Easter Sunday in Golden Gate Park was the serendipitous setting for the 37th anniversary of the founding of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
The weather was perfect and the crowd of about 10,000 was mellow and charming.
Best of all, the party was free, the police were mercifully absent, and there was not a single bit of corporate sponsorship signage.
There were also no overpriced vendors so everyone brought their own food and drink and shared.
It felt like an Easter miracle.
Back in the 1970s, there was a seismic shift in the San Francisco gay scene, with seemingly everyone adopting the Castro Clone look of flannel shirts, jeans and work boots for everyday wear.
In reaction to the "butchoisie" of the time, a trio of gay men dressed up in nuns' habits one Easter Sunday in 1979, traipsed through the Castro neighborhood on their way to a nude beach, and the ecclesiastical drag queen sisterhood was born.
In the intervening decades, dozens of autonomous orders have sprung up in cities around the world...
...following the founding mission statement, "to promulgate universal joy, expiate stigmatic guilt and serve the community."
The afternoon began with a childrens' Easter egg hunt which was followed by a series of performances on a makeshift stage that included everything from a B52s cover band to a plus-size burlesque troupe getting down and dirty.
After an oddly touching recitation of vows by the entire Order...
...Sister Roma hosted the controversial, sacriligious finale of the annual event, the Hunky Jesus contest.
Over a dozen contestants competed, including Horny Jesus and Burner Jesus above and Carpenter Jesus below.
This humorous lampoon has long driven the local Catholic establishment crazy, but in truth the Sisters, particularly in their courageous work during the AIDS crisis, came closer to the ideals of the historical Jesus than their clerical counterparts who are still demonizing women and gay people.
The crowd crowned the eventual winner, Cheerleader Jesus, by the loudness of their cheers, but the most poignant moment may have belonged to Tiago Afonso below who called himself Homeless Jesus.
"Maybe we can find you a place to live with somebody out in the crowd," Sister Roma told him. "How much can you afford to pay a month?" and Tiago replied $500. "$500 in this city? You really are Homeless Jesus."
SF Symphony Music Director led this month's SoundBox concert for the first time since he inaugurated the nightclub series in 2014. He seemed to be more relaxed last Saturday evening, and was obviously having a great time along with the sold-out audience.
The program was all French music, beginning with excerpts from Jean-Féry Rebel’s 1737 Les élémens, which opens with a fabulously dissonant depiction of "Chaos" before water, fire, earth, and air make their appearance. There are so many original instrumental ensembles in the Bay Area that it was odd hearing this kind of music on modern instruments, but it was given a fun, jaunty performance by the chamber orchestra and the projections by Adam Larsen for the various movements were perfection.
This was followed by even more ancient music, the 1199 Sederunt principles (The Princes Sat) by Pérotin, one of the earliest polyphonic works in existence, written for performance at the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Paris, which was then under construction. Elliott James Encarnación above, along with Jonathan Thomas, Adam Cole, Matthew Peterson, Chung-Wai Soong, and Clayton Moser below, gave a superb performance in what sounded like very tricky music to perform.
As Tilson Thomas mentioned in his explanation of the history of the piece, the long-drawn out syllables and repetition look forward to late 20th century minimalism. "It's one of the Steve Reich's favorite pieces of music and mine too."
The second set started with Syrinx, a 1913 Debussy flute solo performed by Tim Day, which was followed by the most substantial work of the evening, Messiaen's Couleurs de la cité céleste (Colors of the Celestial City), a 1963 depiction of the Holy City in Saint John the Divine’s vision in the Book of Revelation. This being Messiaen, the Holy City sounded a bit like a tropical rainforest filled with exotic birds, and Tilson Thomas prefaced the piece by trying to whistle the birdcalls found throughout.
The complex, strange, and demanding music was given a superb performance and the audience, as it had been all evening, was amazingly quiet and attentive. Besides a huge percussion component that would not have been out of place in a gamelan orchestra, there was a prominent part for a piano soloist performed by Orion Weiss above.
The third set began with Principal Oboe Eugene Izotov, accompanied by pianist Robin Sutherland, in a pair of short, lovely salon pieces, the 1907 Pièce en forme de Habanera by Ravel and one of the last works by Saint-Saëns, an excerpt from a 1921 Oboe Sonata.
This was followed by Tilson Thomas conducting a small orchestra in Darius Milhaud's 1930 Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra with Principal Percussionist Jacob Nissly seemingly playing 40 different instruments at once in a wildly amusing piece of music that managed to sound simultaneously complicated and transparent.
The young Matt Damon lookalike returned with the chamber orchestra for Milhaud's Scaramouche, a short, delightful paean to Brazil which closed out the show. Realizing that I had never heard a single one of these musical pieces before made me wish the main Davies Hall SF Symphony concerts were even half as adventurous in their programming.
A party was held on Holy Saturday afternoon at the San Francisco Eagle tavern for worshipers of superheroes and those who enjoy dressing up like them.
It's not quite Święconka, the Polish blessing of the Easter baskets on Holy Saturday, but every region has their own traditions, including men in San Francisco dressing like Lady Deadbolt.
