THE ENGLISH Opera Billy Budd makes a rare and welcome appearance in Los Angeles this month at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion as the culmination of the city’s “Britten 100/LA” festival, last year having been the centenary of composer Sir Benjamin Britten’s birth.
For those with a hazy knowledge of the art form, Billy Budd proves good opera doesn’t always have to focus on lovelorn couples and heaving corsets. Based on a novella by Herman Melville (of Moby Dick fame) this all-man show is set aboard the stifling, enclosed world of HMS Indomitable, a British warship serving in 1797 during the Napoleonic Wars. Our hero, Billy (a spirited Liam Bonner), is a handsome and optimistic fellow, upbeat and sunny despite being pressed into service from a merchant ship, (archly-named The Rights of Man). But Billy is cursed by a stutter, a legacy of some sort of childhood trauma and which later becomes a key plot device.
Undercurrents of lust and sexual repression are brought to the surface as Billy’s physical beauty brings him to the attention of the brutish master-at-arms, John Claggart, (Greer Grimsley) whose unrequited lust turns to bitter hatred and results in him framing Billy for fomenting mutiny, forcing a court martial at the hands of the decent and skeptical Captain Vere (Richard Croft).
Billy is infuriated and upset by the charges, and, unable to speak through his stammer, strikes Claggart, killing him, leaving Vere with no choice but to hold a court martial immediately, his only option under the Articles of War. Billy pleads with Vere to save him, but he is sentenced to death. The sentence brings the ship to the brink of mutiny, but Billy, just before being hung from the yardarm in a very Christ-like fashion, tells the men that death is his fate and asks them not to revolt. Billy is brought onto the main deck. Just before his execution, he praises his captain one last time, singing, “Starry Vere, God bless you!”
The story is neatly bookended by the ruminations of Vere, who, as an old man long retired from the sea, is still haunted by his memories of the event.
Billy Budd is both an anti-war story and an oblique critique of sexual repression. Britten’s music, right from the opening curtain, is full of ambiguity and quiet menace, letting the audience known, long before Billy’s tragic end, that there is something very nasty just over the horizon. The production is by Francesca Zambello and sets and costumes by Alison Chitty.
For tickets or more information, visit www.laopera.org
What: Billy Budd:
What: Los Angeles Opera
Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles
When: 2 p.m Sunday March 2 and 16; 8 p.m. March 5, 8 and 13
Running time: 2 hours, 55 minutes
Cost: $19 to $306
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