Five years from now, you will easily recognize those names in this report
that mean nothing now.  These are young actors and singers still unknown,
but not for long.

By coincidence, two important cultural organizations here held their
showcases on the same day:  the American Conservatory Theater's "New Faces"
in the afternoon, the San Francisco Opera Center's production of Mozart's
"La finta giardiniera" in the evening.

The ACT training program, which launched the careers of Annette Bening,
Benjamin Bratt, Amy Irving, Elizabeth McGovern, Anna Deveare Smith and
Denzel Washington, is graduating this week 16 actors from the company's
Master of Fine Arts program in a traveling showcase (LA and NYC are the
next stops) for agents, theater companies, Hollywood scouts.

Based on today's brief scenes (expertly directed by Ellen Novack)
and the same group's recent world-premiere stage production of Marc
Blitzstein's 1940 "No For An Answer," the list of illustrious graduates
will be soon expanded.  Among the future theater and film stars:
Saba Homayoon, Sky Soleil (that's she and he, two great names), Heidi
Armbruster, Ryan Farley, Jed Orlemann, Finnerty Steeves, Jessica Turner -
and more.

With Carey Perloff in charge of ACT and Melissa Smith running the
Conservatory, both theater and music will have a steady supply of future
stars coming from there.

 From SFO's past Merola and Adler programs came many of today's leading
opera singers.  Most of the cast of tonight's Opera Center production are
on the way to join them:  first and foremost, Tiffany Abban, whose powerful
Arminda was almost too big for the Cowell Theater.  Saundra DeAthos'
Violante/Sandrina, Greta Feeney's Serpetta, the steadily improving Brian
Anderson's Belfiore and Brad Alexander's Podesta were all delightful and
effective.

Under Judith Yan's direction, the SFO orchestra did well - although
somewhat ponderously - with the sparkling score, the 19-year-old Mozart's
warm-up exercise for "Don Giovanni," another womanizing, murderous monster
who is the heartthrob of all sopranos and mezzos.

What's this headline about abuse then?

That came from stage director Roy Rallo and, indirectly, from SFO general
manager Pamela Rosenberg.

The young singers were abused right along with the work and the audience
in this primitive, crude implementation of Eurotrash, an exact copy of
the musical excellence/theatrical trash dichotomy so often produced by
Rosenberg's previous company, the Stuttgart Opera.  In another coincidence,
it was today that I saw a copy of the Stuttgart production of Handel's
"Armida," and the Cowell evening came right off the pages of the Rosenberg
formula:  frumpy, deliberately unattractive modern dress, nonstop shticks
in the background, continuous groping and as many sexual references as
possible - or more.  Yet, it's not the juvenile sex-obsession that's
"obscene"; it's what the direction does to Mozart.

Defenders of Early Peter Sellars and Late Harry Kupfer efforts in this
genre (although both in another domain compared with Rallo's inaptitude)
usually defend themselves against "naive Americans," but this rant comes
from a certified, native-born trashy European.  When I compare Novack's
straightforward direction of the difficult, compressed showcase today, or
of Perloff's brilliant direction of a past Opera Center production with
tonight's abomination, I wonder why a relatively small theater company is
so superior to one of the world's largest opera companies when it comes
to stage direction.  Eurotrash is as European as "continental seating"
is Continental - libelous use of the language.

These poor young singers were made to perform very difficult arias while
running around, fake-humping, taking pratfalls, groping, being groped,
creating a racket DURING arias.  Didn't Rallo see video of 30-year-old
productions trying, and failing, with a "visual counterpoint" to the music?

"Strong," visceral stage direction has its place when it has something
to do with the music.  Rallo's approach is different:  it disregards the
music or acts against it.  The non-stop, super-busy collection of shticks -
throwing plastic cups, crawling around, groping, rolling, feeling up, going
down - acts only as a kind of anti-music.

How clever can this crappy defiling of the work be? Very, on a third-grade
level.  When the tenor is pursuing the soprano, she spits in his face,
kicks him in the groin and then smoothly picks up the line from the
libretto:  "Forgive me if I said too much."

I know how I feel as a member of the audience, confronted by a director
acting as a constantly-ringing cell phone of distraction, but I cannot
imagine what it must be like for young singers to see this as their future
lot on stage.

Janos Gereben/SF
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