LETTER TO JULIET
Bellepoque
The Chamber @ The Arts
House
Friday (3 October 2014 )
This review was published in The Straits Times on 6 October 2014 with the title "Moving musical tribute to Shakespeare's women".
Letter To Juliet is a 80-minute play produced by local
light musical theatre group Bellepoque in commemoration of William
Shakespeare’s 450th birth anniversary. It is in effect a tribute to
the multi-faceted women who made the Bard’s plays so true-to-life and
ultimately memorable.
The
setting scripted and directed by Hemang Yadav involves literature teacher
Hermione (played by Sherilyn Tan) who has a troubled relationship with her
ambitious and insensitive husband Leo (Darren Guo), and writes Agony Aunt
letters to Juliet Capulet of Verona, the Shakespearean heroine who has been receiving such letters for
centuries.
She
addresses the issues of contemporary women and relates these with Shakespeare’s
women as she lectures her class of students, which was the audience. Each
letter introduces groups of operatic arias and duets, with a cast of five
singers very capably accompanied by Vincent Chen on the piano.
It
was perhaps unfortunate that the first heroine was Juliet herself, as young
soprano Angela Cortez was overmatched by the waltz-song Je veux vivre from Gounod’s Romeo
et Juliette. Just getting around the coloratura notes was not quite enough,
as it also needed to sound seemingly effortless, which was not the case.
Opposite
her was a more believable Romeo, with Ah,
leve toi soleil sung by tenor Melvin Tan, one of the land’s best bleeding
heart tenors, who made every note and gesture count. Their duet O, Nuit Divine! was better balanced than
anticipated and the mismatch much less obvious.
The
character of Lady Macbeth, love or loathe her, was all about ruthlessness and
overarching ambition. She found a perfect protagonist in soprano Satsuki
Nagatome, whose sheer depth of tone and emotion swept the field in Verdi’s Nel di della vittoria (from Macbeth) as she eyed the Scottish throne
with her next nefarious plan. A woman’s hysteria provides an added dimension to
the cold brutality already perfected by man.
In
two arias from Purcell’s The Fairy-Queen,
adapted from A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
it was tenor Reuben Lai who stole the show as a smarmy, domineering male,
towering over soprano Sabrina Zuber’s bit-part in the slender If Love’s a Sweet Passion. The aria from
Handel’s Giulio Cesare, V’adoro, pupille, ably sung by Cortez, ironically had nothing to do with Shakespeare’s play on the same Roman
emperor.
A
Shakespearean heroine who evoked most sympathy was Desdemona, and this production
telescoped scenes from Otello by both
Rossini and Verdi. Verdi’s version is by far the better known, with its tender Ave Maria, here sung with much feeling
by Nagatome. The final duet and murder scene with Lai’s Otello brandishing a
dagger provided the most gripping moments of the evening.
To
close Hermione ponders her next step with her wayward hubby, and drawing from
the strengths of all the Shakespearean heroines, she does the unexpected. Forgiving
the arrogant Leo would seem like a cop out in the age of women’s liberation, but
her magnanimity is the quality that makes true love transcendent. It is all
there in The Winter’s Tale. Shakespeare
truly understood the hearts of men, and women.
Photographs by the kind permission of Bellepoque.
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