Lady Business: Opera conductors, theater critics, and who tells women’s stories
Hello and welcome to Lady Business, a weekly newsletter about women, the business world, and all the ways they overlap. You can sign up for Lady Business and read previous issues here. This is the fifty-fifth issue, published January 17, 2019.
I had an extremely culture-filled few days last weekend: Opera! Broadway musical! Broadway play! If you want specifics: Aida at the Met, Waitress, and Network.
The first was a decent spectacle with sound problems (and plot problems, but: Opera. Mocking the plot is half the fun.) I was particularly bemused by the orchestra musicians, who spent the performance visibly wandering in and out of the pit. Maybe due to lackadaisical directing?
It’s been an eventful year for the leaders of the Metropolitan Opera’s orchestra – music director James Levine was #MeToo’d by several men last year, leading to the appointment of the company’s first openly-gay (white, male) conductor and a lavish profile this week of same. A parenthetical in that profile grants that, celebratory headline aside, “conducting remains an overwhelmingly straight (and male, and white) profession.”
Which leads us to this fun point from 2016:
The Met has a sorry history of engaging female conductors. The gender barrier was broken in 1976 by Sarah Caldwell, but only at the insistence of Beverly Sills, who agreed to sing in “La Traviata” on the condition that Caldwell be hired to conduct. Simone Young was next, 20 years later, making an auspicious 1996 debut in “La Bohème.” But she last appeared at the house in 1998. In 2013, the excellent British conductor Jane Glover, an early-music specialist, became the third woman to conduct at the Met.
As of that 2016 article, a grand total of four (four!) women had conducted in the Met’s 136-year history. Lest that seem like a potential outlier, there’s this cheerful Mother Jones chart about all top orchestra conductors, as of 2013:
Which is one reason why Waitress the next day was so welcome: Women were actually involved in creating and directing this story about women!
I had enjoyed Adrienne Shelly’s 2007 movie and its gently bittersweet story (and meta-story), which mostly held up in the transition to musical spectacle. The singing, too, was terrific; we lucked into tickets during the few weeks that musician Sara Bareilles, who wrote the play’s music and lyrics, returned to star as the blue-collar diner waitress stuck in an abusive marriage with an unwanted pregnancy. (Given that description, is it weird to say that Waitress is one of the most fun plays I’ve seen in the past year? And Bareilles’ voice is A.Ma.Zing.) But there’s also this, courtesy Jesse Green’s 2016 review for New York magazine:
A lot of the preview press for the new Broadway musical Waitress, which opened tonight at the Brooks Atkinson, concerned its groundbreakingly all-female creative team: Sara Bareilles (songs), Jessie Nelson (book), Lorin Latarro (choreography), and Diane Paulus (direction).
Green then went on to argue, a bit weirdly, “Feminism does not suggest or hope that women can tell women’s stories better than men can, or for that matter that there is such a thing as a women’s story.”
…Really? I mean, sure, men can be feminists and tell women’s stories well, even if they’re not always as good at it as they claim to be. (Hi, Joss Whedon!) And Green eventually concludes that “perhaps it really did take an all-female creative team” to create Waitress. But are men, generally, equally as good as women at telling stories based on our own experiences?
Anyway, I was already pretty disappointed to see Green’s name on that New York review. That’s not due to any general dislike of his work; but I was hoping that somehow Sara Holdren had that critic’s job in time to opine on Waitress. Holdren’s reviews for New York stand out in part due to her expertise as a director and in part due to her perspective as apparently the only woman reviewing theater for top New York-based publications. Which -- sorry, Jesse -- I would argue is an expertise that matters when reviewing stories by women and/or about women!
Take Holdren’s review of Network, the third show I watched this weekend and the most mixed bag. Bryan Cranston, as my friend Lindsay put it after the show, landed mostly on the right side of the scenery-chewing line; the staging was the cinematic immersive experience director Ivo van Hove has become theater-world famous for; the decision to not update the movie's 1970s plot for our internet age was weird and occasionally tedious; and the play included an unnecessary 30 minutes or so of bloviating about the media and reality TV (and, sigh, the current president) that wasn’t nearly as smart as van Hove thought it was.
My biggest disappointment was the oddly stilted performance of Orphan Black’s Tatiana Maslany, an actor who’s won awards for her chameleon-like virtuosity on that show. Holdren was the only critic whose review helped me figure out part of why this play didn’t serve her -- or any of the non-Cranston actors -- very well:
Van Hove’s Network treats the parable of [Cranston’s Howard] Beale’s rise and fall as a star rather than a fully fleshed-out ensemble drama. When Cranston isn’t there, the temperature drops noticeably, and as Beale becomes more and more untethered from sanity, the comparative monotony of van Hove’s work with the rest of the play’s cast starts to become glaring.
Yet Howard Beale isn’t even really the story’s protagonist. If that honor belongs to the character who most consciously drives the action, then in Network it’s Diana Christensen. She’s the primary puppet master behind the Howard Beale phenomenon … [but] other than Cranston, the people in Network feel stuck, sometimes overwrought and often stiff. They’re gamely going through the motions of a high-tension drama, but van Hove hasn’t always helped them viscerally connect with the text or each other.
I’d love to see the Network play that revolves around Diana Christensen, one that treats her calculated choices and moral flaws as more interesting than Howard Beale’s descent into madness. Insanity is showy, sure, but it also gets boring pretty quickly on stage; from a story-telling perspective, rational people making bad choices for logical reasons are inherently more interesting.
But a story that wrestles with Diana as protagonist would have to care about her as more than a scary, soulless, homewrecking young woman in a sad old man’s world. That story might, dare I say it, benefit from having a woman involved in its writing, or its directing. But in that absence, I’m grateful that there’s at least one high-profile woman critic paying attention to how other women’s stories are told.
Lady Bits:
--Am I allowed to be faintly embarrassed for everyone involved in the Gillette Makes a Statement About Toxic Masculinity ad? (If you’re going to go the Dove route, could you at least be a little less treacly and self-congratulatory?) Also, shallow point, but: A lot of men in the ad are just not very hot, or are filmed in unflattering ways. Which seems like a weird choice for an aspirational visual commercial about how men can be better role models.
--The Good Place and Brooklyn Nine-Nine are both back, hurrah! Emily Nussbaum’s New Yorker review of the latter focuses on its “defiant positivity,” which is definitely something that’s helped me go full Schuroverse sitcom stan in the past, oh, two years or so.
--Shameless plug alert: My book for Inc. and Harper Collins, Startup Money Made Easy, comes out on February 12. If you or someone you know is starting or running a business and wants some financial advice, would you consider pre-ordering it and/or leaving me an Amazon review?
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