"The Loathly Lady' at Penn

What do women want? In The Loathly Lady, Freud's famous cry of despair becomes a quest forced on a knight as the penalty for his crime against a woman. Merlin and the Viennese Sage accompany the knight on his journey, along with an incredible outpouring of comic rhymed couplets by librettist Wendy Steiner and a musical score by composer Paul Richards that enhances the couplets and adds a few twists of its own.

The Penn Humanities Forum signed an all-star early music team for this, its Irvine Auditorium debut production. Soprano Julianne Baird is one of the best-known early music specialists in the world, and the other female parts were sung by three members of the best-known early music vocal group, the Anonymous Four. Piffaro provided the historic winds, and the historic strings were bowed by one of Piffaro's best partners, a New York viol consort called Parthenia.

The knight's quest forces him into encounters with a female lineup that spans the centuries. He interrogates Queen Titania, Sheherezade, Jane Austen's Emma, Eliza Doolittle, Virginia Woolf and Tennyson's Lady of Shallot. Period instruments accompany the medieval scenes and modern instruments take over when the women from more recent eras step into the spotlight.

Next: An animated film

Steiner is working on an animated film version of this "early music musical." Critics received a DVD of the pilot in their press kits, and the Penn premiere accompanied a concert-style production with large-screen projections taken from the animator's paintings and storyboards. The result was a complicated multi-media experience that combined on-stage acting and costume changes with the elegant fantasy world projected on the screen. When Emma sang about her ideal husband— the "Mr. Knightley," who is both passionate and respectful— the screen backed up the song with images of the upright Jane Austen gentleman and the upright life he and his wife would lead together.

In addition to its other virtues, Richards's score contains some old-fashioned standout numbers in the great tradition of operatic arias and Broadway hits. Emma's song and Titania's dream of motherhood are both appealing ballads. Sheherezade's paean to female sexual passion is a driving tango that turns comic when the knight realizes she's answering everything he says with the same description of physical desire.

Are men this insensitive?

My only critical demurrer concerns the character of the knight. He is not, I must protest, a worthy representative of malekind. Some of his responses to the women's visions seem weak and petty. Titania's ballad, for example, lovingly describes the emotions of motherhood and visualizes husband and wife working together as they convey their child through infancy, but the surly narcissist knight responds by whining that women ignore their husbands once the baby arrives. Am I the only human male who looked forward to fatherhood and enjoyed sharing the adventure of parenthood with his wife?

I'm more inclined to think both sexes want the same thing: an impossibly perfect mate who fulfills every requirement on their checklist. The spouses who build successful marriages are the astute, realistic types who grasp the need to sort out priorities and make tradeoffs. A successful Type A surgeon or hedge fund manager probably won't make a sensitive and understanding husband. The dazzling beauty may not look so great when you need someone who can cover your back with a shotgun. You can't have everything. And you can't give someone else everything either.

But that kind of thought shouldn't be seen as a criticism. It's primarily a sign that The Loathly Lady touched on important matters as it delivered a full evening of music, comedy and visual pleasure. The Penn Humanities Forum presented the premier of The Loathly Lady as a gala celebration of the organization's tenth anniversary. It was a perfect choice and a glittering success.