Steven Spielberg's DISCLOSURE DAY

  

Thus far, the Donald Trump administration decision to release previously classified information about UFO (or UAP as we are calling them now) sightings have turned up nothing more than black and white footage of fast moving points of light in the sky. It's true that the movements of these objects shatter our laws of physics, and personal, mystified accounts by pilots who have been eyewitness to these events makes us all ponder what the heck is out there. It's no wonder that the eternal question of "are we the only ones" in this vast universe keeps coming back to the forefront. Since these latest "disclosures" have done a pretty bad job of clarifying long-held secrets, and a great job of raising even more questions, it is up to Steven Spielberg to set the record straight. 

Listen, you unbelievers: Yes, there are beings out there who have visited the Earth! And yes, even some have crashed landed (despite their supposed superior aeronautics); and yes, the United States government has recuperated the bodies of extraterrestrials in Roswell in 1947; and YES, the government has also done a whopper of a job denying it all. In essence, this is the premise of Steven Spielberg's latest film Disclosure Day, a rollicking adventure chase thriller that explores the mythology of UAPs. What makes the movie irresistible is that this time around he never lifts the foot off the gas pedal. Luckily, the latest governmental releases may have incidentally drummed up business for the film. Trust me, it didn't need it. When Spielberg makes a movie about aliens you run to the theater to see it on the big screen. You don't wait for it to stream at home.

At the risk of giving away too much of the plot, the movie opens with Daniel Kellner (Josh O'Connor), a kind of whistle blower who has in his possession video drives of many UAP sightings and actual evidence of aliens. He is being chased by Noah Scanlon (a bearded, memorable Colin Firth -- looking a bit like an older Orson Welles) who heads the Wardex Corporation. He and his men are all dressed in black. That's all you need to know. They are, undeniably, the bad guys. 

When it comes to exploring the flying saucer mythology Spielberg, throughout his career, places its visual landscape right along Catholic iconography. You see it in the Sacred Heart of Jesus transformed into the glowing chest of the lovable alien in E.T. The Extraterrestrial, and in the welcoming spread arms of an alien in Close Encounters of the Third Kind -- a kind of redemptive crucifixion. In this film he continues this theological imagery through the character of Daniel's girlfriend Jane (Eve Hewson) who is, not only a former nun, but during a memorable interrogation scene by Noah, she takes off her crucifix necklace and holds it so tightly that it cuts into the palm of her hand giving herself a stigmata worthy of St. Catherine of Siena or St. Francis of Assisi.

 At the heart of the story we find further religious allusions through the character of Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), a Kansas City TV weather announcer who one morning, after a Northern cardinal flies inside her apartment window, she begins talking in tongues (Russian? Ukrainian?).  In Catholic theology this red bird represents the blood of Christ, and is traditionally thought of as a messenger from heaven and a bridge between the earthly and spiritual realms. When she suddenly begins talking in an unknown language on live TV like Christ's apostles did on the Day of Pentecost, she becomes a wanted person by Noah, and thus ignites her run for her life.

But don't get the wrong idea: Disclosure Day is by no means a mere treatise on the mystical aspect of extraterrestrials. It is an exciting pre-summer movie in which Spielberg uses his mastery of pacing and slow disclosure to guide us through a story that visually contains many throwbacks to his past films, and even includes a train crash as a homage to the one in Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth, one of Spielberg's childhood favorites as we are led to believe in his autobiographical The Fabelmans.  

What about the aliens? Oh, they are there, but you'll have to wait a while to see them. Everything is explained, especially the mysterious Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), who throughout the movie is seen surrounded by people building what looks like a theatrical set for a suburban middle-class home.

The film concludes with a one word imperative. Maybe it's not the word I would have chosen, but it is clear that the meaning it tries to convey is that we must demand integrity and transparency from our government. Spielberg has always been a believer, and his films have shown just that, and he knows that his audience share in his search for the truth. 

Believe! At the risk of sounding like a Christmas advertisement for Macy's, maybe this should have been the last line of this exciting film. 

