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Got a few ghosts I'm promising not to love
Things I did not expect from the Boston Lyric Opera's A Midsummer Night's Dream: that it would leave me wanting to write slash. But tell me what else I am supposed to do with this beautiful moment at the end of Act III when Puck is sorting out the four lovers, gesturing them like sleepwalkers to their appointed places, but of course in Britten's opera Hermia enters after all the rest, bedraggled, exhausted, too weary and too in woe to respond to his Hermes-charming; he has to go hands-on, reduced to touch and physics like a mortal man. And at first he is aggravated, comically impatient—Lord, what fools these—but then something changes, perhaps first in the music. It's not only the gentleness with which he arranges her sleeping limbs. It's the awareness that was absent from his deft stage-managing of the other Athenians. He's looking at her. (That moment in the punt when Harriet sees Peter sexually for the first time. I was raised on Sayers.) And when all is set in place and he's shaken the juice into Lysander's eyes, restoring the course of true love to its supernally smooth run, he stands there with the love-charm in his hands, gazing down at Hermia with a strange, contemplative tenderness: you can see him wondering whether to use it and simply stand there until she wakes. And the curtain comes down.
I want to write that.
(I wrote a few lines in the darkness of the next scene, but they may not be the right ones. Prose may be required. TBD.)
I may also forever envision Snug the joiner and Robin Starveling as a couple, but I am not sure I need or really want to write that particular pairing. They were marvelous in their roles. Starveling is fidgety, timorous, easily flustered; always dropping his cues, made even more nervous whenever anyone's attention is on him. (Him clutching his lanthorn, his dog, and his bush of thorn, in his blue workman's coat with his beret resolutely pulled down, was a thing of beauty. Without misplacing a line of the melody, which Britten wrote for a perfectly straight-up baritone, he managed to make his outburst at the audience—"And this dog, my dog!"—sound like the kind of stack-blowing indignation-trumps-stage-fright falsetto crack envied by many a radio actor.) Snug, by contrast, is one of those long, lanky, unworriable fellows; slow of study he may be, but amazingly laid-back. Starveling's jitters calm down around him; after Peter Quince hands out the parts, Snug takes him upstage to rehearse. You found them most often blocked together, even scattering from the translated Bottom. And I know both of the singers, although not closely and not for years: Andrew Garland was two years ahead of me at Lexington High School; Liam Moran was at the Yale School of Music while I was doing Classics. Even were I so inclined, I don't think I could commit rude mechanical slash (now that sounds like a band) without it starting to feel like RPS.
But definitely Puck/Hermia.
I want to write that.
(I wrote a few lines in the darkness of the next scene, but they may not be the right ones. Prose may be required. TBD.)
I may also forever envision Snug the joiner and Robin Starveling as a couple, but I am not sure I need or really want to write that particular pairing. They were marvelous in their roles. Starveling is fidgety, timorous, easily flustered; always dropping his cues, made even more nervous whenever anyone's attention is on him. (Him clutching his lanthorn, his dog, and his bush of thorn, in his blue workman's coat with his beret resolutely pulled down, was a thing of beauty. Without misplacing a line of the melody, which Britten wrote for a perfectly straight-up baritone, he managed to make his outburst at the audience—"And this dog, my dog!"—sound like the kind of stack-blowing indignation-trumps-stage-fright falsetto crack envied by many a radio actor.) Snug, by contrast, is one of those long, lanky, unworriable fellows; slow of study he may be, but amazingly laid-back. Starveling's jitters calm down around him; after Peter Quince hands out the parts, Snug takes him upstage to rehearse. You found them most often blocked together, even scattering from the translated Bottom. And I know both of the singers, although not closely and not for years: Andrew Garland was two years ahead of me at Lexington High School; Liam Moran was at the Yale School of Music while I was doing Classics. Even were I so inclined, I don't think I could commit rude mechanical slash (now that sounds like a band) without it starting to feel like RPS.
But definitely Puck/Hermia.