It’s nobody’s fault

Now that I’m done with the Cinetopia Film Festival I was able to get to another cultural event today. This afternoon was the last performance of Michigan Opera Theatre’s production of The Grapes of Wrath.

Yeah, I read the novel by John Steinbeck sometime in high school. I also saw the movie, the one starring Henry Fonda released in 1940. I don’t remember much of either one. High school was a long time ago.

And now it has been turned into an opera. It premiered a dozen years ago. The libretto is by Michael Korie, who worked from the book and included some scenes from the explanatory chapters of the book. The music is by Ricky Ian Gordon. I’ve heard another work of his and enjoyed it, so I knew this would be tuneful, not some modernist stuff that works to avoid tunes. Several of the characters have beautiful arias, especially John Casy, Ma Joad, and Tom Joad. Even Noah Joad has a tender moment.

The basic plot is the Joad family is forced off their land in Oklahoma because of the Dust Bowl. They travel to California to try to find work and it doesn’t go well. A theme of the story is economic inequality. In an early scene the chorus sings about the foreclosure crisis being nobody’s fault. The local bank has to follow the rules by its headquarters on Oklahoma City. The HQ has to follow the rules set by Chicago. Whoever is in Chicago has to follow the rules set by Congress. The rich rig the system in their favor, then say sorry, I can’t help you. I’m just following the rules. It’s nobody’s fault.

The music was wonderful, the singing was wonderful, the acting pretty good, the story was great. Alas, I have issues with the set. The first scene is set in a soup kitchen where the community sings about the lack of rain. The set for this scene is fairly realistic – the tables, chairs, coffee urn, stage and podium, a piano, linoleum on the floor, cabinets in the back, religious banners on the wall, one side with doors and windows with light shining in. But for the rest of the show the set is much less realistic – the Joad truck is assembled out of tables and benches with Al holding a steering wheel, for instance. And all this plays out in front of the basics of the soup kitchen, its stage, floor, cabinets, and wall of windows. I enjoy theater that uses sets that conjure a car out of tables and chairs. That is something live theater can do very well. But the realism of the first scene and lack of realism for the rest of the story didn’t sit well with me.

There was one aspect of that realistic first scene I think they got wrong. Just outside those big windows is water dripping. Lights shining through the windows project the dripping water onto the back wall of the set. It’s a cool effect. Except… they’re singing about an endless drought. They even blow dust off their soup bowls. No way can there be water dripping off the roof.

Even with those quibbles I enjoyed the opera very much.