La Traviata

Verdi’s Traviata (‘fallen woman’) is a courtesan - so why not stage the opera in a strip club?  That’s what director Julie Edwardson and her Emotionworks Cut Opera have done.  The audience, attracted by the originality of the concept or perhaps the salacious nature of the venue, surrounds the stage where strippers and pole dancers do their thing at other times.  A four-piece blues’n’jazz combo, including Ms Edwardson herself on keyboard, supplies the music.  It’s not as Verdi and his librettist Francesco Maria Piave conceived it.  It’s cut down (‘no boring bits’ is the policy) to under ninety minutes and the original characters are reduced to four, all performed by classically trained and good singers: Violetta (Justine Anderson), Alfredo (Te Ua Houkamau), his father Germont (David Skewes) and Flora (Annemarie Sharry). 

The bones, however, of the enduring story of the ‘fallen woman’ with tuberculosis and a noble soul is there.  So are what we might call the ‘big numbers’ (the brindisi, Sempre libera, De’ miei bollenti spirita, Pura siccome un angelo Iddio mi diè una figlia and more).  The innovation of this adaptation is the frequent segues to songs by Cole Porter (What Is this Thing Called Love? - and, of course, Love For Sale), Randy Newman (Leave Your Hat On), Julie Styne & Leo Robin (Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend), Mack Gordon & Harry Warren (At Last and I, Yi, Yi, Yi) and many more.  These mostly 20^th century numbers slot in appropriately if not always smoothly.

They are performed by percussionist Wayne Cuebas – a gravelly Tom Waites type - smooth guitarist Richard Woods and the support cast of Violetta’s pals - strippers cum sex workers (Katy Turbitt, Joanna Collyvas, Hannah Wright, Antoniette D’Andrea and Theresa Scalise).  They support Violetta when they can, but more often act as a kind of Greek chorus, elaborating and commenting on the actions and emotions of the story.  Ms Sharry, actually dressed as Carmen Miranda, does a charming rendition of I, Yi, Yi, Yi, but she can switch to operatic singing at the drop of a fruit hat.  These modern songs, as I say, do not advance the story; they comment on it, or they give a contemporary interpretation of Verdi’s 19^th century emotions. 

In principle, this is a good idea; the 19^th century emotions, albeit sung in classical style, are shown to be not remote and incomprehensible: they are emotions we know expressed in more familiar jazz and pop standards.  That’s not to say the juxtapositions always work.  When Ms Collyvas sings Falling In Love Again (rivalling Marlene Dietrich), it is entirely apt – as is her My Heart Belongs to Daddy when Violetta reverts to her previous life.  Violetta’s broken heart is well conveyed and sung by Ms D’Andrea with Stormy Weather.  But Ms Turbitt’s I Want to be Loved by You (although sung perfectly well) doesn’t quite gel – and nor does Ms Scalise’s Fever.

An interpolation that maybe shouldn’t work but certainly does is a pole dance by Jewel Stone, an actual performer at this venue.  Her graceful, fluid movements are amazingly in perfect musical sync with Ms Anderson’s Sempere libera, making a sensuous parallel to the aria’s emotions.

A decidedly less successful addition to proceedings is a strip by Violetta’s pimp (a version of Baron Douphol?) played by Dick Gross (once mayor of the City of Port Phillip!).  It’s an addition that had the audience averting their eyes and it adds nothing.  Did Mr Gross insist on this schtick?

What Verdi and Piave would make of all this is not difficult to guess (Verdi was particularly prickly), but, as Ms Edwardson has said of other composers and librettists she’s ‘adapted’, they’re dead.  She is a seasoned professional: a singer herself as well as an assistant director and director of operas in her own right, the last winning her a Green Room Award in 2011 for a production of La Sonambula.  Surprisingly then, there’s not much that’s theatrical here: the staging feels perfunctory and clunky.  The light, feel-good nature of the show and the altruistic intentions acknowledged, we have to ask, ‘does it work?’  Work as something that delivers the essential La Traviata (I guess), but also introduces opera to non-opera goers and breaks down barriers of prejudice toward opera, demonstrating to people (the young in particular) that opera is not elitist, stuffy and boring.  (If you’re under 25, you get in free.) 

What of the story – the narrative on which the songs depend?  The audience gets a plot summary on the way in, but without it would we know that Violetta is unwell and, in fact, dying?  Ms Anderson sings beautifully, but there are no signs of debility, not even a cough.  Would we know why Germont wants Violetta to renounce Alfredo – or why he comes to guiltily respect her?  But an adaptation should – shouldn’t it? – remain just a little faithful to the essence of the original.  Here things are definitely diminished, not just in playing time but in scale and weight.  A courtesan is not quite the same thing as a prostitute or a ‘sex worker’.  Violetta’s lover when she meets Alfredo is a baron and her ‘patron’, not her grinning pimp.  Germont is a respectable bourgeois, not a Mafia Don with a (quite irrelevant) machine gun in a violin case and a pistol in his hip pocket.  Violetta’s associates may well be other courtesans, but these women consorted with the higher strata of a hypocritical society – that is, Violetta’s salon is not a brothel or a strip joint.  I’m not being merely picky and purist here: the substitutions are not equivalents of the milieu or characters of the original and they feel arbitrary and a little off-the-top-of-the-head. 

The worthy aims of Emotionworks notwithstanding, the feel is of an enterprise under resourced and under rehearsed, a little ad hoc and, I’m sorry, a bit too amateur.  Would not Emotionworks productions – and this La Traviata is the most recent of many – achieve their aims more successfully were they simply better planned, better thought out and better done?

Michael Brindley