Reviews

Grendel

Eric Owens gives a heroic performance in Julie Taymor’s visually stunning but surprisingly unpoetic opera.

| New York City |

July 12, 2006

Eric Owens and Desmond Richardson in Grendel
(Photo © Stephanie Berger)
Eric Owens and Desmond Richardson in Grendel
(Photo © Stephanie Berger)

To paraphrase Robert Frost, something there is that doesn’t love a wall. But whatever that something is, it isn’t director Julie Taymor, who has asked set designer George Tyspin to make an 18-ton, 28-feet-high, 46-feet-long wall — called the “ice-earth unit — as the centerpiece of Grendel, now in a very limited run at the New York State Theater as part of the Lincoln Center Festival.

A theater visionary because of the stage grandeurs she envisions, Taymor, who adapted John Gardner’s 1971 novel and the epic poem Beowulf with J. D. McClatchy, also fills her stage with oversized menacing puppets (made with co-creator Michael Curry), projections (by Karin Fong, Imaginary Forces) flying objects and freaky costumes (by the excellent Constance Hoffman), supra-titles sometimes in a barely legible ersatz old-English font, and a dragon head with a long curvy tongue to support Denyce Graves, who shows up as a dragon lady. Taymor, who has a superb eye but whose ear might profit from a trip to an otolaryngologist, fills the stage with everything but an opera that tells its story with clear urgency.

The by-now-famous wall, which shifts grindingly round a number of times during the three-hour work, is a literal one. But there’s another wall that the show needs to overcome, the figurative wall of sound created by the show’s composer (and Taymor’s husband) Elliot Goldenthal. To endow monster Grendel (Eric Owens) with arias and recitative while he ruminates existentially on destruction — and to supply 20 other characters, the Concert Chorale of New York and the Los Angeles Children’s Chorus with music to intone — Goldenthal ranges over numerous history-of-music periods.

Waxing eclectic isn’t per se a bad idea, but the result doesn’t realize his good intentions. Goldenthal keeps on keeping on, but his output has the slushy feel of someone reaching for inspiration who hasn’t found the way to impose his own style on what’s gathered. There are the occasional stretches of appealing, if sometimes appropriately abrasive, melody. One stand-out is a second act love song delivered during a dream Grendel has of himself with Queen Wealtheow (the very fine Laura Claycomb) while they drift halfway above the stage on a boat of many oars. Grendel — who rarely leaves the stage and only then to climb onto or down from the expensive ice-earth unit — stumbles into other compelling patches of notes, especially in his final introspective, triumphant outcry.

Too often, though, Goldenthal’s work has the quality of a film score for a biblical spectacle, and the Taymor-McClatchy lyrics fall short of poetry (which is surprising because McClatchy’s recent adaptation of Our Town works like a charm). Incidentally, the same epicitis afflicts Angelin Preljocaj’s abundant choreography, which looks like dance sequences in movies where Salome might gyrate. When Beowulf (Desmond Richardson) finally arrives, his routine resembles a Mister American Muscle face-off.

At Grendel’s first appearance, he sings, “And so begins the twelfth year of my idiotic war.” The dismayed remark suggests that Taymor, McClatchy, and Goldenthal want their enterprise to be seen and heard as an examination of the current administration mentality that’s embroiled this country in the Iraqi civil war. But that isn’t precisely where the creators are going. They’re interested, thanks to novelist Gardner, in getting to the nitty-gritty of an age where heroes are scarce and their absence creates aimlessness in the common man. Grendel is not evil incarnate, looking into his sinister soul; he’s uncertainty worried to near madness over the origins of his darker impulses. At least, that seems to be the impetus behind the opera’s conception, but as attenuated here, it doesn’t really click into place.

In her rooting about for a hero, Taymor has found her man not in Beowulf, but in Owens, whose glorious bass baritone is mightily tested for richness and endurance and stands up to every test. Moreover, he does so in an outfit that looks as if it’s been fashioned from a few hundred pounds of grey clay. (He’s frequently followed around by three “Shadow Grendels” who maybe are meant to be his inner thoughts and who definitely look a lot like the Blue Man Group.) Graves, in a peaked hat, nails as long as you can imagine, and a shaggy red coat with long train, plays and sings her scene with feline gusto. (She’s accompanied by back-ups called the Dragonettes doing the next-best thing to doo-wopping far above her.) Raymond Aceto, Jay Hunter Morris, and Richard Croft also sing impressively in other roles.

But as usual, the entire undertaking is Julie Taymor’s show. While this Grendel is mammoth and stunning; ultimately, it isn’t heroic.

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