TRISTAN UND ISOLDE at the MET

Tristan und Isolde might be Richard Wagner's greatest work for the stage. A work inspired by the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and his writings about mankind's insatiable striving. Since its creation, it is his most talked-about, most written about, and most dissected creation. The opera was born out of Wagner's ideas about transcendental love beyond death, and an episode of infidelity (Wagner had an affair with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of his Swiss benefactor). Its pioneering soundscape, so vastly different from the conventional opera of his time, led to countless volumes written about the dissonant chord found in the third measure of the prelude -- the so, called "Tristan Chord," -- a deviation from the traditional harmonic practice of Wagner's day that many scholars argue eventually led the way to the dissonance of 20th century music.

At a time when the Metropolitan Opera is facing a financial crisis, this new production is the kind of event that is actually filling the seats. The matinee performance I attended yesterday seemed to be sold out, and there was an energy in the house which has not been felt in quite a while.The source of that energy is soprano Lise Davidsen, who is singing the role of Isolde for the first time at the MET after taking it "on the road" singing it for the first time at the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona, a performance I also attended.

American director Yuval Sharon is responsible for the new production which is filled with perhaps too many complex ideas. It attempts to be a visionary look at the work, and oftentimes it succeeds brilliantly, while at other times you question his directorial decisions. One thing is certain, like the best in theater, less is more, and Mr. Sharon's best moments are when he keeps things simple.

 

At the center of his production is a tunnel, a kind of vortex where the main action is played. Aside from the fact that it is aesthetically beautiful and complex in all its permutations, it also serves as a kind of funnel-like speaker which throws the voices back to the house. Not that Ms. Davidsen needs any amplification which this set might give her, but it really helped tenor Michael Spyres in the Act II love duet, and in the difficult music of Act III. The same can be said about Ekaterina Gubanova, who plays Brangäne. Hers was the smallest voice in the entire cast.

At times, the vortex breaks into two parts, separating the main characters from each other -- perhaps foreshadowing the events to come, or maybe it's just an example of the technical wizardry the MET can pull off and Mr. Sharon is showing off.

Throughout the production there is a long table on the stage. Here, silent doppelgängers of the characters silently mimic the action that is being sung inside the vortex. For the most part, I found this multiplication of characters distracting during the first two acts. But in Act III it suddenly worked. On the stage lies the dying Tristan, being attended by Kurwenal (a rather boisterous and vocally strong Tomasz Koniezny), and inside the vortex Mr. Spyres sings his mournful longing phrases for the return of Isolde. These are the inner thoughts of a dying man, and the audience is made witness to his last moments.

The other trick in Mr. Sharon's magic bag are projections which fill the entire proscenium of the house -- and that's a really tall proscenium! I must say that the resolution of these projections are not the greatest. Perhaps in the future the projections of live events can be improved. Although when pictures are projected, the image is quite sharp. Sometimes the pictures can be outright silly. When Isolde and Brangäne discuss potions a projection of an elegant feminine hand holding an alluring vial appears. The image is right out of Coco Chanel or Cristóbal Balenciaga -- you pick your favorite perfume ad! 

But when the projections work dramatically, they are memorable. During the confrontation between Tristan and Isolde in Act I, the characters appear to be walking the razor's edge, a powerful image that brings back the violent back-story of this tale: the slaying of Morold at the hands of Tristan.

It is a production not to be missed, filled with interpretive ideas that makes for a rich evening at the opera. It is also a harbinger of things to come: Ms. Davidsen is slated to sing the role of Brünnhilde in the MET's new Ring production which will also be directed by Mr. Sharon. Let's just hope that the MET gets its finances in order so that these wonderful future events can happen. 

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER - “¡Viva la revolución!”

