Anna Nicole: World Premiere
An opera in 2 acts
To be broadcast on BBC 4 TV on 25 March 2011 at 9pm, Saturday 26 March at 1:30am and Monday 28 March at 11pm
FIVE STARS – The Telegraph
“…a weirdly inspired work, an engrossing, outrageous, entertaining and, ultimately, deeply moving new opera” New York Times
FIVE STARS – As her live-in lawyer/lover Gerald Finley was unshakeably smooth and irresistibly evil. MusicOMH
[On Gerry] Is there anything this glorious singer cannot do? The Observer
Composer: Mark-Anthony Turnage
Librettist: Richard Thomas
Venue and dates:
Royal Opera House, London
Thursday, 17 February 2011, 7.30pm
Monday, 21 February 2011, 7.30pm
Wednesday, 23 February 2011, 7.30pm
Saturday, 26 February 2011, 7.30pm
Tuesday, 1 March 2011, 7.30pm
Friday, 4 March 2011, 7.30pm
Director: Richard Jones
Conductor: Antonio Pappano
Set designs: Miriam Buether
Costume designs: Nicky Gillibrand
Co-Lighting Designers: Mimi Jordan Sherin, D M Wood
Choreographer: Aletta Collins
Performers:
Anna Nicole Smith: Eva-Maria Westbroek
Old Man Marshall: Alan Oke
The lawyer Stern: Gerald Finley
Virgie: Susan Bickley
Cousin Shelley: Loré Lixenberg
Larry King: Peter Hoare
Aunt Kay: Rebecca de Pont Davies
Older Daniel: Dominic Rowntree
Blossom: Allison Cook
Doctor Yes: Andrew Rees
Billy: Grant Doyle
Mayor: Wynne Evans
Runner: ZhengZhong Zhou§
Daddy Hogan: Jeremy White
Gentleman: Dominic Peckham
Trucker: Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts
Deputy Mayor: Damian Thantrey
Four Lap Dancers: Yvonne Barclay, Amy Catt, Amanda Floyd, Katy Batho
Four Meat Rack Girls: Kiera Lyness, Marianne Cotterill, Louise Armit, Andrea Hazell
Onstage Band: John Parricelli (Guitarist), John Paul Jones (Bass Guitarist), Peter Erskine (Drummer)
The new stagework looks at the high-profile celebrity lifestyle of the American glamour model and actress Anna Nicole Smith, who died in 2007 after an apparent drug overdose at the age of 39.
She was Playboy’s Playmate of the Year in 1993. She married 89-year-old J. Howard Marshall II the following year. After his death in 1995, she fought a protracted legal battle with his son over his estimated $500 million fortune.
Smith died five months after the death of her 20-year-old son from her first marriage. Daniel Smith died of an accidental overdose in the Bahamas hospital room where his mother had days earlier given birth to a daughter.
Anna Nicole was commissioned by the Royal Opera House, with six performances scheduled in February and March 2011. Turnage’s music is published by Boosey & Hawkes, the composer having joined the company’s roster in 2003. Turnage’s 50th birthday is celebrated in 2010.
Photo Gallery
What the critics say
Rupert Christiansen, The Telegraph, 17 February 2011
FIVE STARS
Anna Nicole is underpinned by compassion for the eponymous heroine and scorn for forces that mould, and then destroy her, says Rupert Christiansen.
Twenty years ago, Mark-Anthony Turnage established himself as an operatic enfant terrible with his brilliant punky adaptation of Steven Berkoff’s Greek.
Ten years ago, he seemed to have calmed down with a warmer-hearted and more conventional version of Sean O’Casey’s First World War tragedy The Silver Tassie.
But middle age takes people different ways, and now Turnage seems to have reverted to his old tricks with this flamboyantly vulgar and fabulously entertaining new work, based on the sad but true story of Anna Nicole Smith, a two-bit, surgically enhanced American stripper, nude model and C-list celebrity who married an 89-year-old billionaire and ended up, at the age of 39, dead from an overdose of prescription drugs in a lonely hotel room.
If I tell you that the libretto was written by Richard Thomas, best known for Jerry Springer: The Opera, the text’s clever rhyming couplets, garnished with lashings of potty-mouthed obscenity and sprinkled with flashes of wit, will come as no surprise.
Nor will the Brechtian style: Anna Nicole’s story unfolds, through sixteen short scenes, as a moral tale of the idiocies of tabloid culture, interspersed with choric commentary, as the heroine – if that’s what she is – passes from small-town Texas to billionaire’s ranch and back to rock bottom.
It’s often very funny, but it’s not just a crude farce with a downbeat ending: I think it is underpinned by genuine compassion for Anna Nicole and genuine scorn for the forces that mould, and then destroy her.
What makes this opera so exciting, however, is that Turnage seems to have found precisely the right musical idiom for such a drama – an Americana, brashly orchestrated and violently propulsive which embraces jazz, blues, musical comedy, and lounge smooch so ingeniously and responsively as to transcend mere pastiche. (The more sophisticated may pick up the pointed allusions to Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress too.)
It doesn’t set out to be a complex or a subtle score, but it packs an irresistibly visceral punch.
Richard Jones’ production is immaculately slick and deliciously imaginative. I loved the day-glo oranges and pinks of Miriam Buether’s sets and the strange black insect creatures with cameras for heads who track Anna Nicole’s every move.
In the title role, Eva-Maria Westbroek, singing with inexhaustible energy, gives a big-hearted, full-throttle performance which never strikes a false note of sentimentality.
A large and uniformly excellent supporting cast is strongly led by Alan Oke as the pathetically infatuated billionaire Anna Nicole marries, Gerald Finley as her Svengaliesque lawyer and Susan Bickley as her embittered bitch of a mother.
Antonio Pappano conducts with all the required pizzazz, and an enraptured audience did its bit too, rewarding this world premiere with a tumultuous reception.
