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Chicago Tribune
7 days ago
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Column: Thar she blows! Chicago artist and writer Dmitry Samarov brings ‘Moby-Dick' back to life
Moby Dick was a whale, a very big whale. It is also a book, a very big book, written by Herman Melville and published in 1851. It was initially a commercial failure, this tale of Captain Ahab on a whaling ship named the Pequod on his mad quest for vengeance on the giant white sperm whale of the title that had chomped off Ahab's leg on a previous encounter. The story's narrator, a seaman along for the journey, opens with what is arguably the most famous first line in English literary history, 'Call me Ishmael.' 'Moby-Dick,' the book, entered the life of artist and writer Dmitry Samarov two decades ago when he was 33. 'I was going through a divorce and came upon a cheap paperback copy of the book,' he says. 'It was a crazy time for me and I was grasping at anything that might help me. This novel was a life raft and I felt lucky to be among the few who had not been assigned to read it in high school, so I wasn't spoiled by having to do it for homework.' And so he was helped and life moved on. But in the days following the bloody events of Nov. 4, 2024, in Gaza that rattled this world, Samarov was particularly affected. He set about trying to 'forget the news.' He canceled his subscriptions to newspapers. Never a tech aficionado, he severed his remaining internet ties so there was 'no headline-blaring app (following) me out the door.' Samarov came to the United States from his native Russia in 1978 when he was 7. He lived first in Boston and then came here. He went to the School of the Art Institute. He started driving a cab. He wrote. He made art. In 2006, he started writing an illustrated blog about his behind-the-wheel experiences. This attracted the folks at the University of Chicago Press, and that led to 'Hack: Stories from a Chicago Cab' (2011) and 'Where To? A Hack Memoir' (2014). His next book arrived in 2019, 'Music to My Eyes,' a gathering of drawings and writing handsomely published by the local Tortoise Books. 'For more than 30 years, I have been bringing my sketchbook to concerts and drawing the performers on stage,' he said. I wrote of it: 'His writing has matured over the years and in wonderfully compelling ways his new book can be read as a memoir, for in it he shares stories that help explain why and how music has, as he put it, 'haunted my entire life.'' He lives in Bridgeport and makes his living by working some fill-in bar shifts at the Rainbo Club and a couple of shifts at Tangible Books, near his apartment. 'My life is all freelance and flexible,' he told me some time ago. 'The goal is total unemployment.' Now, on to the latest book, seeded by an article Samarov read about, as he puts it, 'tech hucksters claiming to make millions publishing new versions of classics from the public domain.' He was not at all interested in 'tricking anyone into paying me $15.99 for a cut-and-paste reprint of some dusty tome.' He discovered Project Gutenberg, the internet site that allows people to download books or read them online at no cost. It offers some of the world's great literature, focused on older works for which U.S. copyright has expired. Near the top of its most-downloaded list, Samarov found his old friend, 'Moby-Dick.' And so he got to work. In his short but lively 'Designers Note' at the book's end, he gives some of the details, and he tells me one of his goals with this project is 'to introduce it to younger people.' He writes that he feels the novel is 'as relevant as any news story.' The book is handsomely published by Samarov's friends at local publisher Maudlin House and is available there and elsewhere for $25, not at all bad for a 650-page book. Melville dedicated 'Moby-Dick' to his great friend, novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne. Samarov dedicates this new edition to Harry Synder, the late manager of a theater in Boston about whom Samarov writes elsewhere, 'Harry and I didn't talk much about art over the 35-plus years of our friendship but he showed me how to carry myself in the world without neurotically making sure anyone who crossed my path knew of my 'true calling.' He was a fully-rounded person first but an artist to the core.' The whale is on the cover of this new edition, striking in black and white, though to me, he appears to be smiling. 'I was inspired by scrimshaw art,' says Samarov, then explaining that art form that is created by engraving or carving on such whale parts as bones and teeth. There are nearly 100 drawings of people, boats, buildings, implements, ropes in knots and other items. There is a Samarov self-portrait and a drawing of Melville, accompanied by Samarov's writing, 'I wonder what (Melville) would make of there now being over 7,000 versions of his masterpiece. … I'd like to believe he'd judge the version you hold in your hands worthwhile and not a cheap cash grab.' Far be it from me to dip into Melville's mind, but I think Samarov's right.
