If you haven`t lived in the Twin Cities, you may not know about the playful jabs that nice, cozy, conservative St. Paul has had to put up with from culturally trendy Minneapolis over the years. Yet all the guff about St. Paul being the night life equivalent of a wasteland may be coming to an end.
The Ordway Music Theatre in St. Paul, a major new performing arts center, is in the thick of its opening festivies. Not surprisingly, this plush performing hall`s planning and execution–pegged with a price tag of about $46 million–has inspired enough press and publicity updates to stuff the Ordway itself.
It was four years ago this month that Mrs. Sally Ordway Irvine, granddaugher of Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Co. (3M) founder Lucius P. Ordway, officially proposed the performing arts center.
Convincing the powers that be wasn`t difficult. Since the closing of its Civic Center in 1980, St. Paul had been without a major downtown performing space. Soon enough, the St. Paul/Ramsey County Arts and Science Council was enlisted, along with crucial corporate and private funding adding to the $15 milllon donated by Irvine.
Overlooking Rice Park, just up the hill from the Mississippi River, the Ordway is the first music and theater facility to be designed by architect Benjamin Thompson, a native of St. Paul who is now based in Cambridge, Mass. It was Thompson`s designs of Faneuil Hall Marketplace in Boston and Minnepolis`s own St. Anthony Main retail center that showed what the Ordway founders were after: a user-friendly, people-oriented space to be used by the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra (SPCO), the Minnesota Opera and the St. Paul concerts of the Minnesota Orchestra, along with a slew of other arts groups and programs.
THE MAIN HALL, seating between 1,750 and 2,000 persons, harkens back to classic European opera houses. The horseshoe-shaped auditorium is warm, elegantly tiered and rounded. Candelabra-inspired lighting fixtures soften the curves even more. (Only the lobby`s casino-style blue carpeting hits a sour note.) Inside and out, mahagony and brass are the primary materials. A smaller, 315-seat space is a utilitarian recital hall/theater, intended for a variety of dance, music and theater groups.
Both stages are just being warmed up for the workout to come. But it`s clear that Thompson and acoustic consultant R. Lar Kierkegaard of Chicago have hatched something remarkable with the Ordway main hall. The stage itself is the trump card–adjustable to a three-quarter-thrust position, with the orchestra pit underneath or level with the main floor or beneath the stage itself, all maneuvered by an elevator. As one architect said, ”It`s a weird combination of a building, a stereo system and a machine.”
With such staging flexibility, going to the Ordway will be a richly varied experience. The kickoff events certainly back up that variety. After a New Year`s Day open house, the opening-week festival began Jan. 8 with soprano Leontyne Price in recital. Last Wednesday showcased Pinchas Zukerman and the SPCO, which Zubin Mehta conducted Monday night, with Zukerman as violin soloist.
Last Thursday brought one of the new hall`s main events, the Minnesota Opera`s U.S. premiere of ”Animalen,” a 1979 work by Swedish composer Lars Johan Werle and librettist Tage Danielsson. It will not be entered in the books as the opera`s shrewdest pick, nor as the jewel in the Ordway`s crown.
ON PAPER, ”Animalen” (”The Peacable Kingdom”) probably fit the bill: As one local writer put it, the Twin Cities are practically New Scandinavia, and a musical fable about nuclear disarmament is timely enough.
The story begins in Tibet, at a meeting of the Worldwide Animal Convention presided over by King Gustav the Lion. All the animals of Earth are growing jittery about the nuclear arms race. Human delegates from Russia and the United States also have been invited to the convention to work on a solution. Meantime, the animals are treated to some home-style entertainment: The Americans present a Wayne Newton-type named Billy Benson, while the Russians bring on their singer, Ludmilla. Against all political odds, these two fall in love, sending both the animal and human kingdoms into a tizzy.
Though more than ably conducted by the opera`s longtime associate Philip Brunelle, ”Animalen” is a silly little cautionary tale about the arms race. Werle`s score is full of atonal plinks and plunks, a style that could be described as messy pointillism, somewhere between second-rank Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim in his ”Sunday in the Park with George” mode. Some of the material`s snap may have been lost in translation, but it`s hard to discern what`s what in a production as limp as this one.
For all that, the production showed off the hall`s acoustical suppleness wonderfully. The Ordway`s tuneable ceilings and walls proved to be unusually responsive. And with the clearest, fullest voices–as in the winning soprano of Gail Dobish`s Penguin and the contributions of Vern Sutton and solid musical comedy types such as Jon Whittier`s Otter–the hall appears to welcome all kinds of musical performing.
IN COMING WEEKS, jazz will be represented by Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Joe Pass, the Modern Jazz Quartet and others. Also on tap in the Ordway`s near future are the mime Marcel Marceau, actor James Whitmore in his one-man Will Rogers show, and Martin Landau starring in ”Dracula.” Along with local and national dance, choral, and orchestral evenings on both stages, a late night jazz series in the Ordway`s rehearsal hall is planned.
Beyond that, some questions have yet to be answered. It`s hard to gauge exactly who will get access to the smaller space and for how many
performances.
Yet the amazing thing about the Ordway is that in design and ambience, it has taken on the best traits of St. Paul itself. There isn`t the new-car look and feel that usually accompanies a virgin performing hall. It is as comfortable and comforting–and, in its sparkling way, as unpretentious–as the city it graces. That in itself is reason enough to call the Ordway Music Theatre a success. There should be many more reasons down the pike.
Michael Phillips is a writer and reviewer based in the Twin Cities.
