McNally's "Golden Age' by PTC (1st review)

Imagine yourself transported to the Théâtre-Italien in Paris on the opening night of Bellini's I Puritani in January 1835. Onstage the world's greatest singers employ the world's most ethereal music to portray lofty issues like love, death, redemption and forgiveness; but backstage the same singers and their composer indulge their selfish egos in petty jealousies, recriminations and career strategizing. What's more, you and I know something the bickering singers don't: that within eight months the great composer Vincenzo Bellini will be dead of an intestinal inflammation at the age of 33.

In theory, we have here the raw material for an intriguing drama. And on the basis of my own brief career as a super (in the Opera Company of Philadelphia's Carmen, 1982), I can attest to the disconnect between onstage and backstage: After my first appearance, as I floated off the Academy of Music stage overwhelmed in rapture, the first thing that greeted me in the wings was the sight of two chorus singers arguing over the numbers on their respective pay stubs.

In practice, unfortunately, Terrence McNally's Golden Age subjects us to three acts and more than three interminable hours of operatic name-dropping and hackneyed expository dialogue, spoken by characters who are never developed to a point where we care about them.

Inside baseball

As he has already demonstrated (to much better advantage) in Master Class and The Lisbon Traviata, McNally knows and loves opera. Golden Age suggests that he knows maybe a little too much about opera. This exercise in operatic "inside baseball" is about as compelling as being cornered by a life insurance agent who so adores his actuarial tables that he can speak of little else.

"The trick is to take what's already been written and make it sound new," McNally's Bellini remarks at one point. "Agitation makes the voice go up, not down," a singer explains later. "I hate high notes," says another. "They're what's wrong with opera."

Meanwhile, in the real audience at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre, the intermission conversation ran more along the lines of, "Should we go? It's getting late."

"'Your talent or your ego'

The banality of McNally's dialogue, as well as its sheer quantity, almost defies belief. There seems no end to leaden lines like "I don't know what's bigger, Vincenzo— your talent or your ego" or "I can't make love to my own voice!" or "I've made a house of cards and it's collapsing all around me!" or "She'd upstage the Pope himself if she found herself on stage with him" or "What we call art is artifice" or "I have more commissions than I can possibly fill!" or "These are dangerous emotions Bellini has let loose in his music!" or "Everything that lives must die" or (my favorite) "I'm a bitch, Vincent, not a cunt" (an esoteric distinction that had me reaching for my dictionary).

At one point in Act III, Bellini beseeches his quarreling vocalists to heed the music onstage. "These upcoming high notes of mine," he declares, "are what the people of Paris are going to be talking about over their coffee and croissants in the morning." That reminded me of a memo that the Wall Street Journal's legendary editor, Bernard Kilgore, posted in the newsroom back when I was a reporter there. "The next time I see the word upcoming in a story," it read, "I will be downcoming, and someone will be outgoing."

Of course, Kilgore had a better sense of humor than McNally. More important, Kilgore understood, unlike McNally, that brevity is the soul of wit. (As you see, 40 years later I still cringe whenever I hear the word upcoming.)

Coughing and fluttering

The Philadelphia Theatre Company's capable cast and crew do their best with this disappointing material. Jeffrey Carlson, looking appropriately pale and anemic as Bellini, spends most of his time fluttering back and forth, coughing into his hanky and throwing sheets of music around. Amanda Mason Warren is appropriately commanding as the tempestuous soprano Maria Malibran, a sort of 19th-Century forerunner of Maria Callas. The lavender set by Santo Loquasto, with candelabras, divans, piano and stairway leading to the "stage," offers plenty for the eye.

As director, Austin Pendleton functions more or less like a newspaper editor trying to pump up a reporter's story when he should be questioning its underlying premise. Pendleton, of course, is the author of Orson's Shadow, another exercise in backstage theatrical navel-gazing presented by Philadelphia Theatre Company in 2007. Playwrights and directors need to hold each other accountable, but Pendleton merely serves as McNally's enabler. Both of them need to be reminded that what David Eisenhower once said about journalists also applies to performers and composers: They're not as interesting as they think they are.

During a talk-back earlier this month at the Wilma Theater about her play Becky Shaw, Gina Gionfriddo remarked that when you're young, a night at the theater is exciting in itself; but as you grow older, you become less cavalier about wasting a few precious hours of what's left of your life. Golden Age not only invited this 67-year-old to contemplate how I might better spend three hours, it provided the answer: Go see I Puritani itself.♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read another review by Jim Rutter, click here.
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To read a further comment by Dan Rottenberg, click here.