  Mikhail Bakhtin, the great Russian literary critic, wrote that the novel as a literary genre is a series of carnivalesque episodes; essentially an empty bag where anything can be stuffed in. Of course, he was thinking of François Rabelais, a French writer whose novels cemented the framework for the genre. Gargantua and Pantagruel, Rabelais's great work, brings to life the essence of what a medieval carnival must have been like: loud, dirty and infinitely grotesque.  It is no wonder that Thomas Pynchon's novels are often referred to as carnivalesque and Rabelaisian. If Bakhtin theorized that the novel can subvert social norms and hierarchies through humor and chaos, then Pynchon's novel Vineland, the inspiration for One Battle After Another, is a perfect example of Bakhtin's theory. And Paul Thomas Anderson's film takes the theory a step further and adds politics to the stew in its quest to break down society's standards. Let the revolution begin!

With his incredible flair for telling a story with images that linger in one's mind, Anderson fashions a tale of an underground group of violent radicals vent on a quixotic quest to bring down the government. The story of French 75, the name of the group, (and also the name of everybody's favorite drink at "Rick's Café Américain" in the film Casablanca), has been told in VistaVision, the most celebrated of all the widescreen 35mm formats developed in the 1950's. The Searchers, Vertigo and The Ten Commandments are just three of the many films shot in this process -- a quixotic quest to bring families back to the theaters instead of sitting at home watching Milton Berle on that new invention: television. Mr. Anderson's choice to use VistaVision is also a rallying plea for people to get their ass off their streaming-den couches and come back to the place where movies are meant to be seen.

The focus of the story is the love between Bob Ferguson, in an amazingly satisfying performance by Leonardo DiCaprio and Perfidia Beverly Hills, a powerhouse of a performance by Teyana Taylor. They live in their scrappy revolutionary echo chamber, and they are very much in love. Their nemesis comes in the form of Colonel Steven J Lockjaw (an outlandish and utterly remarkable Sean Penn) who is seduced by Perfidia during a raid on a migrant detention center. As Manohla Dargis wrote in her review of the film in the New York Times "Lockjaw will spend the rest of the film trying to reassert his supremacy."

Years pass and Bob is living with his teenage daughter Willa (Chase Infiniti). He has let go of the rebellion and is now a burnout watching TV and smoking weed all day. That is until Col. Lockjaw invades his house in a quest to find Willa and discover who her real father is. This puts Bob on the run once again, this time aided by Sensei Sergio St Carlos (Benicio Del Toro), Willa's martial arts instructor and an underground migrant leader.

Meanwhile Lockjaw has been invited to join the Christmas Adventurers Club (talk about carnivalesque!) a white supremacist organization. During his interview with them he lies about having had sexual relations with a black woman. This lie will result in disastrous consequences for the colonel.

That Bahktin empty bag has been overfilled with so much Pynchon, Vineland and Anderson that a whole lot of intelligent, calculated cinematic explosions will follow!

 A friend reacted to the release of this film by saying "finally a movie worth seeing." I agree, and I'll add that it is worth seeing multiple times. And perhaps in multiple formats, especially if it is playing in VistaVision near you. It is by far the best film of 2025, and it has Oscar potential written all over it. I would not be surprised if we see DiCaprio winning his second Oscar, and Sean Penn his third. Both give fantastic performances.

And for Chrissake, finally give P T Anderson an Oscar!  He so deserves it for this film.

Twenty-two Wagner Years Ago

I can't believe that WagnerOperas.com is twenty-two years old. Not to sound cliché about it, but it only seems like yesterday when I decided to put together a website after I heard the new Parsifal production from the stage of the Bayreuth Festival that was causing a furor. If you've been following my website, or if you are a lover of Wagner you will certainly remember the Christoph Schlingensief staging that transferred the setting of the opera to Africa and replaced the Grail with a decaying rabbit. There was no live video in those days, only audio and some published photographs. Not really being able to see what audiences were violently booing at the Green Hill made the production even more mysterious. In an outrageous kind of way, it was the kind of event that inspired one to go out and put a website together. 

