Through August 23: Madness Takes its Toll in Union Avenue's "Salome"
It's astounding and time is fleeting
“Art in the blood is liable to take the strangest forms[…]” – Sherlock Holmes, “The Greek Interpreter”
“[W]e’re all mad here.” – The Cheshire Cat, “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
Union Avenue Opera describes the 1905 opera Salome as “an opera of desire and destruction.” Which, in this disturbing and driven production, it certainly is.
In UAO’s operatic adaptation by Richard Strauss (1864–1949) of Oscar Wilde’s 1893 play all three of the principals—King Herod, princess Salome, and the imprisoned prophet Jochanaan (John the Baptist)—are more than a little deranged. Herod hallucinates a cold wind and the noise of powerful wings (“das Rauschen / von mächt'gen Flügeln”), Jochanaan roars out visions of the Apocalypse, and Salome is inscrutably nihilistic.
Even some supporting characters are more than a bit odd. Captain Narraboth is obsessed with Salome, while Queen Herodias’s page is obsessed with Narraboth. Only the two soldiers guarding the cistern in which Jochanaan is confined seem fairly sane. But they’re also not the brightest torches on the terrace.
The collection of idiosycracies, all by itself, was enough to raise eyebrows and hackles 120 years ago. In a letter to Strauss, for example, the dramatist Romain Rolland attacked the opera's "nauseous and sickly atmosphere" and its cast of "unwholesome, unclean, hysterical or alcoholic beings, stinking of sophisticated and perfumed corruption".
But possibly the most radical and unsettling aspect of the opera was the music. Although widely regarded as a musical “conservative” by the avant garde in the mid 20th century, Strauss was actually quite radical in many ways. As Alex Ross observed in a 2019 article for The New Yorker, it’s Strauss’s “staggeringly original” score, “unsettling in its sexual and racial politics,” that is the most truly transgressive aspect of Salome. “When the clarinet slithers up a disjointed scale at the outset of the piece,” he wrote, “the curtain effectively goes up on twentieth-century music.”
So I’m happy to report that Union Avenue Opera’s Salome is a huge success, at least from a musical standpoint. Mark Freiman’s rather static direction—he has an unfortunate tendency to simply plant actors on stage and have them sing facing front—and Zak Metalsky’s relentlessly dim lighting tend to blunt the dramatic edge of the work. But the sheer power of the orchestral playing and, above all, the splendid singing of the entire cast render such dramaturgic quibbles largely irrelevant.
The role of Salome is easily one of the most demanding in the repertoire. It calls for the stamina and range of a dramatic soprano but contains brief passages that drop down into alto territory. It also requires an actress who can make the character's sexual obsession believable.
St. Louis’s own Kelly Slawson is Union Avenue’s Salome. Her voice is a powerful dramatic instrument, both silky and powerful. She also has what Anna Russell humorously described as “a good cutting edge”: a necessity for the music of a post-Wagnerian like Richard Strauss.
A self-described “rock and metal lover,” Slawson (in a St. Louis Magazine interview) described Salome as “the most heavy-metal opera that there is” with “a sort of rock vibe.” You can see (and, more importantly, hear) that in her magnetic performance. Her Salome is unsettlingly predatory in her seduction scene with John the Baptist (Jochanaan), thereby adding impact to the latter’s revulsion for the character. This is a Salome as destructive as she is seductive; no wonder Herod finally demands her execution.
You need a very solid Jochanaan to counter a Salome that commanding, and Union Avenue certainly has one in baritone Daniel Scofield. Widely praised for his Verdi performances, Scofield has the kind of big, auditorium-filling voice that is needed for a character that delivers many of his surreal prophecies from the cistern into which he has been dumped. When, at Salome’s command, he is freed so that she can attempt her seduction, the stage fairly crackles with a mix of sensuality and hostility.
Heavy metal, indeed.
Will Upham’s clear and precise tenor gives the neurasthenic Herod enough weight to come across as bizarre without being comical. That leaves the comedy where it belongs—in the hands and finely blended voices of the five Jews: Zachary K. Devin, Thomas M. Taylor IV, David Morgans, James Stevens, and Fitzgerald St. Louis. Their increasingly strident debate over their firmly held and mutually exclusive ideas about God provide the closest thing to comic relief in the opera.
That debate is cut off by the caustic Queen Herodias in a persuasively haughty and wryly cynical portrayal by mezzo Joanna Ehlers. She has one of the few real laugh lines of the libretto, and it’s classic Wilde: “Ich glaube nicht an Wunder, ich habe ihrer zu viele gesehn!” (“I don’t believe in miracles, I have seen too many.”).
Tenor Brian Skoog is the genuinely tragic Narraboth, doomed to literally fall on his sword by his obsession with Salome who typically never even notices the event. Contralto Emily Geller is in fine voice as the Page, usually a “pants” role, but in this production costumed androgynously enough to leave room for ambiguity. Baritone Joel Rogier (a UAO regular) and bass-baritone Ian Smith are the two stolidly unimaginative soldiers.
The UAO orchestra is roughly a quarter of the size Strauss calls for (there is only so much room in that pit), but Scott Schoonover gets a lot of sound out of them nevertheless—more than enough, in fact, to make a strong impression in the small performance space at the Union Avenue Christian Church. This score is a tough nut to crack (some of the notes are literally unplayable on their assigned instruments, for reasons known only to the composer) but the musicians do a splendid job with it. Like Hermia in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, though they be but little they are fierce.
Inspired, according to designer Patrick Huber, by both the symbolist paintings of Gustave Moreau and the faux-Egyptian lobby of The Fabulous Fox , the two-level set, complete with an actual cistern to hold Jochanaan, is one of the most visually stunning UAO has ever provided. The downside of what Huber describes as a “black velour jewel box” is that it creates a playing area that is wide but shallow. That unfortunately encourages that “plant your feet, face forward, and sing” staging that I referred to earlier and makes it hard for characters to clearly interact with each other.
It also limited the impact of the “Dance of the Seven Veils,” although choreographer Maggie Nold’s addition of two dancers (Audrey Sondag and Emma Wittenauer) to accompany Salome added visual interest.
Teresa Doggett’s costumes have the appropriately “Hollywood Biblical” look, at least to the extent that I could see them clearly on that twilit stage.
The technical, dramatic, and musical demands of Salome, the daunting difficulty of the title role, and the impact of that final grisly scene of Salome making love to the severed head of Jochanaan have combined to make productions relatively rare. There hasn’t been one here since Opera Theatre’s 2009 presentation with Kelly Kaduce in the title role. That being the case, I can strongly recommend the Union Avenue production. It’s not perfect, but it is (you should pardon the expression) bloody good and well worth seeing. Be advised, though, that despite its age, Strauss’s opera still has the capacity to shock and disturb.
Final performances of Salome are Friday and Saturday at 8 pm, August 22 and 23, at the Union Avenue Christian Church in the Central West End. Salome runs around one hour and forty minutes with no intermission and is sung in German with projected English text. Check out the UAO web site for details.