Mad Men – The Opera

Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti begins not with a prelude, but a jingle. In Matthew Eberhardt’s production a trio of session singers clusters around a studio microphone. A clarinet throws out a slinky riff, the ‘On Air’ light blinks on, and they’re off: a swinging hymn to postwar suburbia, in Andrews Sisters close-harmony. Then we see a scene familiar from a hundred sitcoms and movies: all-American domesticity, 1950s-style. Clean-cut Sam is in his business suit, his prettily dressed wife Dinah fixes breakfast, and Junior scampers about in a cowboy costume. Bernstein establishes his world instantly, and Eberhardt sets it up with a deft touch. This is basically Mad Men — The Opera.

So you know the deal. It’s the hollowness of the American Dream, and sure enough, Sam and Dinah are bickering from the off. What unfolds as they drift through their day — him lording it at office and gym, her bunking off to a trashy matinee at the movies, neither of them bothering to show up for Junior’s school play — is a startlingly cool dissection of a marriage on a downswing. Bernstein’s score is fascinating. The harmonic primary colours come straight from Aaron Copland, but there’s a muscularity that looks ahead to Bernstein’s music for On the Waterfront, as well as big syrupy slugs of the faux-naïf uplift that mars Bernstein’s later stage works — though by having the couple turn and face a glittering Hollywood ending that they’ve done nothing to earn, Eberhardt manages to give the final peroration a necessary dash of bitters.

In fact, if this staging has a fault, it’s that it’s almost too forensic. Quirjin de Lang (Sam) and Wallis Giunta (Dinah) don’t merely look their parts. De Lang’s voice darkens and deepens as he indulges his locker-room delusions, and after two tightly controlled stanzas of hopes and dreams, Giunta’s mezzo-soprano fills out vibrantly, heartbreakingly, when she recalls the early days of their courtship.