Trouble in Tahiti Review – A lively theatrical staging of one act of Bernstein’s Marital Discord | Opera

toEonard Bernstein began writing his satire about a dysfunctional marriage while on his honeymoon, and by his own admission, the one-act opera was based on the nature of the bickering between his parents. Sam and Jenny Bernstein were alive in 1951 and could not be more thrilled to know that they had produced such an unhappy pair. The names were barely hidden: Sam was still called Sam, and Jenny became Dinah only because she worked better musically. In Mid Wales Opera’s new staging, it’s the realistic element that gives the work an unsettling contemporary feel, along with Bernstein’s own combination of poignant word setting and a jazz-infused score.

That MWO continues to survive against the odds is a clear testament to their fearless approach, and while this SmallStages tour is necessarily produced on a shoestring budget, it manages to achieve an authentic 1950s atmosphere as well as the claustrophobia of Sam and Dina’s couple walking episode. Bernstein’s instrumentation of a sassy trio – here sung by Kirsty MacLean, Sam Marston and John Ewan Jones – with the Greek chorus’s lusty praise of the suburban American dream heightens the contrast between the couple’s consumerist aspirations and their all-too-obvious personal despair. Director Richard Studer reinforces this by having the trio interact closely with Sam and Dina, which sometimes builds up more tensions, but also adds a lighter, sillier touch to the dark irony of the narrative.

Samuel Pantchev As Sam – strong in his bravado after winning a handball match – and Samantha Price as Dinah – the song of her dreams during therapy which she sings poignantly – conveyed the bleak sense of partners unable to listen to each other, bent on their own thoughts. He felt sorry for their poor son, Junior, whom they had neglected; Perhaps it is this apparent indifference that makes it difficult to sympathize with them. Even when they finally try to rekindle lost love, with a movie date to see Trouble in Tahiti — hence the opera’s in some ways confusing title — it’s clear that it won’t be happily ever after.

Using Bernard Iannotta’s chamber arrangement of the original music, music director Jonathan Lyness oversaw the keyboard, ensuring that the sweet melodies and harmonies—preconceived echoes of Bernstein’s later music that often excite the ear—speak as vividly as the vocals.

In the second half, which features the full quintet of singers in a cabaret entertainment series of American songs, the impossibility of ideal relationships, as expressed in Stephen Sondheim’s “The Little Things You Do Together” with which they begin, is a good foil to Bernstein’s screenplay. But it was soprano Kirsty McLean’s dynamic rendition of Sam Carslow’s Mr. Paganini that stood out.