‘Amahl and The Night Visitors’ Tries to Breathe New Life to a Creaky Libretto (NoPro Notes)
It’s a struggle to evaluate a piece when the act of performing it seems to carry more meaning than its content. Amahl and the Night Visitors is thin. That is not the fault of On Site Opera, who have done a laudable job producing and performing it. But it is, before anything else, a 45-minute teleopera from the 50’s. It’s a simple fable that was dazzling as one of the early attempts to make television a force for public art, but one whose story today reads as dated and corny. Miraculous healings of small children on crutches have become something of a punchline in Christmas narratives. Charity from those with little to give feels meaningful, but when it’s given to kings on religious pilgrimage, it has the side effect of bringing to modern minds the ways powerful institutions profit off of the faith and labor of the disenfranchised.
As I said though, this particular production carries significant weight and meaning. On Site Opera staged Amahl in a New York City soup kitchen, using a chorus comprised of community members who have been homeless in New York City. The central characters of Amahl and his mother, a young disabled shepherd and an impoverished widow, now live in a shelter as opposed to a hovel, and the Three Wise Men (the titular “Night Visitors”) who stop to visit are homeless men, covered in the bulk of fabric and scraps that identify the New York homeless in the frigid winter.
As a concept, it works beautifully. It juxtaposes a story fundamentally about charity, the inherent humanity of the disenfranchised and ignored, and the capacity for virtue even in the most difficult of circumstances with New York’s enormous homeless population. When we as New Yorker’s are confronted with the homeless every day, we tune them out both to resist despair, and out of the knowledge that none of us has the means to address every instance we’re presented with. Amahl and the Night Visitors puts the homeless in the spotlight, and forces us to confront them in the context of our own capacity for good.
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As a production though, it never rises above “just okay”. The singers are talented, the staging lively, but as I’ve said, the libretto is only so-so. Beyond that, the directorial choices that make the show interesting as a concept and statement make it muddled as a production. When the whole cast is on the same socioeconomic level, the simple messages of charity becomes even more confused. When the whole cast is coded as homeless, part of the message is lost; Amahl’s scrawny libretto starts to buckle, and the act of trying to understand and justify the economic relationships becomes a distraction for the audience.
I left Amahl and the Night Visitors happy that it was produced, but feeling less like I saw great theatre and more like I had born important witness. We New Yorkers bear witness every day like that — on the street, on the subway, on our door stoops. Hopefully, for we who saw it, Amahl will remind us that bearing witness is only the first step.
Amahl and the Night Visitors has completed its run.
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