Regina
Presented by Nashville Opera Association
8 p.m. March 23, 2 p.m. March 25, & 7:30 p.m. March 27 in TPAC’s Polk Theater For tickets, call 255-ARTS
The Tennessee Repertory Theatre and the Nashville Opera Association are doing something rare and wonderful. They are collaborating on back-to-back productions of a celebrated play and an opera based on that play: Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes (1939) and Marc Blitzstein’s Regina (1949), the latter named for Hellman’s charismatic and willful central character. Foxes ran from Feb. 28 to Mar. 18; Regina opens this weekend.
So far as I know, such a collaboration has never happened anywhere before. For the Rep and NOA, it permits the husbanding of resources: Both productions use the same set and the same costumes, allowing the companies to spend more of their budgets on actors and singers. More important, for people who see both, the two productions are reflections of each other that enable one compelling story to be experienced in two powerful forms.
In both forms, the story, though set early in the last century in the Deep South, is mythic in effect. It’s about ruthless pride and resentment-fueled ambition that run roughshod over anybody in the way. At its center is Regina Giddens, a woman who considers herself the equal of any man, but who has been forced all her life either to submit to men or to beguile them. In the story, an opportunity arises for her to get rid of her despised husband and to subjugate her arrogant brothers. She seizes the day.
The set and the costumes, used in both productions, wonderfully emblematize the tasteless ostentation of the Gilded Age, when turn-of-the-century robber barons obscenely flaunted their wealth. In both, a tightly crafted fable works itself out like a Bach fugue. Yet there are important differences.
In the play, speech and gesture are realistic. And the persons of the drama, even the minor ones, are complex figures seen in three dimensions. David Grapes deserves kudos for his able casting and subtle directing in Tennessee Rep’s recent production. As Regina’s brother Benjamin Hubbard, Cecil Jones was costumed like Mark Twain’s King in Huckleberry Finn, and was just about as crass. But he was also tough and shrewd and furnished with a sense of humor and a vital gusto that compelled admiration. Tandy Cronyn as Regina generated an almost scary kind of sympathy, taking advantage of the graceful femininity she inherited from her mother, actress Jessica Tandy. Her interpretation of Regina seemed overly subtle to some, but that subtlety is a long-lasting yeast that simmers and froths in memory. After seeing her in the role, I cannot imagine Tallulah Bankhead, who opened the play, except as a parody. Even Bette Davis in the filmed version, as David Grapes observes, self-servingly chewed the scenery.
The Rep has given Nashville Opera a tough act to follow. Rehearsals indicate that the latter company is meeting the challenge. The back-to-back performances on the same set, using the same costumes, underscore that an opera is in crucial ways quite different from a play. The most important difference, of course, is the role played by music. In the play, lines spoken in a subtly authentic Southern idiom interweave to give an illusion of realism, even of voyeurism, as if the audience were looking through a knothole into Regina’s drawing room. In the opera, when those same lines are sung, the singing highlights them and underscores them—and obliges audiences to see them as expressionistic. The music furnishes them with an emotional freight that is left implicit in the play. One analogy is the difference between ordinary walking and dancing. Another, perhaps, is the difference between the work of painters Edouard Manet and Amadeo Modigliani.
Marc Blitzstein does extraordinarily inventive things with this music. First of all, Regina is not a piece of grand opera in the tradition of Verdi and Puccini. It’s not a modernist opera in the tradition of Schoenberg and Berg and Stravinsky. Nor does it follow the model of Britten’s Turn of the Screw. Rather, it develops a conception articulated and illustrated by Kurt Weill and continued by Stephen Sondheim—an attempt to create a musical theater with the accessibility of The Music Man and the subtlety, depth, and dramatic force of Der Rosenkavalier.
Much of the dialogue is spoken, as in the play, but sometimes that dialogue morphs into and out of sung speech. Most noteworthy is Blitzstein’s genius in interweaving naturalistic spoken lines with several varieties of musical settings. He uses more than one subtly varied recitative: Sometimes the setting wittily mimics the rhythms and intonations of normal speech, and sometimes it melodically heightens those patterns in ways that recall Anglican settings of Old Testament psalms. It’s a fascinating display of virtuosity that makes great demands on singers and on conductor Michael Ching.
There are likewise some big expressive songs at moments of high drama, and some ensemble singing, but there are no traditional arias, where the action freezes while a Kathleen Battle or a Cecilia Bartoli vocalizes a brilliant triple axel. Instead, the big songs are essentially ballads that might have been sung by Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra. A characteristic example occurs near the end of the play, when Regina and Ben are jousting to see who will be the CEO of their family business. Regina, gambling that she will be the victor, has just announced that she wants 75 percent of the company. Ben laughs in her face and then sings to her what is almost a classic ballad, calling her “greedy girl, greedy girl.” His song is not angry or threatening: It’s almost seductively gentle, even paternal, and at the same time fiercely inflexible. In context, the moment is complex and ironic.
At other points, Blitzstein takes still different approaches to the ways in which words and notes may interact in his opera. For instance, he doesn’t adapt Hellman’s dialogue for his big climactic moments: He writes those lyrics himself and integrates them with great skill into the total fabric. He also adds to Hellman’s cast a young African American man called Jazz, who has organized and trained some fieldhands into a Dixieland group called the Angel Band. This band and its music are ingeniously used throughout as a unifying thematic and architectonic device.
Blitzstein’s music, then, is one essential difference between Regina and Hellman’s play. Another is the two casts—although there are some noteworthy likenesses here too. The actors who portray Ben Hubbard, his brother Oscar, and his nephew Leo are physiognomically more alike than unlike in both productions, just as both sets of Hubbards are archetypal new-rich assholes. But Blitzstein’s assholes have wonderful big voices as well, even when they speak—these voices are proper to expressionistic opera, but not to realistic drama.
The figures of Regina and her daughter Alexandra are markedly different in each production. The Rep’s Alexandra, for instance, was tall and slender, like her onstage mother, and though the lovely Sarah Bloom did a solid and sometimes moving job in the role, it was difficult to believe she was only 17. In the opera, Carrie Eberhardt as Alexandra is shorter and more full-bodied, like her onstage mother; she has an angelically innocent face and is an altogether convincing 17-year-old.
The strongest contrasts, however, are the two Reginas. In Foxes, Tandy Cronyn used her resemblance to her slender and feminine mother to great advantage. In the opera, Adria Firestone as Regina recalls the Elizabeth Taylor of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? An accomplished actress as well as singer, Firestone has a sensuous beauty and intimidating charisma onstage that invite comparison with the legendary older actress. And she has a big, rich, subtly expressive voice that she uses with comparable versatility. Both she and Tandy Cronyn deliver powerfully moving performances, in quite contrasting ways.
It’s a lucky coincidence that the Alexandras in each play resemble the Reginas. In both cases, the younger actress is a convincing image of the older one. And in both versions, Alexandra, watching her mother go through a terrifying kind of psychic sex-change, uses her own genetically hardwired will not to go and do likewise.
These contrasts and comparisons are only some of the ways these two productions augment one another. But though each is enriched by its reflection in the other, either alone is powerful stuff. Accordingly, those who did not see the Rep’s The Little Foxes should not miss the chance to experience this Regina. But those who have seen the Hellman drama are greatly to be envied: They are offered what is most likely a once-in-a-lifetime winning ticket.