 The production was so creative and outrageous at the same time, and director Schlingensief had taken such a plunge into an unknown world (he had never directed a Wagner opera before) that in my mind I must have said in my own small way I can also go to the edge and produce something that will either delight or upset people. Well, I'm sure my website did neither. The aim of the site was not to entertain, but to instruct, and to serve as a repository of all things Wagner. And, by the way, for those of you who remember, and it may not be many, WagnerOperas looked like this when it appeared on the Internet for the first time on 2004:

 I always had a fondness for that layout, if you want to know the truth. There was something pleasing to the layout. But as things changed in the online world, so did the site. Hopefully, its present look reflects the current visual tastes when it comes to an online presence. My further hope is that it is as pleasing to the eye as the original was.

Perhaps one day there will be a radical change to the look of WagnerOperas. And why not! The site should always reflect the current tastes of the opera world.

A New and Improved Wagnerians Page

 I spent this weekend updating the Wagnerians page of the Wagneroperas site. Click here to go to the page, and take a listen to the new added audio that now accompanies each of the artists featured.

Bayreuth: The New Meistersinger Misses the Mark

 

I imagine that after a notorious Meistersinger production by Katharina Wagner that brought to mind the dark days of National Socialism; and the production that followed it, by Barrie Kosky, that explored the anti-Semitic undercurrents of the work, it was time to free this opera of its sociopolitical trappings and remind us all that it is a comedy. That is the impression that this new staging by Matthias Davids seems to want to put forth. However, if the aim was to remove the corset and let it all hang out, then that was partially achieved arguably by the last scene, which brought to mind a kind of Germanic hoedown, complete with bails of hay, lederhosen and an inflatable cow hovering overhead. Beckmesser unplugs the damn cow in retaliation for being ridiculed in front of the entire Nuremberg, but the cow gets inflated at the end to show that everything is fine in the dear old city.

But it is not! After Walther wins Eva in the song contest, they both storm out of the city hand in hand. Yes, they listened to Hans Sachs's speech about securing holy German art, but they're not buying it. They turn their backs on the old guard, and leave behind Sachs and Beckmesser upstage, both confused, asking each other what went wrong.

You can check out more pictures from the production by going to wagneroperas.com and checking out my 2025 Bayreuth page.

But what about the rest of the production? The first scene of Act I is dominated by a gigantic staircase that leads to a very tiny white church teetering at its zenith. The faithful descend after the service is over. All dressed in costumes that bring to mind the late 1800's. These elegant church goers find Walther wearing modern, contemporary clothing, but wait, is that a chain mail hoodie under his jacket to remind us that he is a knight? Throughout, the costumes seem to be divided in two worlds. David wears a t-shirt and oxblood color Doc Martens, but the Meistersingers dress in ceremonial robes of another time when they gather for a meeting. And what about that visually stunning staircase, the first visual treat we see when the curtain opens? It just goes away never to return. Why have it there in the first place?

The second scene of Act I presents the meeting place of the Meistersingers, and whadda ya know, it looks like a copy of the Festspielhaus auditorium, complete with wooden seats. Many patrons of the Bayreuth Festival complain about the un-cushioned seats, especially those that experience the Festspielhaus for the first time. There must be more complaints about the seats than about the heat in a theater that is not air conditioned. Was this the way to humor the audience? Was the audience at Bayreuth subconsciously supposed to feel good about the fact that the artists were just as uncomfortable, if not more, than they were. There must be a streak of Schadenfreude in Mr. Davids a mile long. 

 The best reaction to this production that I have heard since the premiere on July is that while Davids is busy at work trying to put the yucks back in Wagner's only comic opera, down in the hidden pit Daniele Gatti is trying to find the work's profundity. Perhaps this is the eternal question when it comes to staging  Meistersinger. Despite the humorous situations one might find in the narrative, the story does contain undercurrents of Antisemitism and the glorification of German art, which is called holy. Sachs demands that is be respected and defended, but Walther and Eva give their backs to it. 

