Almond’s high tenor plays against Love’s weathered rasp – one of their models was a YouTube clip of Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks singing a particularly devastating version of “The Chain” in 1982. The music is lean, balancing pop’s go-for-the-throat emoting with showier stage exposition, guitar-driven soft-rock passages and laptop electronica that sounds like Trent Reznor if he was weaned on Sondheim.
When she and Almond undress each other, it feels mighty real.
At 50, up close, she looks her role: part state-of-the-art Dorian Gray ingénue, part tragically-imperfect, time-scarred mortal. While the play doesn’t use her offstage persona as crutch or shorthand, Courtney Love playing a lustful dead goddess is solid casting. It’s one of a few moments that make you think of Love the icon – Hole’s frontwoman, Kurt Cobain’s widow, a person who has courted opera-sized drama in life and art equally. The sensibility was decidedly indie rock, not arena rock. Staged in the South Village performance space Here, in a room the size of a modest loft apartment, it featured a string quartet seated in the audience, a chorus of circulating dancers dressed in various flavors of nightclubbing black and dramatic action on a stage the size of three parking spots. Almond, 38, is both a singer-songwriter and an accomplished composer-playwright his husband, Mark Subias, is Love’s agent, and the man who brought the two together.īut Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark this was not. The one-act opened last night in New York City as part of Prototype, a critically-admired, forward-looking annual festival of small-scaled opera and musical theater works. “It’s gonna be a bruise.” Her voice, ravaged as ever, is not what one generally hears in musicals, let alone “opera.” But it remains a powerful, visceral instrument, and when it harmonizes with Almond’s on the word “bruise,” the effect is magnificent. “I decided, finally, to get a tattoo,” sings Courtney Love in her stage debut as Athena in Todd Almond’s experimental opera Kansas City Choir Boy.
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