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Beyond

nytheatre.com review by Ross Peabody
August 15, 2005

Beyond, A Little Night Opera: a simple title with pretty vast implications. It’s a fitting title for Danny Ashkenasi’s modern opera. Both simple and with vast implications, these two aspects of Ashkenasi’s newest work are handled with a subtle, forceful, and deft hand.Beginning with a car crash and the imminent demise of a world renowned opera singer, Beyond is the story of how this soprano, near death, is guided through the events of her life by two angels who become husband, lover, son, even therapist and plastic surgeon. Ultimately, it is about a woman looking back on her life and appreciating the simple things, and finally laying down at the end of that life after seeing the terror of the world and of living and choosing not to return. It sounds a little familiar, but it is in this familiarity that this piece finds its strength.In opera, even of the chamber variety, only two strategies work: an opera must be produced on an epic scale, or on one that is spare as spare can be. If the choice is anywhere in between, you lose either the power of the spectacle or the power of imagination. The spare environment of his empty stage and his simple story underscore the fact that Ashkenasi fully understands this. The audience is lucky here, because this show is all about Danny Ashkenasi’s remarkable abilities as composer and director. Catherine Gayer carries a voice to be envied by those blokes on microphones at the Met, and both David L. Carson and Lance Olds as the angels are competent singers and actors who bring a great humor and humanity to their roles (although neither really has the discipline to pull off Ashkenasi’s rigorous direction). Ashkenasi’s repetitive, melancholic, joyous, and, at times, darkly hilarious composition, as reflected by the specificity, discipline, and occasionally tongue-in-cheek range of his direction, suffuses the show with the operatic, and cosmic, spectacle that is in Ashkenasi’s own imagination. It, in turn, is then shared with us.There are moments when the story veers from the simple life of a woman into the more clumsy complexities of the nature and purpose of therapy and other cosmic conundrums of a more philosophical nature. Things get a little muddier than I would appreciate in these moments, but when writer Helga Kraus and Ashkenasi allow the simple straight lines of this soprano’s life to be simple, the universality and beauty of Ashkenazi’s imagination shines through.