Heaven Bellamy
3/15/17
A
Rake’s Progress, shown at the Emerson Majestic Theater by The
Boston Lyric Opera was an opera that challenged the focus of the audience. It
was a three hour experience that did very little for the incredible talent of
the singers. The stage set was interesting, but makeshift and confusing. The
stages black surface was dirty with visible scuff marks from feet before the
production even started, and at several points the actors could be seen off
stage re-arranging props. These little mishaps were almost exciting compared to
the seemingly never ending sing song talking that went on for a large portion
of production. It is wonder how the performers were able to memorize the words
of such mundane melodies.
The costumes were quite
versatile and confusing for the time period, which in itself was also not very
clear. Baba wore a series of extravagant dresses that exenterated her bold bust
and her extravagant personality. Her eye shadow in several scenes was
“full-faced”, in that it reached all the way from the top of her eye brows to
the tops of her cheeks. Her character’s moral position was confusing. She was
made out to be this evil woman who owned a brothel house, and stole the man of
an innocent rural farm girl. However her affluence is constantly taken
advantage of by Tom, and she is robbed by an intruder after Tom fights her in
the bathtub and she falls unconscious. It is hard not to sympathize with her
while this is happening, let alone see her as a villainous character. At the
end, she even consoles with Toms previous lover and tells her to go get him
before he loses his mind.
Eventually Tom does lose his
mind, as the audience finds out that the man that convinced him to go to London
was actually a figment of his imagination. There is also a scene that he is
told by this “shadow man”, that he is to kill himself if he does not pick three
cards from the deck that he chooses. Tom lives because of course, the man is
him, and he is able to guess based off of what he himself has picked. The
ending doesn’t come as any surprise, as his previous lover whom he calls
“Venus” chooses to leave him because he’s gone so insane.
A Rakes
Progress, at the Emerson Majestic Theater is certainly not worth the
three hours that it asks of its audience.
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