With Why is Eartha Kitt Trying to Kill Me?, UrbanArias has given us an operatic gem, and the talents assembled for the production have encased this most entertaining work in pure gold.
What makes this little work, with its under fifty minutes of singing, shine so? The company that bills itself sassily as the go-to organization if you want a “quickie,” opera, prides itself on offering up short and smart operatic works, and it sure delivers its mission here. More importantly, every one involved in this production knows exactly how to get the most out of a modicum of means and resources and create a cohesive and classy evening of theater.
Artistic Director Robert Wood also knows and banked on drawing a particular and appropriate audience at Signature Theatre Ark space. This is where his UrbanArias banditos have slipped in to offer an opera, yes, but it also happens to be a fast and funny contemporary love story about two men. It’s served up cabaret style in between a summer festival of solo cabaret performances at Signature, and, while the “hum” is still in the air, of “summer hummer-ing” Eric Schaeffer-style. Fast, fun, and just a little cheeky.
Take the name of the work by composer Jeffrey Dennis Smith: Why is Eartha Kitt Trying to Kill Me?: A Love Story. It sound like it’s going to be a campy romp, doesn’t it? Well, yes… sort of…
Perhaps an artistic gem is also a great work that defies or transcends the genre it starts in. Like an athlete – take the former Olympic diver Louganis who turned diving into an aerial dance — this work is slippery to define and deliciously teasing in that way.
But let’s go back and deal with the design. The playing space that’s been converted into a cabaret makes for a perfect up-close and personal intimacy. The stage space is even slightly squeezed into a long-across flat area. Designer Ika Avaliani and Wood not only settled on dividing the space in half with stage right orchestra sharing the stage in the same horizontal plane as the two performers, but the designer has found a “short, smart” way to create an iconic image for the piece. What looks at first in the dim pre-show light like something Robert Motherwell might have painted, a dark abstract that maybe conjures a loping black beast in a wide open space, turns out in bright lights to be Eartha Kitt, well-doctored mind you, in a most improbable deep backbend with her head nearly touching the floor. Is it a film billboard poster or a nightmare or a work of conceptual art in a gallery? Well, yes…sort of…
A young man enters the space. He walks through the bare space and places objects around with very considered intentionality. These props include a machete, a machine gun, a black dress, and some very high black heels.
The young man, Joey, is the object of affection of a certain older man. Ben Peter plays Joey and he also plays a detective, on what might be a homicide case, and Eartha Kitt. Peter embodies them all with utter conviction, without uttering one word. Sometimes his eyes seem glassy and his lips curl into a cruel little smile. Sometimes he seems genuine, a beautiful young man trying to find his way in a very complicated relationship with an older man. Well, sort of…
It turns out, director Sam Helfrich, has played a trick on all of us, and such a brilliant, brainy and totally tantalizing trick at that. The Actor doesn’t exist. Well, no, what I mean is Helfrich made up this character to give substance to the story line and give the actor JB Williams someone to play off of. (It’s one of the many brilliant strokes he has in his direction. He succeeds in laying out such clear moments and gets great intimacy from these two performers.)
Why is Eartha Kitt Trying to Kill Me?: A Love Story
closes July 14, 2018
Details and tickets
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The opera, it turns out was conceived as a one-man gob-smacking monologue that is sung throughout by the quite fabulous singer-actor Keith Jameson. Now Jameson, we are told, did have a short workshop with the material in New York City. It is nonetheless a tour de force that the man can sing such a complex score with changes of rhythm and much syncopation and to do it so unaffectedly. I totally believed him in every moment of his journey, which it turns out for the audience is quite the emotional roller coaster.
JB sees a picture in a magazine of a hunk, you see, and he has to have him. Then we watch their meeting and a tender romance unfold. But this changes, and it keeps changing and sometimes it changes on a dime.
Librettist David Johnston has created a marvelous series of vignettes through songs with sometimes strings of words that often change our mind about what is going on in an instant.
Take the song that begins in a kind of cute confessional way, “I know everything about you.” JB pays attention to his young lover and picks up on all kind of details. It’s fun. We’re laughing and smiling and so is Peter with that tender flickering smile. The second verse starts, and suddenly the list of things JB knows is a little weird, more, a little invasive. Peter has stopped smiling and so have we.
To say there are two characters in the show is not of course right. There is Eartha Kitt for instance, sometimes embodied by the Actor and sometimes in a drag get up by Jameson.
But there is also (now very familiar to UrbanArias groupies) the Inscape Chamber Orchestra. By sitting so close to them, I could appreciate these musicians in a deeper, more profound way than ever before as they passed music and mood back and forth across the stage to the singer, and each one of them became a character in my mind. I feel I know Sandy Choi who attacks on the violin with sureness and dazzling brilliance. She made me feel the inside of an agitated, obsessed-driven mind and its unmooring.
Evan Ross Solomon on both standard clarinet and bass gets a great slinky, sexy and clear warm sound that feels like bodies touching, running fingers up and down each other’s spine. Kathryn Hufnagle and Michael Rittling draw such aching meaning and longing that my chest still feels those deep strings rattling around. Daniel Heagney uses percussion instruments to conjure many moods but he makes me feel most the urban rumble and clanging of New York Streets. R. Timothy McReynolds is the tinkling on the ivory keys that keeps the journey going, but it’s those black keys that tug at your heart in this score.
Over all this, there’s Robert Wood conducting, and for this piece, he looks like he’s having such fun and just riding wave after wave of Smith’s beautifully laid out score.
Did I say I like UrbanArias because it’s short and smart? I didn’t want this one to end.
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Why is Eartha Kitt Trying to Kill Me?: A Love Story. Music by Jeffrey Dennis Smith. Libretto by David Johnston. Conducted by Robert Wood. Stage Direction by Sam Helfrich. Set design by Ika Avaliani. Costume Design by Lily Prentice. Lighting Design by Stacey Derosier. With Keith Jameson and Ben Peter. Featuring members of the Inscape Chamber Orchestra. Produced by Urban Arias at the Signature Theater. Reviewed by Susan Galbraith.
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