Tuesday, September 16, 2003
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

REVIEW: Actress doesn't pull off Maria Callas role in 'Master Class'

You can argue the artistry of Maria Callas' voice for weeks, but there's one statement no sensible person would debate: The diva was one passionate lady.

Strange, then, to have found such an absence of passion in Gloria Allen's performance as the star in Opera Las Vegas/GMC Productions' mounting last week of Terrence McNally's "Master Class."

The 1995 Tony-winning play -- presented for three performances last week at UNLV's Doc Rando Recital Hall -- transforms a theater space into a Juilliard auditorium where Callas is conducting a seminar for aspiring singers (she addresses the audience as her students). Callas' lectures and her treatment of her accompanist (played by Dean Epperson), a stagehand (Matthew Thomsen), and the three students who dare to sing for her (Michelle Pippin, Vale Rideout and Rachel Mondanaro), paint a portrait of an aging, frightened, self-absorbed, lonely child/woman whose reckless singing long ago cost her her career and, some say, her life. (She died a broken woman of a heart attack in 1977 at 54.)

The acting in this version had a basic level of competence. The performers all know their way around a stage, and you could enjoy the show for that alone. (There was none of the sloppiness that plagued Las Vegas Little Theatre's production last season.) But director Lorraine Goodman and actress Allen constructed a central character too placid to give the production the animal kick it needed.

When Callas roars at her students, when she remembers her past professional successes or her failures at love, we need to understand that this is a woman drunk on emotion. We should be made to feel that this unpredictable lamb/lion might at any moment eat up the audience. It's this excess that fuels everything that happens in the play. Without it, the script is nothing more than a story about an annoying woman with memories.

Allen was physically right as Callas, but her emotional makeup was all wrong. Her controlled manner suggested a grumpy but basically well-adjusted executive secretary, rather than a temperamental force of nature. Her Diana Merrill-genteel needed heavy doses of Anna Magnani-appetite.

Goodman showed a similar lack of finesse with the minor characters. Typical of the director's approach was Pippin's performance. As Sharon, a terrified student, Pippin exaggerated shyness so inappropriately that her character seemed to be an actress performing a "Saturday Night Live" skit. Her work was all comic poses. What was lost was the simple reality that this was a student afraid of being devoured by a legend.

The closest anyone came to a three-dimensional performance was a young actor in a cameo role. Thomsen was playing a disinterested stagehand. He didn't try to milk the part; he didn't add all kinds of theatrical flourishes to call attention to how bored he was. He just really seemed bored, that's all. He was the only character whose behavior was appropriate to the situation.

Goodman didn't have much luck either with the staging. Callas' frequent drifting into memory hints of a blurring between fantasy and reality. The director chose to sharply separate the two by "announcing" the memory sequences through stage movement. (Whenever Callas' mind wandered, the accompanist and the singing students broke character, moved far upstage right and sat with their backs to the audience to give Callas the stage.)

But all could have been forgiven if Allen had been able to suggest the exposed nerve that was Maria Callas. Her larger-than-life persona is what the play is all about, and it's guilty of an unexcused absence in this "Master Class."