Opera review: Dead M'am Walking
I wrote this review for magazine6000. It was 2000 words which they said was too long, I should cut it in half. I said fair enough and cut it to 1500. Then I didn't hear back. A few weeks later it was published, but someone had cut it down for me, taking out the meaner parts. Fair enough, but certain omissions caused it to make no sense. So here is the edited version and the full version is below. Read here.
âDating Sabrina Carpenter would be crazy, man. Sheâd be singing the whole time. âLalalalalaâ.â - @premiles
Opera takes place in an alternative universe where everyone is a trained opera singer. To ask the obvious question, âWhy are they singing?â is beside the point. Itâs opera! But watching Freeze Frame Operaâs production of Dead Man Walking, I found myself asking the question again and again.
Read this transaction between a man and a woman:
Have you ever been to Vegas?
Actually, I went there when I was little.
Did you win anything?
No, but I did see Elvis Presley.
Elvis? The King?
Now read it again, but read it as an opera. Elongate the stress words. Undulate your vowels. âHave you EeEeEever been to VeEagAaaasâ...
Does it sound rather strange? Stilted and unwieldy? Like an improv sketch grown tedious? Do you want to shout new choice? Taken directly from the operaâs script, the example hopefully gives you some idea of how it feels to watch an opera made from plainspoken conversation.
I have only ever seen some operas in German before, and I was fortunate enough not to speak the language. They couldâve been wailing about anything, but I didnât have to listen. I could just hear the sounds as sounds, like birdsong in the evening. If birds could sing in the lingua franca, it would be no upgrade. âOi, fuck offâ theyâd screech. âOi, fuck offâ. So really, I prefer to be ignorant of other languages: that way I can focus on form and not content; yet, even if I could unlearn my mother tongue to appreciate this opera, Iâd still be jealous of the Europeans, whose words I suspect just sound prettier. When the singing lacks rhyme and melody and the lyrics lack poetic meaning, Iâd rather listen to something in French, subtitles off.
âDonât walk with a cane, itâs doper to limp,â said Harmony Korine. This may be very true, but sometimes the path of least resistance is well-travelled for a reason. Why burp the alphabet when you can sing it? Why sing a dramatic script when you just say it normally? I know the opera singers in Dead Man Walking are world class: they can sing loud for a long time and skillfully quaver their voices, and perhaps I am being ungrateful, but when I see my nephew do a backflip into the swimming pool, I am also very impressed. When he makes me watch him again and again however, well, I am glad when the sun goes down.
At least the singing was underscored by a live orchestra: a quartet playing piano, cello, clarinet and accordion, sounding all very French, possibly Cajun; but this didnât sound like high octane zydeco. It sounded more like the soundtrack for Professor Layton and Curious Village, all smoky and intriguing and mysterious. While the music did suit the Louisianan setting, and I could feel the Spanish Moss dangling above me, there werenât any big hooks for the singers to really get around. Most of it was suspenseful padding and plodding and sneaking, like a cartoon Captain Hook tiptoeing a figure eight loop around the pirate ship. Just poison the drink you scoundrel!
At half time I was complaining to my opera buff friend, casting doubt on the choice of script. Dead Man Walking was at first a book and then a 90s thriller movie, and I felt that the dialogue hadnât been adapted enough to really make sense as an opera. If only there were more musical bits. Yet my friend told me that I was very misguided. My complaints were not due to the writing or direction, but towards a time-honoured convention of most operas: the recitative; a kind of singing that seeks to imitate the rhythms of conventional speech. A recitative has no rhymes or repeated lines or carefully counted syllables; a recitative song is barely a song, but is sung purely to advance the story. Thus, it would not be barbaric to make an opera from the dialogue below:
Keith, itâs time for dinner.
No, not chicken againâŚ
Sit down Keithy. Chicken is good for you. It contains elements and minerals.
Still, they could have done it in a spoken word style, like King Missile or Adam Gnade. And although I have confessed my ignorance to the finer points of operatic tradition, and that if someone talked like this about my own field of art, I would mark them a philistine, I cannot retract my grievances. The music in Emilio Perez was also recitativeâ-it even won an Oscar, yet when I watch the adams apple reduction scene, I still cannot retract my grievances. There are no diegetic reasons for all this singing, and the non-diagetic reasons, being that itâs opera, donât sway me.