A masterpiece? I don’t know about that: Anna Nicole’s impact is so immediate that there’s no space to consider if it will bear repeated hearings.
But meanwhile, before posterity makes its judgment, I’ll eat my six-gallon hat if it’s not a stonking great hit.
Anthony Tommasini, New York Times, 18 February 2011
An opera about Anna Nicole Smith–the American sex symbol, Playboy Playmate, hapless model, laughable actress and fortune-hunting wife of a billionaire 62 years her senior? Commissioned by, no less, the Royal Opera at Covent Garden? When the plans were announced it sounded like a dubious idea, a tawdry way for a major opera house to look hip.
“Anna Nicole,” the opera by the British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and the British librettist Richard Thomas, finally had its premiere here at the Royal Opera on Thursday night before a sold-out house with standees everywhere. And it proved a weirdly inspired work, an engrossing, outrageous, entertaining and, ultimately, deeply moving new opera. This was an improbable triumph for Covent Garden.
Ideally, opera is supposed to be the ultimate collaborative art form, and “Anna Nicole” met that ideal. At 50, Mr. Turnage, whose modernist music is brashly accessible and run-through with jazz, has written a pulsing, wild and, when called for, yearning score. Mr. Thomas, a musical theater lyricist and composer, is best known for “Jerry Springer: The Opera” . His clever, literate and perceptive libretto for “Anna Nicole” bops along in rhymed couples, thick with alliterative, everyday profanities. He and Mr. Turnage sensitively navigate the terrain of Anna Nicole’s chaotic and sadly pathetic life, which ended in 2007, the result of a fatal mixture of drugs. They lend Smith vulnerability without covering over her crassness.
The conductor Antonio Pappano, the music director of Covent Garden, who shares a passion for jazz with Mr. Turnage, drew an electric, blazing yet wondrously subtle performance from the orchestra. And the director Richard Jones has devised a dazzling, humorous yet humane production, with sets by Miriam Buether that come alive with Day-Glo colors and neon lights, and playfully realistic costumes by Nicky Gillibrand.
Whether the real-life Anna was a tragic figure is debatable. But Mr. Turnage and Mr. Thomas have given us a tragic operatic heroine, a downtrodden nobody determined to make it, to “rape the American dream,” as she puts it, any way she can. Anna is in the lineage of Bizet’s Carmen, Berg’s Lulu and Weill/Brecht’s Jenny.
In an effective framing device, the two-act, swiftly-paced opera is presented as a series of interviews with Anna and her circle by a crowd of reporters, here the chorus, costumed to look like tacky correspondents for local television stations. The men wear light gray three-piece suits; the women blue, uniform-like skirts and jackets. Crucial events from Anna’s life are enacted in flashbacks. But when people enter the scene prematurely, like her lawyer and later lover Stern (the real-life Howard K. Stern, here the classy baritone Gerald Finley they are pushed by the chorus into the wings.
After the opening “Scene Zero,” in which we hear Mr. Turnage’s breathless “three-bar overture,” as the librettist dubs its, the chorus of reporters introduce the story by singing sputtered vocal lines in crunchy block chords. We first see Anna in a golden chair, and the soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, with billowing blonde hair and a lipstick smile, looks uncannily like the real Anna.
Ms. Westbroek has essentially a dramatic soprano voice. Indeed, she is slated to sing Sieglinde in the Metropolitan Opera’s upcoming new production of Wagner’s “Walküre,” her company debut. Anna’s music is filled with come-on melodic lines (starting with her first words, when she croons “I want to blow you all a kiss”) and decked with frantic coloratura flights when Anna loses control, which is often. Rising to the challenge, Ms. Westbroek gives a vocally commanding and emotionally courageous performance.
An early ensemble scene depicts the hokey life of Mexia, Tex., where Anna was born, and you sympathize with her desire to escape. Her mother, Virgie, a security guard wearing a trim uniform and packing a pistol, is a complex character, especially as played by the mezzo-soprano Susan Bickley. Virgie keeps popping up to voice forebodings about Anna’s future and issue some justifiable grievances. When Anna escapes to Houston, meets her first husband Billy (Grant Doyle) at the fried chicken joint where they work and has a baby boy, it is Virgie who winds up raising the child for years.
Maybe it is my slant on things, but Mr. Turnage’s music is the primary reason that so much seemed so right in “Anna Nicole.” There are flashes of Weill in the clattering, cabaret-like scenes when the reporters, wielding microphones, mutter like a Greek chorus; and jazzy sneering brass writing in the scene with the dancers at the “gentleman’s club” in Houston. At times Mr. Turnage’s connection to the British modernist school of complex composers like Harrison Birtwistle comes through. The more reflective passages often take the surprising form of beguiling, varied waltzes.
Mr. Turnage and Mr. Thomas have come up with a slew of operatic characters that singers are going to relish, as this cast did. Mr. Finley was riveting as the calculating lawyer Stern, who one moment despairs of trying to control Anna’s over-eating and drug dependencies, and the next moment schemes to hype her for the cameras. In one scene he concocts a plan to turn the birth of Anna’s daughter, who arrived not long before Anna’s death, into a live pay-per-view special.
The tenor Alan Oke nailed the role of the oil billionaire J. Howard Marshall II, who was 89 when he married the 26-year-old divorced Anna. Here J. Howard literally descends into Anna’s life sitting in an oversized office chair suspended on wires. Mr. Oke’s insinuating singing captured the flickers of arousal embedded in the fidgety vocal lines of the smitten codger. After marrying Anna, J. Howard dies suddenly during a raucous party scene, dressed in a ridiculous gold Mylar suit, without having left a will.
Anna’s son, Daniel first appears as a boy, a silent role played endearingly by Andrew Gilbert. The teenage Daniel is played by Dominic Rowntree as a sullen, sweet-faced young man clearly hooked on drugs. When he has a seizure and dies in the hospital room where is mother had given birth to his half-sister just days earlier, the scene is made more wrenching by Mr. Turnage’s understated, harmonically piercing music. The only lines that Mr. Rowntree has come after Daniel has died, when, his head peering from a body bag, he sings a litany of drug names.
