Heartbeat Opera of New York has been activating vest-pocket performing spaces for 11 seasons now, to mounting acclaim. Was it with Salome, presented in Brooklyn in February, that the company made the leap from best-kept secret to poster child for boutique adventures in music theater? Obligatory quibbles aside, the verdict from the consistory of critics who count added up to a resounding Yes! Heidi Waleson, of the Wall Street Journal, called the show “Salome unfiltered, uncushioned by strings, exposed with naked ferocity.”
Waleson’s bit about strings points to Heartbeat’s signature trick of crunching orchestral forces to outré chamber combos—in this case an octet of clarinetists busying themselves on 28 wind instruments, abetted by a versatile duo of percussionists. For all who have yet to discover Heartbeat as well as fans who just want more, a live video of Salome now brings the experience home.
It’s the composer Dan Schlosberg who effected the acoustic metamorphosis, and if you’re thinking Elon and his chainsaw, scratch that. True, Schlosberg slashes Richard Strauss’s post-Wagnerian score with the flourish of a D’Artagnan, but then, with the skill of a Swiss watchmaker, he restores it to perfect working order. Heartbeat’s artistic director and indispensable man with the baton Jacob Ashworth spreads the results before us with keen dramatic instincts.
In keeping with Heartbeat’s less-is-more aesthetic, walk-on characters have bitten the dust, leaving a cast of seven, in contemporary dress, to enact the Biblical tale of the teenage princess who dances for her besotted stepfather and demands in exchange the severed head of John the Baptist. Oscar Wilde’s dialogue, originally written in French but set to music in polished German, is heard this time in off-putting, occasionally serviceable English. In the circumstances, the eyesore of supertitles ought to have been unnecessary, but there they are.
Witnessing the characters’ loud, unhinged behavior up close in tight quarters must have been hair-raising, like a brawl in a subway car. From the safe critical distance of one’s easy chair, much of the effect evaporates. Vocally, the soprano Summer Hassam in her tulle prom dress and high-top sneakers takes a valiant stab at the punishing title role. As for Salome’s power over men, you may have to take it on faith.
The director Elizabeth Dinkova, however, is a believer, to the point that the no-sex freak John the Baptist becomes one more notch in the princess’s belt. Cadaverous and pale in a tattered T-shirt and baggy briefs, he’s kept onstage through the whole show, locked in a Plexiglas cell through long scenes when by rights he should be out of sight. So, we see too much of him, conveying too much that is out of character. Yet to his credit, the baritone Nathaniel Sullivan catches glimmers of the nimbus of the Baptist’s musical prophecies.
Per Wilde and Strauss, Salome’s true conquest is her royal stepfather Herod. The tenor Patrick Cook embodies him in a lounge-lizard wig and Mardi Gras coronet, a pedophile couch-potato ogre twice her height. Spoiler alert: in the pivotal Dance of the Seven Veils, he’s the one who shows some skin, not all of it below the neck.
Salome is available for streaming on YouTube
Matthew Gurewitsch writes about opera and classical music for AIR MAIL. He lives in Hawaii