But I am not being fair. There were a handful of very great scenes in Dead Man Walking, and these scenes had either no singing at all, or singing that was music-singing instead of talk-singing. The music-singing was reserved for the big-ticket dream sequences, scenes involving giant casts of chorus members; the most affecting one being where the nun is encircled by a stream of happy-clappy sunday schoolers, skipping their gospel in a merry melody. The circle is then infiltrated by the boisterous swagger of death-row prisoners, who bellow violently like ghosts in a coalmine. Finally they are joined by the grieving parents and friends of the killerâs victims; their bodies and cries all melting together as they march in a Bosch-like cacophony. In these scenes my questions about the singing were answered.
And I havenât talked about the content of the opera yet, but from the above description you can piece it together. Dead Man Walking is about a young man sentenced to death for the dreadful murder of a teenage couple. There in prison, a kindhearted nun tries to save his soul, and spiritual complications ensue. Hearing it was set in rural Louisiana, home of True Detective, I expected it to be Southern Gothic in tone or at the least, rural noir. The redemption of an irredeemable man is a classic plot in the stories of writers like Faulkner, McCarthy and OâConnor; yet I found this opera too sentimental for the gothic, and too humanistic for noir. It lacked the necessary murkiness. Sure, human life is sacred, forgiveness is a virtue, and the death penalty is therefore unethical; but the play goes as far as to making its rapist-murderer a Christ-like figure. In his last scene he is strapped vertically to the lethal-injection bed, his arms in a T, the bed glowing with light.
While Southern Gothic writers often depict their depraved hillbillies as Saints and Jesuses, they always do so with dark irony and pitch black humour. Dead Man Walking however, plays the idea with utter earnestness. We are made to love the killer by the end, weeping at his long protracted death; yet we know nothing about the victims! This is a familiar gripe with the culture industry, which turns true crimes into spectacles, spawning books, podcasts, movies and tv series; likely of no benefit to the victimâs families. Our desire to know the life and struggles of the killers turns them into modern folk figures: bogeymen for most, and others, heroes. Dead Man Walking seeks to teach a humanist message, but when done in the form of morbid entertainment, the message just comes across as âall human lives are sacred, especially the lives we give our stage-time toâ.
But lately I am trying to null the poison in my blood that saps my love of life, turns my mouth into a scowl and spams my mind with barbed wire words. Spectacle! Mickey Mouse! Dreck! Where does this get me? I know sentimentality is the enemy of Art, but if the sentiment rises from compassion or kindness, I donât think it deserves such a scowl. Iâd like to smile more, and so what if itâs ideologically daggy? I know Iâd feel better about humanity watching Forrest Gump or Green Book than I would watching Wise Blood or They Shoot Horses Donât They. So although Iâm annoyed at this operaâs sanitized setting and themes, I recognise itâs the blood poison talking. I tell myself to stop thinking, to stop scribbling diatribes, to chill out and open up my heart to the singing.
I take my binoculars from their pouch and focus on the faces of the actors. When I look at the nun, I see she is crying. Then when I look at the killer, I am shocked to see he is also, almost, crying! I canât believe it. Itâs the magic of binoculars. Instead of being blurry peg people who sing for some reason, the characters become human to me.
Then I feel it! The murderer! He really is a Child of God. Through binoculars I see beyond the easter-island outlines of his face, into the shadows where lay his eyes, and in his eyes thereâs pain. A crying scared boy! And the nun, Sister Helen. Through her tears she is smiling, and like the spirit of maternal essence she radiates love and concern. They are singing but Iâm not listening. I let the words become sounds and the music swells louder, and when I remove my binoculars, I see the two figures hugging. I feel it. Finally I understand what Flannery OâConnor was trying to do at the end of A Good Man is Hard to Find.
Dead Man Walking, in a much more obvious way, extends that same message of compassion and grace to its killer, asking us to do the same. Although I prefer OâConnorâs flash-grenade method of startling and confusing the audience into possible understanding, I do think Dead Man Walking has its heart in the right place; yet in a culture already saturated with charismatic killers and sympathetic murderers, I donât think its message will come as a revelation
Freeze Frame Operaâs production of Dead Man Walking, aptly showing at the Fremantle Prison, is a real blockbuster with excellent acting, lighting and sound. Although I spent most of it being confused by the singing and was disappointed by the conventional story, it did cause me to reflect on compassion, forgiveness and the sanctity of human life. I feel mildly more sanct and human now.