In another inspired, if creepy touch, choreographed by Aletta Collins, black-clad dancers wearing television camera headdresses increasingly follow Anna around as she becomes the object of media obsession and ridicule.
Covent Garden may have overplayed the opera’s sensational elements of sex and drugs in its marketing campaign, though “Anna Nicole” can probably claim to be breaking new ground in the scene when Anna receives breast implant surgery from the fast-talking Doctor Yes (a vibrant Andrew Rees. The libretto has countless lines that can not be printed in a family newspaper. And “Anna Nicole” revels shamelessly in the crass, sleazy side of American culture, which may be a too-easy target. The London audience ate it up. But so did I, because in the end this is a musically rich, audacious and inexplicably poignant work.
The ovations were tumultuous. Who says the Royal Opera takes itself too reverently? Pictures of Ms. Westbroek as the smiling Anna were everywhere. The house’s elegant stage curtain is usually emblazoned with “ER II,” the emblem of Queen Elisabeth. On this night the emblem on the substitute curtain was “A n R,” for Anna Rex, Nicole. Why not? Anna is now an unlikely operatic queen. Besides, I doubt that Her Majesty will be attending this show.
Andrew Clements, The Guardian, 18 February 2011
Nobody could accuse them of not trying hard enough to turn the first performance of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera on the life of Anna Nicole Smith into an event. Beforehand there was an ample supply of C-list celebrities queuing to be snapped at the entrance in Covent Garden.
And the foyers were festooned with images of the Texan trailer-trash turned Playboy model, who married an 89-year-old billionaire, and lived unhappily ever after until her death four years ago from an overdose. Even the famous red velvet stage curtains were replaced by pink ones monogrammed with Smith’s initials, and above the proscenium her portrait was hanging in front of that of the Queen.
Perhaps the hype was all about the ROH convincing itself that the opera which Turnage had delivered was really what they expected when the first cheques were signed five years ago, and what the composer himself had promised in interviews before the first night — a comedy that morphs gradually into tragedy as it unfolds Anna’s tawdry life. The ending is undeniably tragic, but perversely unmoving, since most of the music Turnage provides for her never suggests or seems to look for sympathy.
In fact, far too much of his score seems in thrall to the libretto, the work of Richard Thomas, half of the partnership that came up with Jerry Springer: The Opera. That was no opera at all, while at least some of Anna Nicole has the dramatic trappings of opera, but not many. There are very few moments when the drama is driven by the music, when the cartoon-like scenes, with cliche texts and schoolboy humour, are given shape and purpose by Turnage’s contribution.
An orchestral interlude in the second act provides a sudden reminder of what he can produce, but otherwise it’s necessary to listen to what is churning away beneath the anonymous vocal lines (sub Sondheim when reflective, off-Broadway musical when flippant) to find a real musical personality. The amplification of the singers, “to increase clarity of the words”, reinforces the tacky sense of a misfiring musical, and Richard Jones’s functional production, designed by Miriam Buether, inhabits a similar two-dimensional world.
Performances are first rate, though Antonio Pappano’s role in the pit is mostly to keep the accompaniments motoring along. Eva-Maria Westbroek is Anna Nicole, but gets little chance to explore anything beyond the outlines of this vapid character. Alan Oke is her wheelchair-bound husband; Gerald Finley is her sleazy lawyer turned lover; and Susan Bickley is her man-hating mother, the only character with anything approaching a moral compass. There’s an onstage jazz trio (Peter Erskine, John Parricelli and John Paul Jones, no less) who appear briefly and mostly inaudibly in a single short scene. Their presence seems a conceit, but too little of this show seems necessary at all.
Jessica Duchen, The Independent, 18 February 2011
Sex, drugs and rock’n'roll opera as the larger-than-life lady sings
Her image grins down on the auditorium from a medallion beside Queen Victoria; and the proscenium itself is as false as the great silicone boobs of Anna Nicole Smith herself, shocking pink, every crest and symbol transformed and possessed by her. So began the most hotly anticipated night in contemporary opera in years.
The sorry history of Anna Nicole Smith, the one-time Playboy model with her “breathtaking, breast-faking life” – her gluttonous appetites, the aged billionaire husband and a tragic family story ending in her own grisly death – has been transformed into an operatic parable for our times by two of new opera’s most exciting and controversial figures, composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and librettist Richard Thomas. And it’s been hyped to the point at which expectation becomes very difficult to match with reality.
Shocking it isn’t; stunning it is. No, you don’t see the oral sex scene (”There ain’t no such thing as a free ranch”…), but you do see the humanity. Eva-Maria Westbroek is a startlingly innocent Anna, caught in demonic forces (Gerald Finley as lawyer Stern) beyond her control.
Director Richard Jones surrounds our heroine and her accoutrements with observers at every turn. At first the chorus is always there, prying, observing, recording, broadcasting… but gradually as the nightmare encroaches, all that is left is a swarm of black and silent cameras, doing what cameras do. No judgement on Anna Nicole, but all on how the celebrity-hungry public saw her, while accepting the manic commercial manipulation of her every move.
Richard Thomas’s libretto would carry the day even if the score weren’t as terrific as it is: varied, acidic, lyrical and occasionally heartbreaking. The death of Anna’s son, Daniel (Dominic Rowntree), who sings only to utter the names of all the drugs he’s been stuffed with, is suitably devastating; Anna’s lament harkens more than a little to Purcell’s Dido.
With Tony Pappano in the driving seat, the orchestra and jazz band together pack a punch in Turnage’s rhythmic score, punching out the jazz and blues enhancing the edgy but somehow edible atonality that is so characteristic of him.
