FRINGE REVIEW: The Consul

POSTED: Saturday, September 8, 2012, 6:07 PM

Filed Under: Arts | Music | On the Fringe Theater

Every year, there's hundreds and hundreds of performances at the Philly Fringe and Live Arts Festival, and unless it's one of the big shows, it's sometimes hard to tell what you're going to get. Here at Critical Mass we're sending writers to as many shows as we possibly can for 75 pocket-sized reviews over the course of the fest. Check back in with us at On The Fringe every day for real talk on what these things actually are!

SHOW: The Consul

GROUP: The Philadelphia Opera Collective

GENRE: Opera

ATTENDED: Fri., Sept. 7, 8 p.m.

CLOSES: Fri., Sept. 14

BRIEF SELF-DESCRIPTION: While trapped in a stifling, dusty waiting room surrounded by strangers, a young woman discovers that everything she is and everything she loves boils down to a single piece of paper. When the whole world closes in around her, will one piece of paper be enough protection?

WE THINK: The trope of the "mad scene," in which a (nearly always) female character expresses losing her mind with a flood of showy coloratura, was highly overused during a certain period of opera. It was basically a go-to excuse to let a diva show off her pipes and for the composer to break musical rules. (Think Ophelia in Hamlet.) A lot of operas foster the sterotype that the whole art form is uniformly big and bombastic, where every single person who goes crazy does so suddenly in a big theatrical way rather than just quietly sobbing in a corner. The grand postures, epic plotlines and bellowed vocals of opera's pre-modern eras were designed to be seen and heard from the back of a large concert hall rather than close up, so you can excuse them for lacking some subtlety.

But The Consul, an English-language opera that won the 1950 Pulitzer Prize for music, is a lovely little example of the possibilities of the small scale. In tiny Jolie Laide Gallery, the audience in the front row (particularly on the left side) is literally within inches of the performers (close enough to feel a breeze as actors go by) and the acting is... actually acting, which is wonderful in an art form where productions can sometimes dedicate all their efforts to the music. The young cast sounded uniformly great; they had clearly thought about how to make the space feel intimate rather than cramped, and how to handle selling it to the back row when the back row is only a couple yards away. The Consul follows the wife of a political dissident, who in the first act has to go on the run from the secret police of their unnamed, East Germany-ish country. Nearly the entire second half is set in a surreal bureaucratic purgatory as Magda attempts to get visas for herself, her husband, his mother and their baby to cross the border in a maddening battle of paperwork with the secretary at the consulate. The story gets heavy into some brutal, emotional stuff — no rose-colored glasses here on the standard outcome of opposing a totalitarian state, and I cried twice, which doesn't happen all that much. You get the feeling that you're watching how madness should be done: Not as a bravura four-minute aria, but agonizingly drawn out over an entire opera.

—Emily Guendelsberger

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Featuring everything from event roundups to concert reviews and sex talk, City Paper's Critical Mass is a space for off-the-wall coverage of Philly's A&E scene.

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