Without a doubt, this is the most interesting part of this production, and it should not be. There is more to Meistersinger than just what Mr. Davids has been able to come up with. He's only skimmed the top of the surface, and perhaps has been advised not to seek further inner meaning -- the previous productions had done that already. It was time to allow hilarity to come back to the Green Hill. But in actuality there is very little that is genuinely comical here except for what Wagner has written. Davids just misses the mark.

A note about the cast: Michael Spyres, with his wonderful baritenor voice stole the show. A beautifully crafted performance that was vocally secured at every turn, especially in the difficult third act where he has to perform the "Prize song" three times. It was wonderful each time. Christina Nilsson proved to be a very pretty Eva with. secured top nd a sunny disposition. In Act III she is place inside what looks like a life-sized flower vase reminiscent of Ari Aster's film Midsommar. When I saw this, I asked myself "is this production going to go that way? Thankfully, it did not. George Zeppenfeld was George Zeppenfeld, a little too stern, too philosophical -- not my idea of a warm cobbler. Michael Nagy played Beckmesser, not as a caricature of a Jew, but as a lovesick guy who wants to court and win Eva with a heart-shaped neon musical instrument.

As the seasons come and go at Bayreuth, I am sure that Mr. Davids will change many things in this half-baked attempt to stage Meistersinger. It is not as easy one to pull off. My recommendation is to stay as close to Wagner's original intention, and you will have a successful revival of this dear, beloved work. 

Sunset Blvd. The Musical on Broadway

 In Jamie Lloyd's minimal staging of Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Blvd., based on Billy Wilder's film noir, so much is left to the audience's imagination that if you have not seen the original film, you might be confused by the action onstage. Why is that man, who we eventually find out is named Joe Gillis, (Tom Francis) coming out of a black body bag? Yes, he is dead, and soon we realize that he's going to tell us his story from beyond the grave, a common film noir approach to story telling. For those of us who know the film, we miss the incredible cinematic image of Joe Gillis's body floating dead in a pool. 

If Mr. Lloyd's numerous tattoos represent a maximalist approach to his personal body art (he recently got the number "10086" tattooed under his ear -- Norma Desmond's address), his professional directorial art depends on having very little onstage. A dark empty arena with actors wearing black and white clothing is enough to bring to life the year 1949. To remind us that the source material is a classic film, videographers with Steadicam rigs project black-and-white images of the actor's faces on a gigantic screen, while also giving us opening and closing credits. This revival of Sunset Blvd. is both a stage and film adaptation of a movie that had already been turned into a musical back in 1993.

The not so-secret weapon of this production is Nicole Scherzinger, a powerhouse performer who embodies the aging silent film star Norma Desmond barefooted and, following the style of this production, wearing only a black negligee. On London's West End she won the Laurence Olivier Award, and last week she won the Tony for her performance. It is a not-to-be-missed star turn (her Broadway debut!) that might demand more than one viewing to fully absorb its layers of brilliance. Last night, the crowd at the St. James Theatre went crazy when she just appeared onstage without singing a note. After she sang "With One Look," the beautiful anthem to the joys of the silent era, something happened that I have never seen before on Broadway: a standing ovation in the middle of the performance. And more of those followed during the evening. This is the kind of idolization reserved for rock and pop stars (Scherzinger was, after all, the lead singer of the group the Pussycat Dolls). By the end of the show, where Broadway seems to give every production a standing ovation, the act of standing up to applaud felt quite anti-climactic.

 There are amazing moments in this production, the most impressive of all is when the production goes outside to 44th street with Tom Francis leading the cast walking to Shubert Alley and back to the theater (you have to see it to believe it), and it is all captured by those ubiquitous Steadicam rigs. The moment has the same gravitas found in those long shots in classic films everyone talks about (the opening shots of Touch of Evil and The Player, and the Copacabana shot in Goodfellas) where every element has to be there at the right time otherwise the magic is lost.  And this is done live, eight shows a week, rain or shine! It is a coup-de-téâtre that you will not soon forget.

The run has been extended to late July. Do not miss this great production and the amazing performance of Nicole Scherzinger.