It’s a tremendous show, fast-paced, spare and concentrated, tagged with references such as Marshall (a passionate, warm-voiced Alan Oke) as an armchair deus ex machina, and replete with layers of laughter and lighting of imagination and colourful wonders – accolades to Mimi Jordan Sherin and D M Wood for this last. The chorus relishes its wordy, busy brilliance; the soloists give their all, and if Westbroek could perhaps be even more extreme in her characterisation then perhaps she will grow into that as the run proceeds. It’s a peach of a role, and must be a tad scary to perform for the first time.
“The party always ends,” mourns Anna’s mother, the opera’s voice of reason and prophecy, sung by the fabulous Susan Bickley, over the dying form of Marshall, who exits the life he so loved in a gold suit while wishing that Anna may never grow into decrepitude. She doesn’t. And the party’s end is grim.
Right topic, right time: Anna Nicole overtly puts America on trial: it reminds us that we had it all, but we threw it away. She’s not only a tragic heroine: she’s the rise and fall of Western excess itself. The only trouble is that perhaps this opera knows that nearly too well.
Mike Silverman, Associated Press (appearing in several newspapers), 18 February 2011
Anna Nicole, the Opera: She Aims to Sleaze
Royal Opera opens ambitious but disappointing work about Anna Nicole Smith
Why write an opera about the sordid life and death of Anna Nicole Smith? That question doubtless leaped to the minds of many when they heard the Royal Opera had commissioned such a work.
And sad to say, despite the expenditure of considerable talent and money — and a splendid performance by Eva-Maria Westbroek in the title role — the question remains unanswered following the world premiere of “Anna Nicole” at Covent Garden on Thursday night.
For anyone who may have forgotten, Smith was a single mother from small-town Texas who, thanks to breast enhancement surgery, became a Playboy celebrity and married an oil tycoon 63 years her senior. Her claim on his fortune was disputed by his heirs, and in 2007 — after giving birth (on pay-per-view TV) and seeing her 20-year-old son die of an overdose in her hospital room — she herself, grossly overweight, died of a drug overdose at age 39.
To be sure, Smith’s willingness to go to any lengths to lift herself out of poverty and her lifelong obsession with publicity have a lurid quality that seems almost mythic. That’s apparently what attracted librettist Richard Thomas and composer Mark-Anthony Turnage when they were looking for a subject for an opera.
But it’s not enough to put the spectacle of her life on stage in a chronological narrative, dressed up with satiric jabs at obvious targets and occasional attempts to indict society at large for enabling Anna’s career. We may feel pity for her, along with disgust, but those are not responses that redeem the tawdry spectacle of her life. In this retelling of her story, it’s hard to empathize with her, much less imagine her as a figure of tragedy.
Thomas has written a sometimes-clever, sometimes-sophomoric libretto very much in the vein of his popular hit, “Jerry Springer: The Opera.”
A typical sample is Anna’s introductory line: “I want to blow you all — a kiss.” (These are also her final words before being zipped into a body bag at the end.)
In a more serious, but not necessarily more persuasive vein, Thomas has Anna exclaim near the end: “Oh, America, you dirty whore. I gave you everything but you wanted more.
Turnage, a respected composer of two previous operas, has set Thomas’s words to a tuneful, percussive score that is highly accessible on first hearing. His orchestration includes a role for jazz trio — a bass guitar, guitar and drums — that helps blur the lines between “serious” music and a more popular sound. Antonio Pappano, the Royal Opera’s music director, conducts with seeming mastery.
There are some striking lyrical moments, as when Anna sings an aria of delight after receiving her new breasts (before the resulting back pain has led to her painkiller addiction.) And there’s a lovely ensemble to conclude Act 1 as Anna and her billionaire husband, J. Howard Marshall II, stand atop a wedding cake while distorted strains of Mendelssohn play and various characters express their thoughts.
There’s also a gorgeous, melancholy interlude midway through Act 2, marking the passage of 10 years as a curtain covered with double cheeseburgers shows Anna’s figure giving way to the obesity of later years.
Westbroek, a Dutch soprano much admired in the standard repertory of Wagner, Verdi and Puccini, throws herself into the title role with all of her considerable assets. On stage for virtually the entire two-hour length of the opera, Westbroek sings with luminous tone and creates a plausible sex symbol with her blond hair and glamorous figure (before she has to put on a fat suit for the later scenes). There’s also a disarming sincerity and eagerness to please about her that make the character more appealing than she might otherwise be.
Among the supporting cast, mezzo-soprano Susan Bickley makes a sympathetic figure as Anna’s loyal but critical mother, Virgie (”My flesh, my blood, my embarrassment,” she sings at one point). Tenor Alan Oke as Marshall makes a splendid entrance flying in from the wings in an over-sized armchair and revels with unabashed glee at buying Anna’s sexual favors.
As Anna’s surgeon, Doctor Yes, tenor Andrew Rees has fun with his aria describing the differences in cup sizes (”A is small, no use at all … .” Dominic Rowntree, as Anna’s grown-up son, Daniel, doesn’t get to sing until after he’s dead. Then he has a brief aria, the words of which consist of a list of all the drugs found in his system — Valium, Prozac and about 20 others.
The opera’s most problematic character is Anna’s lawyer-turned-boyfriend, Howard K. Stern. Portrayed by baritone Gerald Finley, he makes brief appearances in Act 1 but without much purpose.
Even in Act 2, the part seems underwritten — as if the creators couldn’t quite decide whether to make him more villain or sorrowful witness to Anna’s demise.
Director Richard Jones has given the work a lively, fast-moving production, especially in the first and vastly more entertaining half, which traces Anna’s rise in jaunty, energetic fashion.
Though the Royal Opera warned of “extreme language, drug abuse and sexual content,” there’s little on stage to shock, some rough language aside. Even the sex act to which Anna’s opening lines teasingly refer takes place with the chorus tactfully concealing her and Marshall from view.
There are five more performances through March 4, all of them sold out.
