Andrew Boyle

Thursday night’s Salome at the Space at Irondale was my very first visit to a performance by Heartbeat Opera. The production is murderously scary and makes you feel like a sexually frustrated Viennese society lady in 1918. “Maestro, I can’t, it’s just too dissonant!” you cry, running from the Staatsoper. Maestro Strauss has melted your brain, and you faint into your chauffeured Daimler and fly down Mahlerstraße, dreaming of making out with the disembodied head of your handsomest footman. Heartbeat’s production made me wish I owned a set of pearls to clutch.

Heartbeat’s abbreviated, English language Salome with Dan Schlosberg’s condensed orchestration (and saxophones!) and conducted by Jacob Ashworth, collapses the already succinct opera into a few hard punches to the gut. The production, by Elizabeth Dinkova, does away with all visual hints of Wildean decadence. We are instead in a high-tech prison with one wall emblazoned with security screens. A glass box on stage holds Jokanaan, performed by an achingly tender and soulful Nathaniel Sullivan. Wearing only stained tighty whities, his heartbreaking voice carries the leaden gravitas at the center of the opera around which the crude and corrupted sinners of Herod’s palace dance.

A camera is pointed directly down into Jokanaan’s cage (annoyingly blocking the supertitles) so we can sometimes see the imprisoned prophet on the security screens. The glass cage is put to excellent use throughout, heightening the perverted intimacy between Jokanaan and Salome. The cage is also used as the setting for a stunningly effective orgy-incest scene that creates an emotional context for Salome’s demand for the head of the prophet on a silver platter.

Salome herself is performed as a charismatic brat by a winning and manic Summer Hassan. She is a deranged and traumatized teen in a giant pink tutu. Her voice was loud, bright, and bratty, and her soaring energy held together this raw production through sheer grit. Herod, performed by a subtle and extremely funny Patrick Cook, is a grotesque and horny mountain of lust. Salome performs an awkward teen shimmy for him during the dance sequence, and rather than stripping for her stepfather, Herod himself wriggles out of his clothes and whips off his wig in a perverse and deranged slapstick moment.

Manna K. Jones performed Herodias as a mafia bride in gold lamé. She is vapid, merciless, and murderously protective of her daughter. The entire cast, which also includes David Morgans as Narraboth, Melina Jaharis as a page, and Jeremy Harr as a soldier, connected well as an ensemble. Leaning deep into the relationships and chemistry of this biblical family from hell, they enrich the psychology of their characters and bring a modern, trauma-informed analysis to the opera.

The stage direction is difficult and claustrophobic. My eyes moved frenetically from supertitles to projection to actors to orchestra. It seemed like the characters were performing in every direction except towards the audience. It led to a feeling of anxiety, paranoia, and dread, allowing for a perfect explosion during the opera’s Grand-Guignol ending.

Andrew Boyle

Heartbeat staged Herod’s dungeon like a miniature supermax prison. It looked cool, especially Jokanaan’s glass cage, but the techno-carceralist aesthetic seems completely disconnected from the music. I’m not sure what it’s trying to say. The scenery, while entertaining, comes off like a nerdy fourteen-year-old who has decided to put on a leather trench coat and replace his “Magic: The Gathering” cards with a pack of cigarettes. It’s a charming pose, but we’ve seen this bit before.

Strauss based his opera on a play by Oscar Wilde, which was itself inspired by the descriptions of Salome in J.K. Huysmans’s1884 opus of aestheticism, Against the Grain. Huysmans describes Salome as a subject for art “not to be grasped by vulgar and materialistic minds, accessible only to disordered and volcanic intellects made visionaries by their neuroticism.”

Wilde must have taken that up as a challenge. Huysmans describes Salome as a “deity of indestructible lust, the goddess of immortal Hysteria, of accursed Beauty, distinguished from all others by the catalepsy which stiffens her flesh and hardens her muscles.” In Heartbeat’s opera she is an annoying and traumatized teen. The wrongness of it all was discomfiting; however, given the opera’s decadent, fin de siècle origins, a twisted and perverse production seems entirely appropriate.