La Boheme at San Francisco Opera

In the many productions I have seen over the decades of Puccini's perennially popular opera La Boheme, I have never once laughed at its young characters' antics or cried at its sad ending, but did both on Tuesday evening at the San Francisco Opera. (All production photos by Cory Weaver.)

One of the reasons was that the ensemble playing young Parisian bohemians in the 19th century looked and behaved like friends who would actually hang out together. Tenor Pene Pati as the writer Rodolfo, bass Bogdan Talos as the philosopher Colline, baritone Samuel Kidd as the musician Schaunard, and baritone Lucas Meachem as the painter Marcello played off of each other with wit and charm, and instead of the opening scene's usual mugging schtick there was precise and understated humor. All credit to British director John Caird who created this production which was first seen here in 2014, and to the revival director Katherine M. Carter.

Another reason was the sweet, gentle chemistry between the two leads, Pene Pati and Karen Chia-ling Ho as Mimi, the poor seamstress who eventually becomes a kept girl. Pati displayed some vocal uncertainty in the big, high climaxes of his famous arias but otherwise he sounded beautiful. So did Karen Chia-ling Ho whose soprano voice is exquisite in this role. Even better, both vocalists sang their roles rather than belting them.

Soprano Andrea Carroll was a nice surprise as Musetta, the on-again, off-again girlfriend of Marcello when she's not being squired around town by rich old men. Her star turn in Act Two at the Cafe Momus was nicely sung and genuinely funny.

For once, she actually seemed to be an integral part of this young circle of friends.

Mimi and Rodolfo's going from falling in love at first sight in Act One to breaking up months later in Act Three has always confused me. What happened, exactly?

The supertitles by director John Caird are unusually good, and it finally became clear that the reason for the breakup was because Rodolfo was pathologically jealous and a jerk about it and it all got too ugly, which he finally confesses to his friend Marcello. Pene Pati seems too kind to be that kind of asshole, but it's not unusual behavior.

Musetta meanwhile breaks off with Marcello, announcing that he's the worst kind of lover, "which is somebody who acts like a husband."

In warm reviews of the opening performance by Joshua Kosman at On a Pacific Aisle and Lisa Hirsch at SF Classical Voice, they had polar opposite feelings about the Spanish conductor Ramón Tebar. Joshua wrote: "the weakest, most ill-judged conducting the War Memorial has witnessed in a long time" while Lisa praised Tebar's "flexible, generous conducting." I'm siding with Lisa, and thought the orchestra sounded fabulous. Tebar's slightly eccentric, slower than usual tempos worked for me.

I am not a Puccini fan, partly out of resentment that his handful of operas have hogged the repertory for all of my operagoing life, and the pathetic dying heroine sentimentality of his plots is not a favorite. The music is gorgeous and complex though, and occasionally a performance will be a reminder of how potent his work can be. This is one of them.

Ruth Asawa Retrospective at SFMOMA

SFMOMA is presenting a huge retrospective this summer of artist Ruth Asawa (1926-2013), an important artist in San Franciscan and American history.

She was born into a large Japanese-American farming family in Southern California which was sent to an internment camp in Arkansas during World War Two. She was later quoted about the experience: "I hold no hostilities for what happened; I blame no one. Sometimes good comes through adversity. I would not be who I am today had it not been for the internment, and I like who I am."

On a trip to Mexico in her last year of Teachers College, she took an art class taught by Cuban designer Clara Porset, a friend of artist Joseph Albers. In a 1981 interview Asawa stated, "I was told that it might be difficult for me, with the memories of the war still fresh, to work in a public school. My life might even be in danger. This was a godsend, because it encouraged me to follow my interest in art, and I subsequently enrolled at Black Mountain College in North Carolina." (Pictured is Untitled, Abstraction [Dogwood Leaves], 1946-1949.)

The post-war avant-garde arts college in North Carolina was in the midst of an historic moment, with an extraordinary roster of students and teachers that included John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Willem de Kooning, and R. Buckminster Fuller. The experience was transformational for Asawa. She also met her husband, architect Albert Lanier, at the college and they moved to Noe Valley in San Francisco, since the only states where interracial marriage was legal were California and Washington. Along the way, they proceeded to have six children together. (Pictured is Untitled [Wall-mounted Paperfold with Horizontal Stripes], 1953.)

Asawa's work uses the humblest of materials, from rubber stamps to sticks and leaves and folded paper, that is intricate, obsessive and inspirational.

