Dominick Argento’s “Postcard from Morocco,” a surrealistic chamber opera premiered in 1971, presents a unique theatrical experience.
The opera's premise revolves around seven strangers who find themselves waiting together in a train station, each on their way to an exotic destination. They each hold a symbolic everyday item that represents their own stories.
These items include:
- A hand mirror
- A cake box
- A hat box
- Old luggage
- A paint box
- A shoe sample kit
- A cornet case
This sets the stage for a journey that is both external and internal.
Map of Morocco
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Literary and Musical Influences
The libretto, written by John Donahue, references many different literary sources.
It is loosely based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses,” a 19th-century collection of children’s poems.
The music draws from a wide array of genres, including:
- Classical music in the style of Wagner, Richard and Johann Strauss, Léo Delibes and bel canto opera
- 12-tone
- Vaudeville
- Jazz
- Pop balladry
According to conductor Nicholas Carthy, "You’re not meant to seek all of these (references) out. All of these little quotes are simply part of the kaleidoscope of the whole opera."
Staging and Costumes
From the opening moments, the staging and costumes thrust the audience into the trippy world of Argento’s imagination.
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The vivid, elaborate costumes, designed by Anne Piano based on sketches from Maya Hairston-Brown, lit up the stage. Each character wore a different neon color, which reflected their prop and personality.
This proved helpful when differentiating between them, given the omission of real names in the libretto.
For example:
- The Lady with a Hand Mirror (soprano Alice Del Simone) wore red - from her wig to her dress, patterned with tiny mirrors, to her purse.
- The Lady with a Cake Box (soprano Kyrie Laybourn) wore cotton candy blue with her Gwen Stefani-esque wig and a poofy dress, covered with mini cherry-topped magenta cakes.
- The Man with a Paint Box (tenor Paul Wolf), the only character referred to by name as Mr. Owen, had a distinct identity.
UCT OPERA SCHOOL - Postcard from Morocco - 1
Character Analysis and Performances
The ensemble cast excelled with excellent individual performances.
In addition to brilliant vocals, baritone Tyler Padgett as the Man with a Shoe Sample Kit demonstrated his charisma and great sense of comic timing, especially his well-placed snorts and his hilariously frustrated interactions with the overdramatic Laybourn.
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Simone nailed her virtuosic vocal runs, while Laybourn gave powerful, moving laments to her lost lover.
Wolf’s expressive tenor voice captured the mixture of nostalgia and hope in the ending scene.
In many of the lighter-hearted ensemble scenes, the mimes, dressed in the same outfits as the orchestra, added comedic relief as they acted out the main characters’ arias and waved around puppets.
As Holman noted, “The puppets later become a metaphor for us as individuals. It brings up the question (of whether) we too are puppets."
With the ambiguous ending, questions like this are never resolved.
Critical Reception and Interpretations
For about the first 15 minutes, one might be prepared to dislike "Postcard from Morocco."
But thanks mostly to fresh, spontaneous sounding performances, and to composer Dominick Argento’s inability to tolerate writing obscure atonal music for very long, it wins you over.
Still, this Postcard didn’t win over to the extent that one now understands why it is so frequently performed.
Both musically and as a piece of theater, it feels very dated to its self-consciously cryptic early ‘70s origin - the beginning of the seemingly endless trend in the arts toward throwing something on the stage and expecting the audience to accept it as meaningful even if you haven’t the first idea what you meant by it.
Argento found Donahue’s libretto so incomprehensible that he just cut it up into pieces and rearranged them to suit his idea of the characters.
Ultimately, he said he felt the diffuseness of the libretto liberated him to write the kind of music he wanted to write.
There is no plot, no development.
It makes sense, given the era, that Postcard was considered Argento’s breakout opera, the one where he found his voice.
It plays with many of the cutting edge compositional toy box items of the day:
- 12 tone technique
- Burlesquing well-known classical pieces
- Deconstruction of traditional forms
- Crazy, combative sounding percussion
- A small orchestra containing a guitar and a saxophone
In a delightful departure from many of his contemporaries, Argento could not resist doing his damnedest to make any and all of these euphonious.
Four decades later, it’s hard not to hear Argento’s score as the promising work of a young composer - like Verdi’s Oberto - interesting mostly for its early signs of coming greatness.
It’s easy to see why Postcard is popular with directors: it’s virtually a blank canvas.
The notes for the original 1971 production reveal that director Kevin Newbury departed substantially from the original “plot” (such as it is) for the Portland Opera production, resulting in a gentler and less heavily allegorical story.
In Portland opera’s Postcard, the focus stays on the characters and their quirks and vulnerabilities.
The Puppetmaster character who cast a shadow over the proceedings in the original show here is reduced to an afterthought, his brutal manipulation aria reassigned confusingly to the Man with a Cornet Case (baritone Deac Guidi), the rest of whose material has a flavor of the cornered and harassed Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s classic film M - hardly the cool-headed manipulator the song suggests.
Likewise, the Lady with the Hat Box and the foreign singer are rolled into a single character (Melissa Fajardo).
Newbury’s direction was liberally sprinkled with amusing touches.
He worked like a navvy to make sense of the storyline, finding unscripted opportunities to show a sense of human connection between the largely self-absorbed characters.
The stage action did occasionally fall into the dreaded opera trap where a character pretends not to be able to see something that is clearly in his line of vision, or struggles to grab something it’s obvious he could get if he wasn’t trying not to, but for the most part the action on stage was engaging and lent needed shape to the drama.
The high point from a musical and dramatic standpoint was former resident artist Caitlin Mathes’s turn as the Lady with a Cake Box, followed by her duet with Ryan MacPherson as the Man with a Paint Box.
This was the only time in the performance that one was literally on the edge of their seat with suspense.
One wanted to know what was in that box (supposedly her lover).
MacPherson stole the show as Heurtebise in Portland Opera’s debut production of Philip Glass’s Orphee a few years back and he very nearly stole last night’s performance as well.
As it was, he and Mathes ended up neck and neck - a compliment to Mathes’ acting skills, her warm, supple tone and the emotional integrity of her performance of an aria that could have come off as funny if not handled well.
Man with a Paint Box is an extremely exposed role vocally - at times, he is the only sound on stage, the orchestra sitting idle in the pit - his music incorporating challenges that on American Idol would prompt raucous cheering.
Melissa Fajardo seizes the spotlight in Portland Opera’s Postcard from Morocco.
The ensemble cast turned in excellent individual performances, notably the Lady with the Hat Box (mezzo soprano Fajardo) and the Man with the Shoe Sample Kit (baritone Alexander Elliott).
Fajardo’s ability to cut through the instrumental ensemble and noisy chaos on stage while singing with great warmth in her low middle register - humming no less! - was very impressive.
At first, one had difficulty hearing Ian Jose Ramirez’s tenor voice over the instrumental ensemble, but his solo turn as Man with Old Luggage revealed a pleasantly warm, spinning light tenor sound.
Soprano Lindsay Russell and baritone Deac Guidi, both making their Portland Opera debuts, rounded out the ensemble cast as Lady with a Hand Mirror and Man with a Cornet Case with strong, well-sung performances.
Guidi’s robust, chocolatey baritone provided welcome depth and heft to a largely lyric ensemble.
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