New York Times
04-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: ‘Moby-Dick,' the Opera, Cuts the Blubber
The opening line of Herman Melville's 'Moby-Dick' is one of the most famous in literature. But Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer, whose moody, monochromatic 2010 adaptation arrived at the Metropolitan Opera on Monday, conspicuously avoid placing those classic three words at the start. It's an early declaration of independence, the kind that artists have always had to make when turning a well-known novel — especially one as sprawling and shaggy as Melville's — into singing. Heggie, who also composed the well-traveled opera 'Dead Man Walking' (2000), and Scheer, an experienced librettist, have narrowed one of the canon's most overflowing works to its core plot. For readers who enjoyed 'Moby-Dick' but yawned through the rambling digressions about whaling, do I have an opera for you. The compressed adaptation is direct and clear, at least. Some contemporary operas, of which the Met has offered a burst over the last few seasons, lean heavily on confusing devices: complicated flashbacks; characters shadowed by doubles; singers playing metaphorical qualities like Destiny and Loneliness; split-screen-style scenes crossing place and time. 'Moby-Dick' wants none of that. It stretches across a year or so, but in a linear way. It never leaves the ship Pequod and its salty surroundings. Its characters are flesh-and-blood people. Yet the opera only rarely takes on flesh-and-blood urgency. While the story is streamlined and straightforward — a ship's crew struggles with the demanding whims of a vindictive captain — Heggie and Scheer also want to capture Melville's brooding grandeur, philosophical profundity and portentous language. So the prevailing mood is a dark, ponderous blue — a lot of stern, turgidly paced musings directed straight at the audience. The goal seems to have been to create a piece that's lucid and vibrant, but also dreamlike and meditative. A piece, in other words, much along the lines of 'Billy Budd,' Benjamin Britten's opera based on another seafaring Melville tragedy in which a ship becomes a petri dish for archetypal struggles. This is where the ambitions of Heggie's 'Moby-Dick' adaptation run up against his limitations as a composer. 'Billy Budd' fascinates because of the haunting complexities of Britten's music, but the meditations in this 'Moby-Dick' end up feeling dully one-note, as shallow as a tide pool. Even the circumscribed world of the opera includes a storm, a mast lit up by St. Elmo's fire, intimations of the South Seas, night and day, stillness and dance, vast expanses of sky — yet the music fails to meet the demand for these textures and colors. Heggie doesn't have many ideas beyond squarely undulating minor-key references to Philip Glass, John Adams and Britten himself. Every composer's work has influences, but these quotations are startlingly unadorned, even if played with spirit by the Met's orchestra under the conductor Karen Kamensek. Lovers of traditional operatic forms will find much to admire here, as Heggie and Scheer have embraced the kind of ensembles — duets, trios, quartets — that allow this art form to present multiple perspectives at once. But the variety in the text is not matched by variety in the score, and the conflicts that should energize the story don't always feel vital. The real tension is — or should be — between Captain Ahab, whose obsessive pursuit of the whale Moby Dick has drowned his humanity, and Starbuck, the sensible first mate who tries to steer the whole operation clear of disaster. But the opera gets distracted by a side plot about finding brotherhood amid racial and religious difference: Greenhorn — the name the opera gives the novel's narrator — first fears and then befriends Queequeg, the Polynesian harpooner. It's not until nearly an hour and a half into the three-hour opera that it really holds your attention for the first time. In a ruminative aria, Starbuck mulls whether to murder the sleeping Ahab to save himself and his shipmates. In the end, he can't bring himself to do it, and he slinks out as Ahab softly moans and the curtain falls. The sequence is riveting — but we've waited until the end of the first act for it. For the other highlight, we have to wait again, until late in the opera, when Ahab finally lets down his guard with Starbuck and confronts the cost of his single-minded mania. It is the calm before the final, doomed hunt, and Heggie endows it with real tenderness. Ahab, though, primarily expresses himself through drearily similar monologues, grounded in Melvillean diction and given a similarly antiquated musical feel through robustly shaking Handel-style coloratura. The tenor Brandon Jovanovich, stalking the stage with a belted-on peg leg, conveys a sense of Ahab's weariness more than of his intensity. The cast is entirely