharaohs and are sung in multiple languages going back to that era. And for this viewer, up in the nose-bleed seats (well maybe not quite all the way, but definitely in the puffy eye seats) this turned out to be a problem.
Now the balcony is actually a lot of seats and represents a goodly fraction of the audience, so it seems to me legitimate to discuss the overall effectiveness of an artistic production as experienced by half the audience in the theater.
So here is my View from the Balcony about this latest presentation.
The production used a 4 level stage. What I mean by that is that there is the front of the stage where balcony people would like the singers to sing from, for the simple reason that we can hear them better that way. This production added 3 more levels way at the back of the stage, and each was a not-very-high collection of boxes, more or less like offices in a commercial building, except that the front wall was missing so we could see what was going on inside. And often enough, what was inside was a few people, but enough to fill each of the boxes because the boxes weren’t that big, so two or three or four people pretty well filled any of them up.
And they didn’t move very much either, because how could they?
So this is another problem for the balcony viewer. If you want to get some idea of what’s going on in those boxes, you had better bring your binoculars. And it’s not that you will glance through the lens every now and them. You will be watching for whole long stretches if you want to get the action, such as it is.
And we insert that last comment – “such as it is” – because in this performance, the characters don’t move very much. Now this may be perfectly fine as observed from the ground floor, 8th row center, where the characters are life size and the ceiling above the stage is high, and where every nuance is rich and varied.
Maybe that’s how it looked from there. If I am to believe the myriad critics who loved (or at least respected) this performance, then that was the case. But the view from the balcony left much to be desired, as the staging was mostly static.
And one other thing: Ten costumed people didn’t seem to belong on stage, but were there.
Jugglers.
This is not a typo. I do mean jugglers. There was a squad of them. They functioned as the all-purpose helpers and plot-movers and scenery rearrangers that this opera company has sometimes used in non-theatrical demands. But those stage management chores did not require acrobatic skills nor the ability to do juggling. They also appear to function as a plot element, namely as Akhnaten’s own guard who oppose the reactionary priest class who want to bring back polytheism.
There is actually an important question here. Was juggling in Egypt in 1340 B.C. so minimal that what showed up in the production was merely an anachronism, and a not very useful one at that? I mean it didn’t result in laughs, the way anachronism is usually played. It was just – there. One esteemed critic bothered to tell us that juggling did, in fact exist in ancient Egypt. Here’s my reaction:
So what?
The overall effect was distracting. Ten extremely well trained jugglers, sometimes wearing headdresses of old Egyptian gods – the kind of images you see in hieroglyphics – but tossing what looked like baseballs in the air. In another scene, they juggled the bowling pin shaped objects that you sometimes see in juggling acts on TV. One critical account suggested that the juggling was done in rhythm to the music and mirrored the internal structure of the musical score. That seems to be another so what to me.
There was one major exception, which occurred in the second act. The view was filled with a giant disc (obviously representing the sun) and Akhnaten sang his hymn to the sun. It was one of those moments you come to the opera to experience, a moment so musical and visually so different that you are never going to experience it otherwise. And it worked.
It worked visually, and it worked musically, and it kept the audience engaged.
John Holiday, from Rosenberg, Texas, was Akhnaten, continuing an LA Opera tradition of featuring Americans in major roles. Zachary James, from Spring Hill, Florida, was the ghost of Akhnaten’s father (Amenhotep III if you want to be precise about such things). He filled the stage with his presence, although this is a speaking part. Everybody else was also very good. In this newly-minted era lacking the now-retired music director James Conlon, the L.A. Opera recruited conductor Dalia Stasevska, described as being from Kiev and Finland. The orchestra (as always) did credit to the score, which was, in Philip Glass tradition, rhythmic, throbbing, and repetitive. I love the music in Akhnaten, although not everyone around me did. Still, the opera received a rousing ovation at the end.
One commenter took up the question of whether Akhnaten is an opera for someone who is a newcomer. That person’s answer was Yes. I tend to think differently. Here’s why: This production left out the supertitles that ordinarily accompany L.A. Opera productions (and, in fact, most major opera companies). The result from my balcony seat was a production in which there was no story, no movement of plot, basically no understanding of what was going on. True, it was possible to know the bare bones by reading the printed summary, and it was also suggested that people attend the pre-performance talk by a musicologist, which the opera company provides. But if you were to attend this opera as a naive newcomer (the same way you would go to a movie or a rock concert), you would be left high and dry.
One final comment, intended to be wry: This is a city that knows what a baseball looks like. Putting ten jugglers flinging baseballs (or as close to the look of a baseball as you are likely to see in the National League playoffs) was just plain weird. The English National Opera, creators of this look, surely have heard that phrase “coals to Newcastle.” That’s what it was for the Los Angeles viewer.
Addendum
What if Donald Trump actually told the truth about something? How would we know it? I ask this question because of the Iran War. Trump has told the world that he was convinced that the Iranians were about to attack us. If so, this would be justification for at least some of what has happened so far. Since the Iranians are credibly blamed for supporting the terrorist organizations that have chronically attacked Israel, perhaps there is this bit of truth in the assertion. It is a lot harder to believe that the continental United States would be attacked directly.
So here we are, caught in the question of whether or not the U.S. should continue a war that has been justified by members of this administration using multiple, self-contradictory excuses. One argument is that Iran was only a few weeks away from completing some sort of nuclear device.
Perhaps we should note that U.S. intelligence agencies are not reaching the same conclusions.
Over the past few days, Trump has downplayed the rising cost of oil and the resulting increases in the cost of gasoline. Trump has been frankly dismissive of the whole argument.
Is the Iran War a case of Wag the Dog, or is it the legitimate reaction to an increasingly dangerous, terrorist government?
This is the problem with having a president who lies so often and so reflexively that we can’t know whether he might be telling the truth – or some semblance of truth – this one time. There is an additional complication, in that the president’s cabinet and press secretary have been chosen because they also lie in order to support what the president says. In this case, March of 2026 brings us a cessation of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, rising gasoline prices, and inevitably, the resulting rise in costs throughout the rest of our economy. That’s a lot of damage to do in order to distract from the Epstein files.
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