Michael Roddy, Reuters (appearing in several newspapers), 18 February 2011
The tabloid life of Playboy centrefold Anna Nicole Smith, who bought big breasts, married an oil billionaire and gave birth on TV, has made it to the opera stage in London in a production true to operatic tradition.
Like her sexy operatic sisters Salome, Lulu and Manon, the Texan babe with the silicone monsters who becomes addicted to pain killers for consequent back troubles, dies of a drug overdose at age 39, just before the final curtain.
That’s when the cheering of the sold-out opening night audience erupted for the Royal Opera House production of a two-hour opera by librettist Richard Thomas, of “Jerry Springer: The Opera” fame, and British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage.
The staging included a tour-de-force performance by Dutch soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek as Anna, wearing prosthetic breasts most of the time, and who is zipped up in a body bag as the lights go out.
“The way we look at it, is Anna in this opera is a fabulous eccentric who fell on bad times,” Thomas told Reuters Television before the Thursday night premiere of the first of six performances.
The run has been sold out for weeks and, given the risque material, has been the talk of the London music scene and even Britain’s tabloids, which normally eschew opera.
The papers were particularly exercised about the prospect of fellatio being performed onstage as Anna attempts to wheedle a ranch from her octogenarian billionaire “paw paw,” J. Howard Marshall, who died a little more than a year after they married.
A crowd that gathers blocks out all view while the act supposedly is performed, leaving everything to the imagination.
QUITE AN EYEFUL
The audience, however, got quite an eye and earful for its money. The tone was set with a special cerise-coloured curtain topped with a gaudy cameo of Anna Nicole above the proscenium.
The production included an utterly believable re-creation of a lap-dancing club set in Smith’s native Texas and a riotous, cocaine-fuelled onstage party that featured a guest appearance by Led Zeppelin bass guitarist John Paul Jones, a long-time friend of the composer.
Jones turning up as part of a jazz trio gives only a small clue to the depth and breadth of Turnage’s score for the 80-piece ROH orchestra, under the baton of conductor Antonio Pappano.
Turnage, 50 and writing his third opera, pulled from a huge range of styles, including a banjo-tinged tune reminiscent of Smith’s native American south.
There also was a witty ensemble for the furious billionaire Marshall’s offspring from previous marriages who inform Anna in no uncertain terms she’s not getting a dime of his money to a reworking of Sly and the Family Stone’s “We Are Family.”
“Some people say, ‘Why an opera?’ and actually she’s very much an opera figure,” Turnage said.
“It needs that big treatment…as soon as I started working on this I felt this, I could see her singing, Anna Nicole singing. That was very important to me, that I could musicalise her.”
The Royal Opera has been at pains to underscore that despite strong parallels to Smith’s life, the production is not, as the company’s press spokeswoman Ann Richards put it, a “bio-op.”
This stance may in part be designed to ward off spillover from the endless legal battle that arose from Smith’s efforts to claim part of Marshall’s estate, and litigation initiated by the attorney Howard Stern, who was her partner at the end.
Larry Birkhead, the father of Smith’s surviving child Dannielynn, told Reuters on Thursday her estate was considering legal options against the makers of the opera.
Thomas said there was “no intention to write a sort of defamatory-prone script,” while Turnage said he’d gone out of his way to give Stern, sung with immense finesse by Canadian baritone Gerald Finley, “beautiful music.”
The opera’s ultimate message, though, is delivered by the woman who wanted to be Marilyn Monroe and instead wound up an overweight addict and laughing-stock of reality television.
“I want to blow you all, blow you all, a kiss,” Anna sings near the opera’s opening, and again at its tragic conclusion.
Michael White, The Telegraph blog, 18 February 2011
Anna Nicole opera gets lost in its own froth
There was a mood of slightly desperate festivity about the Royal Opera House for last night’s premiere of Anna Nicole. Images of the world’s most famous trailer-trash princess were plastered through the foyers, the surviving bits of statuary wore paper bags over their heads imprinted with her face, and her initials replaced those of the queen on the auditorium curtain. All very amusing – if uncomfortably like the old Soviet technique of coercive pleasure that proclaimed: your business is rejoicing, you WILL have fun.
Well, in the end we did. Anna Nicole is a jolly, bawdy romp and lots of laughs: a fairground ride of a piece. But does it make a durable and lasting contribution to the repertory? Perhaps not.
Ever since the Anna Nicole project was announced, the UK press has had a great time prompting debates about whether this was or was not a suitable subject for opera – which is, of course, the wrong question.
Anything is a suitable subject for opera and, as history suggests, the steamier and sleazier the better. For all their faux-refinement, opera audiences love a spot of low life: why else would so many opera heroines be fallen women? Carmen, Traviata, Manon, Lulu were all wonderfully shocking in their time – and in some cases, with the heightened scandal of representing their time. They seem like period creatures to us, with their vices veiled by crinolines and fans, but in not a few cases these women would have appeared to their first audiences as more or less contemporary figures. The idea of embedding lyric scores in modern-day scenarios is nothing new.
The right question with Anna Nicole is whether a piece that celebrates the vacuity of contemporary American life – and to a depressing extent, our own – can rise above vacuity itself? Whether it gets lost in its own froth or finds something of substance beneath? And last night, alas, wasn’t a big win for substance.
In charting the trajectory of Anna’s path from farce to failure it avoided the mistake of a heartless, spiteful piece like Thomas Ades’s Powder her Face by keeping the audience onside with the central character and salvaging a measure of sympathy from the wreckage of her life. But beyond the jokes and the disintegration, it had nothing of profundity to say about its subject. Or if it did, the point was obscured by what the libretto itself, in a throwaway ensemble line, called ‘too much information’.
Anna Nicole in reality had a short but crowded life that gave the authors of the piece – Mark-Anthony Turnage, composer, and Richard Thomas, librettist – too much to choose from. The result is something overwhelmed by incident, and made the more congested by an over-rich libretto.