During a 1947 visit to Toluca, Mexico, she became fascinated with the way villagers made baskets from galvanized wire, and the inspiration for her looped-wire sculptures was ignited. She stated: "I was interested in it because of the economy of a line, making something in space, enclosing it without blocking it out. It's still transparent. I realized that if I was going to make these forms, which interlock and interweave, it can only be done with a line because a line can go anywhere."

In the 1950s and 1960s, her hanging wire sculptures became emblematic midcentury modern images, and were quite successful in the art market.

One room of the exhibit is a recreation of the family's bohemian Noe Valley house, an Arts and Crafts treasure that looks like a huge, all-encompassing art project.

According to Asawa's granddaughter Lilli Lanier, who grew up nearby, "She always had an idea. Come over tomorrow. We're going to draw eggplants. And then we're going to eat them. We'd draw food...and then it would turn into a cooking lesson--how you make Japanese noodles with cilantro and the eggplants you've just drawn." (Pictured is Untitled, Eggplants on Orange Background, 1958.)

In a post on The San Francisco Standard, Erin Feher makes the case that one of Asawa's greatest contributions was her dedication to childrens' arts education (click here). She begins: "Ruth Asawa couldn’t hide her rising anger. As her youngest son, Paul, proudly showed off the hand-traced turkey drawing he had completed at school, Asawa was taken aback. It was autumn 1967, and Paul attended Alvarado Elementary, just down the block from their Noe Valley home...To Asawa, who had studied with Robert Rauschenberg, Josef Albers, and Willem de Kooning, the turkey was an abomination. Asawa acted swiftly, rounding up a small cohort of fellow mothers and PTA members to elevate the arts program at the school. Calling themselves the “Valley Girls,” they scrounged up $50 in donations and launched an experimental summer school in the cafeteria, run completely by volunteers. Students were taught to weave on looms made from packing crates and to make sculptures from papier-mâché."...“My mom was a bulldozer. The things she really wanted, she got them done,” says Paul Lanier, the creator of that maligned turkey art.

The retrospective will be traveling to MOMA in New York and the Guggenheim in Bilbao, Spain, so check it out this summer while you have a chance.

Yuan Goang-Ming: Everyday War

The 60-year-old Taiwanese video artist Yuan Goang-Ming is currently having his first solo exhibition in the U.S. at the Asian Art Museum.

His global reputation took a giant leap at last year's Venice Biennale where his Everyday War installation at the Taiwan pavilion was reportedly a festival highlight. The Venice show was curated by Abby Chen, who is currently the Head of Contemporary Art at San Francisco's Asian Art Museum, and brought the exhibit here, adding a few additional works by the artist. (For an interesting video of the Venice Biennale exhibit that includes interviews with Yuan, Chen, and lots of fancy art fair people sipping glasses of wine, click here.)

Although there are only about 9 works in the exhibit, they are spread out across the huge expanse of the Akiko Yamazaki and Jerry Yang Pavilion, which usually hosts large traveling exhibits. There is also comfortable furniture on which to sit and actually watch the videos that range from about 5 to 15 minutes. Plus, unlike Venice, there are no crowds, which is a luxury.

The videos are trance-like with the camera never panning to the right or left, only forward and backwards, both visually and with time. There is a serenity to them even when they are depicting empty major streets in Taipei during an annual nuclear disaster drill or a bedroom being destroyed in slow motion by gunshots and small explosions (I hope the goldfish survived).

I saw this exhibit briefly when it first opened in April and found it unpleasantly disquieting, but it was more compelling on a second viewing, especially after experiencing the sonic waves from a huge bomb going off in peaceful Palm Springs a few weeks ago.

Speaking of which, beware the dining room table situated in front of a screen featuring Google Street View gone amok. The table is scary.

While leaving I noticed a group of young people, a collective calling themselves Dream State, setting up installations throughout the museum for a "takeover" of the institution this weekend. The group was founded by Spencer Tsang who is pictured above, and the performance schedule looks like fun. Sunday is free admission to the museum, so check it out. Click here for more information on the museum's website.

Tesla Protest Redux

Last Saturday the weekly Tesla showroom protest on Van Ness Avenue at O'Farrell spread out into the center median between bus lanes...

...complete with homemade signage...

...a brilliant drummer that kept the troops charged up...

...and a fierce determination.

This struggle against fascism in the United States is going to be a long one...

...and one of the few pressure points that seem to be working worldwide are the Tesla protests and boycotts.

The actions of the ICE Gestapo were being recognized in the person of Kilmar Abrego Garcia...

...who was wrongly kidnapped by the U.S. government and thrown into the hellish prisons of El Salvador rather like Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte Cristo.

The people responsible are truly evil.

Meanwhile, all of us get to deal with the peripheral effects of lunatics destroying the economy of the world while welcoming old plagues into the general population.

