La Voix Humaine and Pagliacci, Opera San Jose, Nov. 20 2011

La Voix Humaine (“The Human Voice”) is a one-act, one-singer opera by Francis Poulenc in which the singer spends 45 minutes on the telephone breaking up with the man that she had lived with for five years. Pagliacci, a 70-minute, two-act opera by Ruggero Leoncavallo, is one of the highlights of the verismo style of Italian opera. Pagliacci is usually preceded in the operatic evening by Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana, not by La Voix Humaine. Why not “Cav & Pag”? According to Larry Hancock, it simply costs too much to do Cav & Pag; opening with La Voix Humaine allows for a reasonable amount of music in one evening without breaking the bank.

No economy of set was obvious in La Voix Humaine. We saw a clever representation of an apartment in Paris: the side walls and most of the back wall were basic flat black, but windows had been artfully sketched in using narrow, flexible white tubes (oversized drinking straws?). In the center of the back wall was a large double window that looked out over the rooftops of Paris. The apartment was furnished with a sofa and an easy chair atop a circular rug. Along the right wall was a small table with a mirror; along the left wall was a small bar in a box whose sides were on hinges, along the lines of a side-by-side refrigerator but much smaller. And in the center there was a coffee table on which rested the telephone, which plays an important part in the opera.

Our cast:
A woman: Betany Coffland
Conductor: Andrew Whitfield
Director: Layna Chianakas

The opera was based on a play by the same name, written in 1930 by the French playwright (and man of many other talents) Jean Cocteau. His actors had complained of being “over-directed,” not given enough freedom to display their acting abilities, so he said “Here’s a telephone and one half of a telephone conversation. Act away!” And Betany Coffland did. We first heard anguished sobs from offstage, then she rushed in and busied herself for three or four minutes with the mirror and the bar before the orchestra played the first note of music. For the next 45 minutes, Coffland held up her end of the telephone conversation masterfully, at one point winding the telephone cord around her neck. At the end, after they have hung up, she went and stood in the window, apparently about ready to jump a la Tosca, but then the lights went out. It was an excellent display of acting, and she sang pretty well too. A solid beta.

After an intermission, Pagliacci. Most of the money for sets must have been spent on La Voix Humaine. We saw a concrete wall curving in from the left, about 6 feet high at the edge of the stage, dropping gradually to about 3 feet high in the center of the stage. In front of the concrete wall there was an elliptical concrete “stage,” about 2 feet high and 15 feet long. To the right, nothing. The players did have a small (very small) cart that they pushed down the ramp in back of the curving wall, and there were some boxes that some assistants carried around. After intermission (we got an intermission after “Vesti la giubba” and before the intermezzo), the curtain rose on the same set, except that a wall with a door and a window had been erected at the back of the “stage.”

Our cast:
Tonio: Evan Brummel
Canio: Alexander Boyer
Nedda: Jasmina Halimic
Beppe: Michael Dailey
Silvio: Krassen Karagizov
Conductor: Andrew Whitfield
Director: Cynthia Stokes

Pagliacci can be an exciting opera, especially in the final scene when the actions of the play resemble real-life events so closely that the play-within-a-play breaks down and the Canio character “actually” stabs his wife and her lover. This time, there was no magic. I was sufficiently not caught up in the action that I began to wonder, “Where in his clown suit has Canio hidden the knife that he will use?” and I located said knife in Tonio’s hand. Tonio is standing at the edge of the “stage” and hands the knife to Canio when he needs it. To the director’s credit, this is the same knife that Canio almost used on Nedda just before “Vesti la giubba” and that Tonio had picked up after Beppe had wrung it from him—after all, Tonio had threatened Nedda with “You will pay for this!” after she had rejected his advances. Competently performed, but that’s all. A gamma.