Wildly scatological, the words are actually a virtuoso feat: the sharpest, funniest (and certainly most full-on) opera text I’ve heard in years. But opera doesn’t always flourish with that kind of virtuosity. Think of Auden’s text for Britten’s Paul Bunyan: dazzling verbal overload does no composer any favours – and in this case it presents Turnage with a problem, because he can’t keep up with it.
Thomas has a natural, fast-flowing comic genius that flowers from dung-hills and does here very much what it did before in Jerry Springer, the Opera (where Thomas wrote both words and music). Whole scenes in Anna Nicole revisit the world of Jerry, on a grander scale; and as theatre, they’re brilliantly, raucously funny. But as music they don’t deliver with comparable effectiveness.
Turnage’s voice as a composer may encompass stridency; and having always been drawn to an American vernacular sound-world, it’s in its element with an American narrative. But its affekt (as the Germans would say) is essentially elegaic rather than comedic, specialising in a kind of keening, urban desolation and the whine of solo saxophones on empty streets. And though (as I known from talking to them ) Thomas had some input into the comic timing of Turnage’s score, the words here repeatedly present opportunities that the music can’t quite handle – with so much happening in those words that, as often as not, the score can’t catch up. Or compete.
Another problem is that much of the music, which is uncommonly tonal and tuneful for Turnage, is parodistic – of jazz, of Broadway, of all things transatlantic (including Aaron Copland), and an inexplicable amount of Britten (to the point of near-quotation). Some of the best and most alluring moments in the score – and there ARE alluring moments – come out of these parodies, a good example being a set-piece ballad in Act I with a melodic shape so close to Sondheim he should sue. But parody works best when it’s as alive and fresh as the original. And Turnage’s parody only rarely catches that originating life. More often it comes like a shadow that suffers comparison with what it’s shadowing.
Performances? Well, Eva-Maria Westbroek tries hard to be up for it as Anna and very nearly succeeds but not quite. She’s a conventional heavy Puccini/Verdi/Wagner singer who, I think, has found it challenging to take a role like this and look relaxed and comfortable about it. Vocally she’s strong. Dramatically she’s game but in an awkward way.
There are two wonderful supporting acts from Alan Oke as the old man Anna marries, and from Gerald Finley as the dodgy lawyer she ends up with. And beyond them, it’s a real ensemble effort with some joyous cameos (I particularly liked the breast-enhancement surgeon, gloriously sung by Andrew Rees) and spunky playing from the orchestra under Antonio Pappano.
Did I have a good time? Yes – not least because resistance withers in the face of lines like ‘No one vomits on Dolly Parton’s shoes’, an observation that will stay with me. But when the audience broke into tumultuous applause at the end – and no doubt about it, the response was good – I found it hard to be quite so ecstatic. Anna Nicole is a colourful and naughty novelty with the appeal of a seaside postcard. But from a major, international, and publicly funded opera house, you’re entitled to hope for more than that.
Stephen Crowe, MusicOMH, 19 February 2011
FIVE STARS
The scandalous life of Anna Nicole Smith was a gift for the outré composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and his equally outrageous librettist Richard Thomas.
Superficially speaking this opera has a lot in common with brash, brassy musicals – tasteless kitsch, a drum kit in the orchestra pit and cheap American accents in the chorus – but emotionally it drives forward with easily the same force of La Traviata or La Boheme. The difference is that (as the chorus point out several times) “this actually happened”. In fact, Anna Nicole’s tragic tale has more depth than either Violetta’s or Mimi’s since she crawls out of a commonplace tragedy only to dump herself into one of monstrous proportions.
The libretto has to match these extremes (without laying it on too thick) and Richard Thomas succeeds where many would have failed – eliciting laughter from one-liners as well as delivering overall shape to Anna Nicole’s character. The real test is obviously the music. How does a composer represent the commercial consumer culture of Americana while still staying true to his own musical language? Turnage’s music was alive and exciting, and managed to be full of catchy melody as well as infectious rhythm – but it was still Turnage. Hardly a burning furnace of avant-gardisms, this music is extreme in no way other than its aptness and its beauty – Turnage saw fit to rein in some of his rougher edges to suit the piece and its context.
Director Richard Jones had the lavish, outlandish world of glitz and trash to convey, and he certainly did that – but there were some surprises, too, with amazing performances from the suite of three jaw-dropping dancers; the world’s largest Stannah Stairlift (for Anna’s 2nd husband) and an array of Disneyesque figurines enlarged to gigantic proportions. The acting, movement and interplay of characters were solid throughout, the one jarring omission (which would surely have ramped up the drama?) being when Anna embraced her dead son at her home, rather than in the hospital room that she, too was being treated in – according to the “real” story.
Eva-Maria Westbroek was magnetic from the hapless, gum-smacking Anna of Scene I, to the drug-addled and vulnerable Anna by the end of the opera, combining reckless naiveté with plaintive gawkiness.
Alan Oke was disturbingly realistic as Anna’s 80 year-old husband J. Howard Marshall II, careering around in a wheelchair with a half-full colostomy bag attached and in full view. His shaky hand was in keeping with his dappled head and higher-than-high elasticated waistband.
As her live-in lawyer/lover Gerald Finley was unshakeably smooth and irresistibly evil. His drive as a character was equalled by the force of his delivery, and his physically commanding presence was a perfect contrast to J. Howard Marshall II.
At its best the music was as sublime as Stravinsky’s Orpheus, but with frequent nods to American culture such as hoe-downs and negro spirituals, to gripping effect. Antonio Pappano was on fire, whipping the ROH orchestra into precision, and the supporting cast was uniformly superb. Overall a tender, sorrowful tragedy, told with humour and the best of bad taste.
