Hello, Vocalisters! It's nice to be home again.
We watched Little Women, and my thought was this: One of the problems in taking a long, sedately-paced novel and compressing it into a kind of serial of "greatest hits" moments (which you have to do in order to telescope a very long book into a two-hour opera) is that you entirely miss characterization. With the exception of Jo, there was no characterization of anyone in the opera.
If you hadn't read the book, you neither knew who Beth was nor cared that she was dying. The characters weren't adequately introduced and it was simply a string of new people coming in and out, with the presumption that the audience had read the book and was familiar with the people and plots from the beginning. That, I think, was the problem with the opera.
On the other hand, I saw the (totally musically inferior) opera of Streetcar, having never read the play or seen the movie, and followed the plot very well. I understood what was going on in Little Women, but neither my husband nor my mother (neither of whom had read the LMA book) kept up with the rapid introduction of characters, nor did they care when Meg was married, when Beth died, or when Amy married Laurie. If it's simply a trip down memory lane, reminding you of the book characters you knew and loved in your childhood, it is more effective -- but I think that makes it an inferior stand-alone piece of art. As a documentary of Jo, surrounded by a whirl of characters and events to which the reader is indifferent, it was a rather boring opera.
Them's me thoughts. Good to be back.
Isabelle B.
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