Grisly Glee with Elizabeth Cree at Glimmerglass 2024: A Roily Romp by Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell
July 28, 2024
Elizabeth Cree opening at Glimmerglass 2024
Music, Kevin Puts
Libretto, Mark Campbell
(Based on the novel The Trial of Elizabeth Cree by Peter Ackroyd)
Conductor, Kelly Kuo
Director, Alison Moritz
Set Designer, Edward Morris
Costume Designer, Amanda Seymour
Lighting Designer, Kate Ashton
Hair & Makeup, Tom Watson
Cast
Elizabeth Cree, Tara Erraught
Dan Leno, Christian Mark Gibbs
John Cree, John Chest
Aveline Mortimer, Elizabeth Sutphen
Doris, Emily Harmon
Little Victor Farrell, Seiyoung Kim
Inspector Kildare, Schyler Vargas
Mr. Greatorex/George Gissing/Etcher, Geoffrey Schmelzer
Mr. Lister/Karl Marx/Voiceover/Soloman Weil, Evan Lazdowski
Uncle, Jason Zacher
Jane Quig/Annie the Serving Girl, Ruby Dibble
Priest/Librarian/Mr. Gerrard, Tristan Tournaud
Young Lizzie, Carly Rae Carillo
Elizabeth Cree at Glimmerglass 2024
I have great admiration for Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell’s operas. In 2018 I reviewed Silent Night and was deeply moved by the story and Mr. Puts’s mastery of a contemporary idiom that has freshness and verve without a wincing sting. At the Met I saw The Hours, which has a libretto by Greg Pierce. This opera features multiple timelines, metering the plot like a giant clock; I was impressed with how Puts so skillfully handled the challenge, both formally and musically.
Peter Ackroyd’s The Trial of Elizabeth Cree is a complex, brainy, multilayered Victorian gothic story that, while fascinating, is fatally attracted to the discomfiting blend of louche lives with deranged killers. There’s plenty of gore and more.
However, the opera retelling denatures any indulgence in visual gore. Except for a tale of a Talmudic scholar’s penectomy, most of what could be base was turned on its head to be witty and entertaining.
There is a unique structure to this work that could baffle the hell out of the audience if it were not for the great care Puts and Campbell take in serializing a plot pattern throughout.
The first plot strand is the trial of Ms. Cree for the poisoning death of her husband John Cree. Second is Elizabeth’s tale of her life and times in her own words. The third is husband John Cree’s writing a “diary” describing brutal murders that presumably he, or another, has committed. The final narrative strand has Scotland Yard’s blundering Inspector Kildare trying to crack a wave of murders. During the investigation he seems to implicate every witness. At one point he dons a deerstalker hat, Sherlock-like. Once these four elements of the plot are performed in order, the pattern repeats, ever widening the overall story. The ingenious set construction rotates and highlights the appropriate diorama, keeping us circularly informed.
I cannot expound fully on the plot since this work has a twist at the end which the librettist skillfully gives away in the dialogue. However, the general storyline is as follows: A tortured and abused child, “Lambeth Marsh Lizzie,” escapes her nest when her mother dies in an accident. She is drawn to the music hall glitz and finds comradery with a troupe of vaudevillians, including the true historical character named Dan Leno, whose specialty was playing female roles in drag. Leno was a sensation in his day and a favorite of both Queen Victoria and King Edward. His acting troupe adopts Lizzie and gives her an opportunity to be a much-needed prompter, and then a co-performer. Of course, “prompters” impart performers what to say.
Lizzie meets an aspiring “gentleman” playwright and author, John Cree, who fatefully marries her, much to his future misery. At the Reading Room of the British Museum patrons of burlesque merge with serious scholars. John Cree spends time there working on his new play. Somewhat incredulously, Karl Marx, who hangs there, joins in the plot. The wave of ghastly murders which plague the Limehouse neighborhood is getting a lot of press. The fiend is soon called “The Limehouse Golem” (after the penectomy killing). If we are to believe the sequence of plot fragments, it seems that John Cree is the perpetrator. But soon, Elizabeth poisons him, and the murders cease. Elizabeth is ultimately convicted and executed. That’s when the plot begins to shake down. Things may not be as they appear.
The theatrical abundance of literary techniques including plays-within-plays, self-reference, irony, and palimpsests, unhinge the boundaries of truth and appearance, theatre and reality; the shattering of the fourth wall occurs on several levels and packs this short one-act dazzler with an amazing density of plot.
Mr. Puts, ever protean, gathers music material from many genres and sources. Given that this is a comic murder mystery set in a seamy part of London, there is a significant reflection (and refraction) of Stephen Sondheim. We get the impression we’re seeing something evoking a “Sweeny Todd Through the Looking Glass.” On many levels, this work is a brilliant tribute to Sondheim the musician and master of great literary wit.
British Music Hall tunes are gleefully drawn from fragments of existing or newly composed numbers. Leitmotifs tracking characters and events keep the theatrical kaleidoscope under cognitive control. Elizabeth has a motif (a descending interval with a tremolo), and police investigations ponderously thump on with ostinatos. Ultimately, we know what’s happening through near subliminal cues from both motifs and Mr. Campbell’s ingenious re-echoing of dialog from one character to another (“Hmm… didn’t so-and-so say what she says now earlier?”). Theatrical jargon circulates in talk of marital consummation, enforcement failure, marital affairs, and in the murders themselves. What is truth and what is a representation spin about as we navigate the plot.
The performers as individuals are less powerful than the machinery and ensemble. Tara Erraught, playing the lead, started out being somewhat overpowered by the orchestra, but then quickly upped her amplitude and held forth. Dan Leno, brilliantly performed by Christian Mark Gibbs, dazzles in his music-hall mode; even opera attendees who may have been puzzled by the plot got their money’s worth with his show. John Cree, the husband who compiles the ghoulish diary of murders (Is he the killer? Is it fiction?) was very aptly performed by John Chest. His is an ironic role of marital devotion and perverse killing. Elizabeth Sutphen was a wonderful warbler and John Cree’s surrogate wife, Aveline Mortimer.
After the verdict is known, we are treated to a play-within-a-play reenactment of John Cree’s play, The Crees of Misery Junction, which has its own fourth-wall crash. Is the opera what we’ve been seeing for ninety minutes, or, is it a Schopenhauerian “theatre of the mind?”
The small ensemble took many roles, which added further ironies, visual and aural punning, and more. Besides real personages like Leno and Karl Marx, Victorian novelist and critic George Gissing is here too--perhaps as a doppelganger of John Cree and his failing literary aspirations.
Conductor Kelly Kuo was able to handle the myriad moving parts with elan. The music was tart, romantic, spooky, and lovingly performed.
At the end, we feel cleansed in humor, light stage fare, and hardly notice the grisly retelling of the Limehouse Golem. Entertainment is a killer; Puts and Campbell are masters of the craft in this tour de force.
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