Platee.One of the loveliest dance events of 1998 is Mark Morris's poignant yet wickedly apt restaging of Jean-Philippe Rameau's 1745 hit, the comedie-lyrique, Platte. In its three sold-out American premiere performances as the centerpiece of Berkeley's early music festival, this Royal Opera Covent Garden production, superbly conducted by Nicholas McGegan with magical costumes by couturier Isaac Mizrahi, revealed how cruelly humorous a baroque ballet bouffon can be. Morris serves as both choreographer and director of this comic operatic tale of an amphibian swamp queen, Platte, who believes herself a "salamander salamander, an amphibian of the order Urodela, or Caudata. Salamanders have tails and small, weak limbs; superficially they resemble the unrelated lizards (which are reptiles), but they are easily distinguished by their lack of scales and claws, and by their moist, fatale' to all males, including the Olympian god Jupiter. Jupiter, in order to teach his jealous wife, Juno, a lesson, pretends he will marry the hairless, suction-cup-fingered Platee, who sheaths her pendulous pendulous /pen·du·lous/ (-lus) hanging loosely; dependent. pendulous hanging loosely; dependent. pendulous crop see pendulous crop. breasts and beach ball-sized abdomen in a sheer slip that ends just above her enormous webbed feet. Morris physicalizes the affront this cross-species romance presents by having Platte, magnificently sung by tenor Jean-Paul Fouchecourt, perambulate in lurching walks and stifflegged spurting jumps, while declaiming in comically mispronounced French. The opera begins with a prologue, which Morris sets in a big-city bar late at night with a crowd of tipsy gods and mortals trading tales of infidelities. Bacchus is the bartender (charmingly danced by Guillermo Resto, who returns in the second act as a randy satyr satyr (sā`tər, săt`ər), in Greek mythology, part bestial, part human creature of the forests and mountains. Satyrs were usually represented as being very hairy and having the tails and ears of a horse and often the horns and legs of wearing cloven clo·ven v. A past participle of cleave1. adj. Split; divided. cloven Verb a past participle of cleave1 Adjective split or divided feet, nipple rings, and a leather jockstrap) and the other denizens include a Dyke and her partner. At the prologue's end, their talk, and the setting, fade into Act I, a massive blowup of the terrarium terrarium, a miniature garden in an artificial environment, in which small plants and animals may be kept as ornament or for educational purposes. Fish bowls, small fish tanks, large bottles, and carboys are often employed as containers for terrariums; such vessels behind the bar, where Platte and her amphibious subjects--alligators, lizards, snakes, frogs, and a pair of copulating tortoises--slither about. This surface burlesque, however, cloaks Morris's great musical sensitivity and parodic flair, in which musical jokes of endless chaconnes and animalistic an·i·mal·ism n. 1. Enjoyment of vigorous health and physical drives. 2. Indifference to all but the physical appetites. 3. The doctrine that humans are merely animals with no spiritual nature. squawks of sound are sweetly echoed in a great swamp processional of amphibians amphibians members of the animal class Amphibia. Includes frogs, toads, newts, salamanders and cecilians all capable of living on land or in water. with heads darting, cheeks puffing silently in and out, and bodies undulating as they sip from the water bowl of life. |
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