Richard Morrison, The Times, 18 February 2011
Four stars
When people say that a celebrity’s rollercoaster life would “make a good opera”, they aren’t usually being literal. But an opera, or at least an unusually discordant musical, is exactly what the British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage and writer Richard Thomas have made of the ‘ tacky and tragically short life of Anna Nicole Smith, the Playboy centrefold known for her massive fake boobs, marriage to a billionaire 62 years her senior, and death at 39 from an accidental drug overdose,
Yup, it would make a good opera, And the Royal Opera has certainly done everything possible, and lots which (like Anna’s liaisons) may look unwise in the cold light of day, to premiere it in appropriate style,
The fiesta of recreated trashiness starts even before the show does, for the coat-of-arms on Covent Garden’s front tab has been enhanced by two bikini-clad body-builders, And when Eva-Maria Westbroek, brilliantly believable as Anna, drawls her first line: “I wanna blow you all… a kiss”, you sense that you were right to send your maiden aunt to Parsifal.
So it proves, Thomas gives Westbroek a whole aria devoted to the hundred-odd synonyms for “breasts”, What a cunning linguist (and yes, we get that later too). Wazoos, mams, golden winnebagoes: he must be raiding a saucy edition of Roget’s Thesaurus. That subtle lyric occurs early on, as Anna undergoes the epic surgery that will transform her from shelf-stacker to playmate of Alan Oke’s J. Howard Marshall, the octogenarian billionaire. Along the way we see her in her bump’n'grind prime, in a jaw-droppingly authentic pole-dancing scene. If the director Richard Jones ever loses the day-job he could run a lively Soho basement. But as Anna’s appalled mother watches (a superbly anguished Susan Bickley), the story darkens. “I made some bad choices, some worse choices, then ran out of choices,” Westbroek sings. The lawyer/boyfriend – Machiavelli, Mephistopheles and Svengali rolled into one by Gerald Finley – feeds her disintegration to the avaricious media, and the satire implodes into something bleaker.
The breasts aria is now mirrored by a grimmer catalogue: a solo for Anna’s son, Daniel (Dominic Rowntree), listing the drugs that kill him at 20. Finally comes Anna’s own demise, surrounded by humanoid cameras.
Of course the operatic repertoire is full of doomed good-time girls who mix with the wrong blokes. But most die to a sublime soundtrack of V erdi or Puccini. I hope the world warms as much to Turnage’s score, superbly conducted by Antonio Pappano. It’s jazzy, bitter-sweet, fizzing, moody and often touchingly tender. Five more performances, all sold out. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this sardonic fable for our times finds a second life on screen or in the West End.
Fiona Maddocks, The Observer, 20 February 2011
Spankingly naughty, riotously melodic and brilliantly performed, Anna Nicole which received its world premiere at the Royal Opera House this week, is a fabulous show. That needs to be said straight off. It displays Covent Garden at its technical best: it looks stunning and – as far as you can tell on first hearing – is faultlessly sung and played. It was also fast-moving, often funny, lightly tragic, insidiously anti-American and oddly, frustratingly hollow. Whether it was great opera, and whether it pushes forward the art form, are harder questions.
It opened on Thursday after a near fatal overdose of hype and a hurricane of enthusiasm for its rags-to-richesse-to-tristesse American playgirl subject matter, the late Anna Nicole Smith, brought to life by librettist Richard Thomas (of Jerry Springer: the Opera fame) and composer Mark-Anthony Turnage. As the heroine slipped back lifeless in her body bag for her ultimate Big Sleep – the real Anna died in a hotel room in 2007 aged 39 – the specially installed sugar-cerise curtain fell and the audience roared and whooped, many on their feet cheering the singers, conductor Antonio Pappano, director Richard Jones and the creators themselves. I can’t recall any new opera at Covent Garden, even the successful ones such as Harrison Birtwistle’s Gawain and The Minotaur or Thomas Adès’s The Tempest, generating quite this fizzing, triumphant level of excitement and glamour interest.
Let’s scotch one misapprehension. Far from being outlandish, the life of Anna Nicole is quintessential operatic fare: vulnerable, tragic women struggling for a better life litter the repertoire, from Carmen and Butterfly, to Mimi, Violetta, Tosca, Salome, Lulu. Male heroes, no surprise, tend to be kings and emperors. Silicone implants and drug abuse are no more shocking than incest or adultery and it’s always baffling to see how a few dirty words create such a frisson of tabloid interest and audience hysteria. “I had no idea swearing was deemed so amusing,” one student opera fan texted me after the show, having had a bad evening. Another, with similar youthful and musical credentials, thought exactly the opposite and loved every minute.
Once the excitement dies down, no doubt this polar response will prove typical. Nothing is new under the sun and in many respects, with its arias, big choruses and show tunes, Anna Nicole adheres to convention: a fact, not a complaint. Opera North’s recent Skin Deep (by Armando Iannucci and David Sawer, 2008) explored a similar seamy world of nip-and-tuck, with an equally wordy libretto and a rich lexicon of filthy language. It even went one better in setting “testicle” to music, which was unaccountably omitted here.
But Anna Nicole works far better as a night out, not least because of the ready-made focus of a recognisable anti-heroine, played with extraordinary esprit and vocal finesse by Eva-Maria Westbroek, a dramatic soprano with formidable acting skills, as anyone who saw her in Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk at the ROH will know. Gerald Finley, a Turnage veteran who starred in his The Silver Tassie (2000), throws muscle and soul into the role of Stern, Anna Nicole’s manipulative lover-lawyer. Is there anything this glorious singer cannot do? Alan Oke excels as Anna Nicole’s 89-year-old husband Howard Marshall II, who in a melancholy death scene curses the decrepitude of long life while his ghastly family – echoes of Gianni Schicchi – chant “Not dead yet”. Susan Bickley plays her mother, Virgie, with Peter Hoare, Rebecca de Pont Davies and Wynne Evans leading a strong ensemble cast. Lap dancers, meat-rackers, truckers, Wal-Mart employees, black, jackdaw-like human cameras and a host of other nightmare characters peopled the stage in Miriam Buether’s fluorescent, garish designs, lit by Mimi Jordan Sherin and DM Wood.
