Alison Bechdel says she thought the idea of having her graphic novel memoir turned into a musical was "insane"; composer John Adams says his landmark opera, "Nixon in China," is as timely as ever; NBC has invested $500 million in Snapchat with big plans for using the social media platform.
John Adams' timely revival of 'Nixon in China'
The L.A. Philharmonic has been celebrating composer John Adams’ 70th birthday all season, and on March 3 and 5 the orchestra finishes the party with his most famous opera. “Nixon in China” is about the 37th president's monumental meeting with Chairman Mao in 1972, breaking two decades of hostile silence between the U.S. and communist China.
The opera premiered in 1987, and is now considered one of the great contemporary American operas. And Adams maintains it’s as timely as ever.
Nixon is often portrayed as a cartoon villain. But even his critics were impressed by his surprise summit in Red China in 1972, 45 years ago this week.
John Adams was 25-years-old when Nixon made his famous trip.
“I was intensely aware of Nixon,” Adams says. “First of all, because I was a student during the Vietnam War. And when he was elected president, I was almost drafted. And at the time he seemed to be a boogie man for us.
“The idea of composing an opera about Richard Nixon meeting Chairman Mao was first proposed to me by Peter Sellars, the stage director,” Adams explains. “And I was very, very skeptical because this was 1983 and Nixon was still really an object of late night television jokes. And people had still remembered Watergate and his bad behavior.
"But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this was a perfect choice for an opera — because the characters were so colorful, and the story is essentially about the collision of capitalism versus Communism, which was the great agonistic struggle of the 20th Century.”
This production of “Nixon in China” is directed by Elkhanah Pulitzer, artistic curator for the San Francisco Opera Lab. And yes, she’s related to Joseph Pulitzer, the father of the Pulitzer Prize. The family connection is of note because “Nixon in China” has so much to do with news and journalism. Pulitzer began prepping six months ago — right in the thick of the 2016 election.
“There was this sort of general consensus among the design team,” she says, “you know, Look at this crook — and everything he had done, in terms of lying under oath and all of that. And then, I would say the lens shifted in light of the election, and just the sort of explosion around what’s ‘real news.’ I mean, I come from a journalism family, and the idea of actually calling it ‘real’ as opposed to ‘false’ is an entirely new rhetoric that didn’t exist.”
“‘How much of what we did was good?,' is the question that Chou En-lai ends the piece with, and a reflection on the actions that were taken,” Pulitzer adds. “And that level of self-reflection and self-doubt and questioning, and leaving it with us to question, I feel is a gift that is very important at this time in history.”
Adams says that in almost every interview he does, he is asked, "Would I write an opera about Donald Trump?" And his answer is always, "No. And the simple reason is that he’s ultimately not an interesting character to me. There’s just no shading to his personality. There’s no self-doubt, there’s no empathy. I don’t think the man cares about anyone. So, from a dramatic point of view, it’s just not interesting."
“I’ve always, with one or two exceptions, chosen to write about things that have happened within my lifetime. I’m currently writing an opera that takes place in 1850, about the California Gold Rush, but the fact that all these people came out here based on reading what basically was fake news, and the racism and the violence that took place at that time, is eerily similar to what we’re witnessing in this country right now. So I always try to take things from my American experience and use them as a means of — I guess you could say — poeticizing my experience.”
The L.A. Philharmonic performs "Nixon in China" on March 3 and 5.
'Fun Home': How Alison Bechdel's queer coming-of-age comic became a musical
Alison Bechdel's career as a cartoonist started with her comic strip, "Dykes To Watch Out For,” which ran from 1983 to 2008.
In 2006, Bechdel wrote “Fun Home,” a graphic novel memoir about her father’s troubled life and her coming out as a lesbian in small town Pennsylvania. Soon after "Fun Home" was released, she was approached about adapting it into a musical. Her response:
I thought that was insane. Really, I thought it was impossible.
Jeanine Tesori penned the music and Lisa Kron wrote the book and lyrics. After a few years of workshopping, “Fun Home” opened off-Broadway in 2013. It then moved to Broadway and won the 2015 Tony Award for Best Musical.
The stage adaptation follows Alison through two of the most formative stages of her life: early adolescence and her college years. As the young Alison confronts her own sexual identity, she reflects on her relationship with her closeted gay father.
Bechdel recently spoke with The Frame's John Horn as the touring production of "Fun Home" opened at the Ahmanson Theatre.
Interview Highlights:
How Tesori and Kron's adaptation of "Fun Home" made Bechdel see it differently:
They plumbed emotional depths that I didn't quite get to in the book. They necessarily fleshed out the character of my mother more in the play. She was just a minor character in the book, mostly because I knew my mom was going to see the book and I was terrified she would read it. It was easy to write about my dad because he was dead. So I had kept my mother very minimal. But you couldn't stage this story without making her more three dimensional, so they gave her more to do in a way that was very authentic to who my mother was.
On writing "Fun Home" and what her father taught her:
I didn't realize what the book was about until I had nearly finished writing it. I knew I was writing about my father's suicide, about the fact that we were both gay and growing up in this small Pennsylvania town. But what I realized as I was writing the last sentence of the book is that this story was also about how my father taught me to be an artist. He taught me to be someone who could write this story. I saw his aesthetic focus. He was always looking at stuff, moving furniture around, changing stuff. There were things that he loved, colors that he loved, colors that he hated — and just seeing that kind of discrimination going on all the time was very educational. And he had this confidence in the stuff that he did. I wanted to have that. I wanted to have that kind of skill and confidence in my own taste and judgement.
On hearing "Ring Of Keys" for the first time:
The first time I heard that song on an mp3 I was just staggered. It was clearly this amazing butch anthem! That's kind of what it's become for young audience members. It's funny because in the play, the child actor playing me is 10 or 12 years old. This thing actually happened to me when I was much younger. I think I was 4. My father saw me noticing [a butch lesbian] and he glared at me and said, Is that what you want to look like? But of course, as a child, I had to say, No, that's not what I want to look like. But I did! And I knew I did. And I could see my father's shame and fear. He saw himself in that woman too.
On seeing her parents as stage characters:
My parents met in a play in college. They were avid theater fans. My mother acted in summer stock all through my childhood. And in a way, my childhood growing up in our house was a kind of performance. It was this play that they put on every day. I feel like there's just something really perfect and apt about seeing them turned into characters.