Robert Gordon, who worked intimately with Harrison on the opera, was on hand to tighten the libretto down to an announced 90 minutes-by my watch it ran closer to 110-while preserving virtually all of Harrison’s music. Retained from the original iteration of the opera when it was first, and somewhat disastrously produced in 1971 at Cal Arts in Pasadena, was the conceit of Indonesian shadow puppetry acting out the plot. In Lou Harrison’s conception, Bithynia was an Eastern land and the incorporation of an Asian gamelan-type ensemble suitably represented the abyss between West and East. The LA Phil New Music Group under conductor Marc Lowenstein comprised a modest-sized Western orchestra with five players of ancient Asian instruments and the Los Angeles Percussion Quartet. That summarizes Act I of the newly revised Young Caesar, performed for one sold-out night only, June 13, at Walt Disney Concert Hall, and directed by the young hotshot of contemporary opera, Yuval Sharon, with his experimental company, The Industry. His mission was to get King Nicomedes to hurry up and return some ships loaned by Rome. In that capacity he was dispatched to Bithynia, a kingdom on the Black Sea coast of northwest Asia Minor, or what is now Turkey, today an hour’s flight from Rome, but then a sea voyage of some duration. Let’s go back to a time maybe 35 years or so before he was murdered at age 55, when Caesar was coming into his manhood, a bright, athletic fellow just married to Cornelia and father of a daughter, ambitious and in the service of General Marcus Minucius Thermus. When was art ever completely autonomous from public life? It’s an old debate which must be renegotiated in every time and place.
Will CEOs now start deciding that nothing more controversial or “relevant” than Anne of Green Gables will now be staged, or published, or seen in museums? Of course we know there are dangers, too, in government support of the arts. The play is no endorsement for assassination.Ĭommentators are piling on, many pointing out the inherent dangers of corporate sponsorship. What they spinelessly seemed to be missing is Shakespeare’s point: The play continues for two-plus acts after the Act III, scene 1 killing, to deplore what happens to the remaining characters as a result of this impulsive act, and indeed what happens to democracy itself. In response, Delta Air Lines and Bank of America promptly withdrew their support, no doubt fearful of a massive right-wing consumer boycott. How anyone could have seen Donald Trump in this representation is anyone’s guess, but Breitbart News and then Fox News went ballistic. Caesar is represented by blond-haired Gregg Henry, who appears in a modern business suit and long tie, possessed of a gold-plated bathtub and what one critic described as a “pouty Slavic wife.” Orson Welles put on a “fascist” Julius Caesar with his Mercury Theatre back in the 1930s, restoring the Roman setting and its leather-clad citizens à la Mussolini.Ĭurrently an angry storm is circling around the New York Public Theater production of the play, which began previews on May 23 and officially opened two weeks later. Before that, productions of the work had Caesar resembling Abraham Lincoln, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. In 2012, the Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis cast Caesar as a tall, spindly black man that inevitably suggested President Barack Obama.
But that was not the first time the semblance of a public figure had been “relevantly” inserted into the role. recently a reworking of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar appeared as the Tragedy of JFK. Other controversies are making the news these days. With librettist Robert Gordon (no relation), he wrote Young Caesar, an opera considered scandalous at the time with such a plot line. Was he straight, gay or bi (terms that none in his era would have recognized)? Composer Lou Harrison, whose centennial is being honored this year, decided back in the late 1960s and early 1970s-the early wave of Gay Lib, when homosexuality was still illegal-that yes, Caesar did have at least one important homosexual liaison. The calendar is not controversial, and the facts surrounding his death are well documented, though with some disputes among historians.īut the representation of Caesar stays in the news as the subject for much debate and acrimony. His assassination still evokes the warning, Beware the Ides of March! LOS ANGELES-Gaius Julius Caesar (100-44 BCE) invented the Julian calendar of 365.25 days, the one we still use today, and was the pivotal figure in the devolution of the Roman Republic into the Roman Empire. Adam Fisher as Caesar and Hadleigh Adams as Nicomedes / Craig T.
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