This is going to be a long haul but it's important to fight it in every way possible.

Frankenstein at SF Ballet

Late to the party again, I finally saw the San Francisco Ballet production of the full-length, story ballet version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein last Saturday evening. Created in 2016-17 by British choreographer Liam Scarlett as a co-production of London's Royal Ballet and the San Francisco Ballet, it's an ambitious, colorful, striking work. Scarlett was a principal dancer at the Royal Ballet before retiring in his mid-twenties to become a full-time choreographer. Frankenstein was his first full-length ballet which was an immediate, popular hit with audiences but left a lot of critics kvetching. (Click here for the late Alan Ulrich's review of the SF premiere.)

Scarlett proceeded to create ballets all over the world for the next four years until accusations of "sexual impropriety" involving male dancers surfaced in 2019. The British tabloids were at their worst and implied that he'd been molesting minors, which turned out to be bunkum. The succeeding, years-long investigation cleared him of all charges, but it was too late. Scarlett resigned his position with the Royal Ballet and companies around the world dropped his ballets from their repertories. With his career over, and after a year of hiding away during the COVID pandemic, Scarlett hung himself in his own flat, dying at the age of 35. Tamara Rojo, SF Ballet's Director who was in charge of the English National Ballet at the time, was quoted in Dance Australia: "The world is a much darker, uglier, nastier place without you [Liam] in it."

In the Ulrich review, he noted that "Scarlett has said how eager he was for San Francisco Ballet to have the piece because of dancers Joseph Walsh and Frances Chung." Eight years after the premiere, the two dancers reprised their roles as Victor Frankenstein and his doomed fiance Elizabeth Valenza, and it was an absolute treat seeing this dynamic duo from the original cast dancing on Saturday night. (All production photos are by Lindsey Rallo.)

Before his suicide, Scarlett left a bequest naming five "trustees" to oversee his legacy, including Joseph Walsh and his wife Lauren Strongin, a recently retired soloist at the SF Ballet who danced in a number of Scarlett ballets. So on top of performing Victor Frankenstein, Walsh along with Strongin have been staging the four different casts that have been performing Frankenstein earlier this year and in the final "encore" week to end the season. Walsh is one of my favorite dancers, with an ability to go from utter stillness to fluid motion without any visible transition, a skill that reminds me of Buster Keaton at times. (Click here for an interesting interview with Walsh and how crazy it has been trying to be both dancer and stager at the same time.)

The original production by John Macfarlane is both spectacular and stark, with the medical students anatomy theater looking like something out of the recent film Poor Things. The ensemble dance with students waving around body parts was a bit bizarre, but it effectively takes the audience from the opening scenes of genteel Swiss aristocracy into the realm of horror. The reanimation of The Creature at the end of Act One was a genuine coup de theatre and it packed a jolt.

This is the third time Wei Wang has been in this production as The Creature and he owns the role. Creepy, alluring, pathetic, and frightening all manage to come across in his performance, and the scene where he accidentally kills the 7-year-old William Frankenstein is the most powerful in the ballet. On Saturday night, William was danced by the extraordinarily precocious Bode Jay Nanola, who was amazing.

The huge musical score is by New York composer Lowell Liebermann, whose music I had never heard before. His template seemed to be the late ballets of Prokofiev (Romeo and Juliet, Cinderella), and though Liebermann doesn't have the melodic and rhythmic genius of Prokofiev (few composers do), the score was colorful, attuned to the action, and eminently serviceable. My hope is that Ms. Rojo brings back more of Liam Scarlett's ballets, some of which he created for the San Francisco Ballet, especially since the company already has two official "stagers" in Lauren Strongin and Joseph Walsh.

May Day Protest in SF Civic Center

Various protest rallies and marches took place in San Francisco on May Day, and I walked to the one scheduled for 4PM in Civic Center Plaza, which was to be followed by a march down Market Street. There were lots of plainclothes police parked around the neighborhood but overall the law enforcement presence was deliberately low-key with no street closures in front of City Hall.

Upside down American flags of distress were omnipresent.

Various labor union groups were also represented although they were overshadowed by strident speakers ranting on a portable speaker system.

Some of the signage was profane...

...and delightfully homemade.

Of all the current protests in San Francisco against the oncoming of fascism, the weekly gatherings from 12 to 2 on Van Ness in front of the Tesla showroom are the most fun.

They even have free red, white and blue popsicles.

My favorite sight was on an adjoining lawn where a quartet were practicing a dance routine...

...in front of a sign reading "BE FABULOUS / BAN FASCISM".