Turnage, 50, has called this a “comic horror story”, a fair description. It adds little psychological complexity to the heroine, relying on the quickfire episodes of her shocking life to provide drama. To an extent they do. Any depiction of a woman ululating over her dead child, especially with Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder echoing in the score – one of several musical quotes – must elicit sympathy. But Anna’s own death is as swift as a light being flicked off. Maybe that nothingness is exactly the point. She repeats her opening double entendre – “I want to blow you all – a kiss” and the opera ends, four bars and nine fortissimo chords later, in blackout. We are left feeling like ghoulish outsiders staring in at a zoo full of caged, maimed humans.
In one sense Turnage’s stage works over more than two decades have moved from low-life to high, from the coruscations of the working-class, Oedipal Greek (1988) to the sensational, Hello!-style frail celebrity of Anna Nicole. His one-act 1997 chamber pieces Twice Through the Heart, a monologue about a woman who murders her lover, and Country of the Blind used tiny forces to plumb human pain. The Silver Tassie for ENO evoked the trauma of war. Unafraid of emotion and growing up as much influenced by jazz and rock as the classical mainstream, Turnage has always had a singular power to hint, without heavy-handedness, at moral truths.
On first hearing, this element is missing in Anna Nicole. Turnage feels straitjacketed by the internal rhymes and relentless dazzle of Richard Thomas’s text. The regrettable late decision to use surtitles, unnecessary since the singers are lightly amplified, tips the balance towards words and pushes the score, undoubtedly packed with riches, into the background. In Act I, a high-profile jazz trio (consisting of the excellent Peter Erskine, John Paul Jones and John Parricelli) colours the sound with sexy, bluesy riffs. But it was hard to hear what the orchestra was up to. This changed radically in Act II, where Turnage’s own, spikier voice, full of smoky, plangent woodwind, wah-wah muted brass and elegiac, at times waltzing strings, at last found room to breathe. It’s possible that opera novices will like Act I while fans prefer Act II.
Anna Picard, Independent on Sunday, 20 February 2011
Pumped up on silicone and southern-fried chicken, wasted and blasted on uppers and downers, Anna Nicole smiles from every corner of the Royal Opera House.
Gone are the portraits of Maria Malibran, the maquettes from Gawain and Les Sylphides. Here instead are glossy publicity shots, packets of tranquillisers, relics of a life in the vanguard of raunch culture. Even the red velvet curtains have been replaced with hot-pink nylon. Lap-dancer, gold-digger, siren and grotesque, the single mom from Mexia, Texas, has burned a big hole in Covent Garden’s budget.
Brashly and brilliantly staged by Richard Jones, with dayglo designs by Miriam Buether, red-carpet lighting by Mimi Jordan Sherin and D M Wood, and pneumatic costumes by Nicky Gillibrand, Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera narrates what may or may not be the life and death of Anna Nicole Smith. As Anna’s mother, Virgie (Susan Bickley), reminds us, much of what we see is hearsay, while Anna’s lawyer and lover, Howard K Stern (Gerald Finley), attempts to manipulate her backstory for the media. The bare bones are tawdry: an abusive father, a series of minimum wage jobs, pregnancy, and the lure of solvency from lap-dancing and breast enlargement surgery. Enter octogenarian oil-man J Howard Marshall II (Alan Oke), Anna’s liver-spotted knight in a shining wheelchair, and her fortunes are transformed. But “there’s no such thing as a free ranch” and the price is baby-talk and blow-jobs. Fame follows, and with it addiction: to temazepam, tequila, Jimmy Choos and cocaine, but mostly to fame itself.
Richard Thomas’s libretto follows the model he forged in Jerry Springer: The Opera, turning the air several shades of blue with alliterative argot then delivering a sucker-punch of Tin Pin Alley sentiment. Turnage is an old-hand at Americana. There’s a hefty dose of Sweeney Todd in the opening chorus, bossa nova rhythms, banjos, blues, trippy waltzes, woozy veils of strings. The orchestration is ravishing, though the tactus unvaried. With so many (rude) words to get across, voices are amplified, making a thick slab of sound despite Antonio Pappano’s meticulous conducting. But as triumph turns to tragedy, the textures soften. Copland is the influence in Act II, Turnage’s fanfare for the common woman, with a fractured passacaglia for the grieving, overweight Anna.
Though lawyers still circle around Anna Nicole, Turnage’s modern-day demi-mondaine is sympathetically drawn. Pouting for the cameras, all big blue eyes and beach-ball breasts, Eva-Maria Westbroek catches Anna’s naivety and impulsiveness, if not her Texan accent. It’s a captivating performance, and one that is strongest opposite Oke’s enfeebled but larger-than-life Marshall. Bickley’s Virgie, too, is powerful, enraged and resigned. In a large cast of cartoons and ciphers, Peter Hoare’s Larry King is outstanding, as is Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts’s psychopathic Trucker. What Anna Nicole’s shelf-life will be is anyone’s guess. Neither the sex industry nor the cult of celebrity is fully explored, and there’s little romance. As to the chorus’s claim that “You won’t be bored”, you must make up your own mind.
The Guardian Review of Reviews, 21 February 2011
Marks out of 10 (rated 8 overall)
Guardian 4 (booooooooo!)
Observer 9
Times 8
Telegraph 10
Independent 10
Independent on Sunday 7
Reviews in German
http://www.zdf.de/ZDFde/inhalt/31/0,1872,8213599,00.html
http://www.wienerzeitung.at/DesktopDefault.aspx?TabID=3904&Alias=wzo&cob=545062
http://www.n-tv.de/leute/Oper-ueber-Anna-Nicole-Smith-article2646956.html
http://www.europeonline-magazine.eu/anna-nicole-smith—ein-leben-wie-eine-oper_110988.html