I attended this last night.
I can't say I was ever taken by the subject, but I bought a ticket as soon as they went on sale; this was largely because one of the stars is Gerald Finley, one of my most favourite singers.
I was perfectly aware of who Anna Nicole Smith was. I realised by looking at the programme that she was just a couple of months older than me. Not hugely significant, except that she was coming to prominence when I was trying to figure out how I fitted into the world around me, and she died as I felt comfortable in being true to myself.
But I didn't see previously, and understand even less, why she was thought to be a suitable topic for an opera. It's a very commonplace story: uneducated woman from an impoverished background works in the grey area between prostitution and showbiz, marries a rich man, and dies of drug abuse. Her abuse was of legal prescription drugs rather than the more stereotypical street drugs. The only noteworthy aspect of her life was that the man she married was extremely rich and extremely old.
I was concerned that this opera with music, libretto and production by men would be little but slut-shaming. I was relieved that this didn't transpire. However, I am uncomfortable at a group of privileged men taking the life - and death - of such a woman and playing it as comedy, or farce. It perpetuates the myth of opera being upper-class people laughing and sneering at lower-class people. (Many of the rest of the creative team - set designs, lighting, costumes and choreography - were women)
It's a very short work, two acts of about an hour each, but both Acts dragged. Act 1 could easily have been cut by ten or fifteen minutes, and Act 2 would have benefited from being a bit tighter.
The very best aspect of the show was The Show. The whole mix of staging, sets, costumes and above all, performance. A new work has the distinct advantage of not having opera queens (of all genders and orientations) lamenting about how it's not a patch on how Callas did it in 63 or Domingo in 82 in the classic production created for Caruso and Patti and relying entirely on oil-lamps.
It was visually stunning: constant movement that never seemed hyperactive, bright colours, and some lovely visual touches. I especially liked the ballet dancers, all in black, with TV cameras for heads, cameras that increased in number throughout the second act. There was one bit, supposedly when she was on Larry King Live, and they had a live link-up to her dogs, with some enormous plastic dogs that I thought were cute.
The performances by Eva Maria Westbroek as Anna Nicole, and Gerald Finley as her slimey lawyer were outstanding. Regular readers know how much I love Gerry; Eva Maria has impressed me several times. Just a shame such immense talents were wasted in this piffling tosh.
My major criticisms of the work were of the work itself. Despite the tragedy of her life (her son dies; she died), it was played for laughs, but it simply wasn't that funny. I didn't like the way it was structured. It broke one of the basic rules of story-telling which is, where possible, to show rather than tell.
Great art, or even good art, acts as a window on the human condition and a mirror on the soul, offering an insight into the inner life of the characters as well as their outward motives. The absence of dialogue and soliloquy meant that we never knew what the characters were thinking.
I had no clue whether Anna Nicole was self-aware, was she the manipulator of these lustful men or was she being exploited by them. And furthermore, I didn't care. There were no contradictions, just an acceptance by the author, and therefore forced onto the audience, of the inevitable trajectory.
The music was inoffensive and not unpleasant. I'm cautious to rush to judgement on the basis of one performance, because it usually takes more than one hearing for any work to seep into my system, even if it then becomes a beloved work. Music that is adored on the first hearing may soon become irritating.
Nevertheless, I am not an entire stranger to 21st century opera and I feel there was nothing special about the music. It seemed influenced by Bernstein - for some reason I kept thinking of On The Town - and maybe even Gershwin but with none of the brilliance. (To be clear, I'm not implying 'borrowing').
I found little variety in tempi and style, although I suspect a further hearing or studying the score would contradict this. It went on at a frenetic pace - unrelentingly, I tweeted in the interval. A lot of it was dull, not least the opening chorus which seemed like a parody of an amateur musical written for schoolchildren, demanding very little from the singers. And I simply didn't like the vocal lines: a constant narrative style, written to reflect the cadences of speech, with no lyricism and very little to make the singers sound gorgeous, despite what I know of them.
All of this would have added up to a decent work, but I found the libretto to be pretty ghastly. I've already said why I didn't like the structure and narrative style, but these would have been bearable if the content was of any value.
The ROH made a big deal in their marketing about the prolific use of profanities. They probably knew that they had to sound loud klaxons in order to warn the more delicate or easily offended patrons of the coarseness of the language, and, wisely or not, they decided to turn a necessity into an opportunity: use it to market how edgy and innovative they are. Except that, swearwords aren't edgy and innovative, and they simply weren't shocking. It's ideas that shock not mere words, and a script bereft of ideas is always going to look like a schoolboys' wankfest.
I was irritated by elements in the audience who laughed knowingly at the use of words such as cuntilicious and titties, as if they needed to demonstrate that they were not shockable prudes. But there was one sequence with a narrative about the rich men who get blowjobs in car parks and empty their (can't remember the word they used for semen) into whore's cumbuckets. This was the nearest they got to social comment and it was received, at least round me, by an awkward silence. Were the words suddenly too coarse, too close to the truth?
During the interval I overheard someone mention that the libretto had a quote from Guns N' Roses; in Act 2 I noticed quotes from 'Fame' and 'Everything I Do I Do It for You'. That puzzled me and annoyed me. If you're going to make references to other works it's a bit weird to do it three times. It's too many and yet too few. But, to be honest, if I want references to 80s/90s commercial pop, I'd listen to 80s/90s commercial pop.
One of the very few bits I remember is the bit that turned into my shopping list today. Frankly, I don't go to the opera, or any artform, to get a shopping list. This was a list of all the drugs that her son Danny took, or might have taken, before his death by overdose. As I went to my GP today, and my prescription prepayment certificate expires next week, I got my long list of prescription drugs renewed. I want art to take me away from the mundanity of life, not remind me to ask the doctor for Tramadol.
I would have been prepared to dismiss the puerile libretto as just a bit of fun if it were not for the number which, if I remember correctly, closed Act 1, where Anna Nicole and the chorus sang that they were going to 'rape the American Dream'.
It takes real brilliance to make a joke using the word 'rape' and carry it off. I was left with the distinct impression that these schoolboys didn't actually understand what the word 'rape' means.
If they had said 'I'm going to piss or shit on the American dream', it would have made sense. But I'm at a loss as to what they meant. Destroy it? Subvert it? Embrace it? It made no sense, and, coming out of the mouth of a woman, wasn't credible.
No doubt, that makes me in their eyes some humourless feminist, and simultaneously a Daily Mail reader. I just don't think overgrown schoolboys, who seem not to know women, should use words with the sole intention to shock unless they actually know what the word means.
So, visually amazing, musically mediocre, and lyrically weak and banal. And, I suspect, very dependent on a strong cast of first rate singers who've had the luxury of long rehearsal time to build the production; I'm not sure how it would come over with a lesser cast on minimal rehearsal, which is how many great works are presented, at the Royal Opera House and the numerous part-time companies that exist. And I wonder how it would play in America: I suspect that it would sound like a crudely unsuccessful attempt at American musical and verbal idiom, and an inaccurate caricature of a type of American lifestyle.