West Edge Opera presented a concert version of the other operatic version of La Bohème by Leoncavallo on Sunday at Mills College in a wonderful, strongly sung performance. Pictured above, left to right, are Ryan Bradford as Colline, Sally Mouzon as Phemie, Buffy Baggott as Musette, Michael Orlinksky as Schaunard, Alex Boyer as Marcel, Anders Froelich as Roldolphe, and Carrie Hennessey as Mimi. Not pictured but essential was Musical Director Jonathan Khuner on piano, who gave a virtuoso performance of the complex musical reduction while conducting a large vocal ensemble.
Leoncavallo was a librettist as well as a composer, and was great friends with Puccini for whom he wrote the libretto for Manon Lescaut. Leoncavallo proposed collaborating on an adaptation of the 1849 play by Henry Murger (above) and Théodore Barrière about starving artists and their girlfriends in Paris' Latin Quarter during the 1840s, which in turn was based on a series of touching, humorous, autobiographical stories by Murger published in various Parisian newspapers. Puccini professed to be uninterested but changed his mind and wrote his own opera with different librettists, basing it on the later 1851 collection of stories called Scènes de la vie de bohème which was published after the smashing success of the play.
Leoncavallo was furious and went ahead with his own opera while publicly calling out Puccini for his bad behavior. Puccini denied the story in a letter to an Italian newspaper in 1893, and concluded, "Let him compose, and I will compose. The public will judge." And judge they did, with Puccini's 1896 tuneful, sentimental opera becoming an overproduced repertory staple while Leoncavallo's 1897 opera slipped into obscurity. Based on the West Edge Opera performance, I actually prefer the Leoncavallo. Its libretto is more coherent, the humor is genuinely funny, and the characters have a harder, more realistic edge. The Bohemians are also more fleshed out than in the Puccini opera, especially the composer Schaunard, given a sly, funny performance by Michael Orklinksky above.
I tried to find an English translation of the novel at the SF Public Library, which did not exist, but did stumble across a delightful 1946 biography of Henry Murger, a Parisian janitor's son who had dreams of becoming a poet. That didn't work out so well financially, so his friends encouraged him to write prose, and he finally found a measure of success with journalistic vignettes based on real incidents from the lives of his friends. In their early 20s, they were mostly starving, aspiring artists in various disciplines, living in unheated garrets and cheap hotels in the Latin Quarter, while hanging out nightly on the second floor of the Cafe Momus which was an actual establishment.
The Leoncavallo opera starts with a scene at the Cafe Momus, where the proprietor is demanding to be paid and the artists respond by crafting a manifesto of demands themselves, such as a more extensive selection of newspapers, better coffee, and so on. The second act takes place at an apartment courtyard just as Musette is being evicted after her rich sugar daddy stops paying rent because she's been spending too much time with the painter Marcel. She was supposed to be hosting a soiree that evening, so her circle of friends decide to rearrange her furniture in the courtyard for an impromptu party instead, which culminates in a near-riot when the noisy young people wake up the older tenants. The chorus was a little ragged, but they heroically managed to convey both the revelers and the angry tenants in musical counterpoint.
In contrast to the Puccini version, where Rodolfo and Mimi are the main romantic characters, Leoncavallo's opera focuses more on Marcel and Musette. Soprano Buffy Baggott above as Musette was delightful, and Alex Boyer as Marcel, even with a couple of unsteady moments, sounded ready to take on the major operatic stages of the world with his big, beautiful tenor.
The real Musette was named Marie Roux (seated in the above photo). The book relates that she "was a neatly-balanced mixture of gentleness and heartlessness. She was thoroughly independent, quitted her lover whenever she fancied, and as capriciously rejoined him. The Lothario of the Bohemians had met his match. Once, when, as usual, she and Champfleury [the model for Marcel] had parted forever, Musette came back to stroke Champfleury's head. 'My dear, I am never jealous of my old lovers. When it is finished, it is finished. We see each other again, we are good friends, and that is all. I am not like most women and all the world knows I don't act with men as most women do. If I love someone, I tell him so."
The poet Rodolphe, sung beautifully by baritone Anders Froehlich (above left), was based on Murger himself while Mimi, given a lovely performance by Carrie Hennessey (second from the left) was a conflation of three different lovers, all of them blonde, blue-eyed, and frail. Two of them died young of tuberculosis in charity hospitals, and Murger himself died at the age of 38 from acute arthritis and gangrene, probably brought on by the serious malnutrition he experienced as a young man.
In The Legend of The Latin Quarter, there is a funny story where Murger and Barrière can't agree on an ending for their play, so they bring in a writer friend named Monselet to play referee. "Barrière, it appeared, was insistent that "Mimi must die." Henry shook his head vehemently. He proposed that she be sent on a trip to Italy, at any rate make the ending a happy one. Barrière, who knew the true story of Mimi/Lucille, was adamant. The greatness of the play, he contended, rested upon her tragic death. But for the sentimental Murger, it was harrowing to kill the poor girl a second time. The two collaborators appealed to Monselet. He agreed with Barrière. It was two against one and Henry finally withdrew his objections. "And that," chuckled Monselet afterward, "was how I killed Mimi."