male, with the exception of the soprano who plays the young cabin boy Pip; Janai Brugger captures the boy's otherworldly purity. The baritone Thomas Glass was a solid Starbuck and acted with remarkable confidence, given that he was announced as a replacement for an ill Peter Mattei just a few hours before the opening on Monday — a performance that began with the orchestra playing the Ukrainian national anthem, the Met's latest gesture of solidarity with that country. While the tenor Stephen Costello was a plangent Greenhorn, the bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green sounded underpowered as Queequeg, with little to do except intone native prayers. The sweet-toned tenor William Burden was piquant among the smaller roles. Leonard Foglia's handsome production, with sets by Robert Brill, costumes by Jane Greenwood and lighting by Gavan Swift, is dominated by masts and rigging. The deck cleverly curves up into a backdrop that cast members can climb up and tumble down, seeming — with the help of Elaine J. McCarthy's projections — to be lost at sea as their boats are broken in the whale hunts. It is a clear staging of a clear piece. But that piece lacks the ingenuity and depth to hold its own with its source material, let alone break free. And it turns out that Heggie and Scheer's opening salvo of independence was just a coy deferral until the opera's closing moment. As Greenhorn, the Pequod's only survivor, is rescued by a passing ship, the captain asks his name. Costello answers, singing low and mournful: 'Call me Ishmael.'
Yahoo
03-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Tuscaloosa area to get three new Starbucks coffee shops this year
The near-ubiquitous Starbucks logo will glow soon over three new locations in the area, adding to the handful already found in Tuscaloosa, and on the University of Alabama campus. The first Starbucks in Northport is being built ground-up, on land between Lurleen Wallace and 20th Avenue, and will be a drive-through location. The other new drive-through will be at 405 15th St., in what used to be T-Town Tire. That involves demolishing the old building and getting the new framework ready for Starbucks to outfit. The third will be a full-sized Starbucks, with patio and cafe. That's going up near Lake Tuscaloosa, on Rice Mine Road, not far from the shopping center anchored by a Publix. "We bought a lot from Emmanuel Baptist Church," said Will Roark, a partner in RJ Development of Montgomery, which is working on the sites. "It used to be their old rec center, right at the entrance." More: Looking for a new restaurant in Tuscaloosa? Here are some you might have missed Seattle-based Starbucks is the world's largest coffeehouse chain, following a period of aggressive expansion begun decades after its 1971 founding. Figures from 2024 indicate there are more than 40,000 worldwide, built on every continent except Antarctica. The U.S. has the most, with about 16,000. Starbucks is credited with leading the "second wave of coffee culture," focused more on quality of roasts and cafe experiences, unlike the first wave, which centered around mass-marketed grocery store brands. Seattle's maritime history helped anchor the brand. The founders chose the name after the character from "Moby Dick," while searching for a monniker beginning with "St," as one business partner thought words beginning with those letters seemed powerful. They began compiling a list, and had picked "Starbo," a mining town in the Cascade Range, until the homonym reminded them of the chief mate on Captain Ahab's Pequod. The logo image — originally a full-bodied, twin-tailed mermaid — conflates with sirens of Greek legend. Terry Heckler, the same partner who thought of the "st" thing, found the image, and its mysterious nature, alluring. Heckler once said she's 'the perfect metaphor for the siren song of coffee that lures us cupside.' Starbucks locations sell hot and cold beverages, whole-bean coffee, micro-ground instant coffee, espressos, lattes, Frappuccino beverages, juices, full and loose-leaf teas, along with pastries, breakfast foods and other snacks, depending on the size of the location. Tuscaloosa currently has a Starbucks at 807 Paul W. Bryant Drive, adjacent to the Supe Store at what was for many years the Corner Store, with another inside the Student Center, and one at 325 University Blvd. E. There are drive-through standalone locations on 816 Veterans Memorial Parkway/15th St. E., and at 804 Skyland Boulevard, with a walk-up Starbucks inside the Target Superstore, at 1901 13th Ave. E. Barnes and Noble in Midtown sells their products, but isn't a Starbucks cafe. The three new spots should open by late summer or early fall, but that's up to the chain. "It depends on Starbucks and their suppliers, if they can get materials in a timely fashion," Roark said. Once RJ Development has completed exterior prep, Starbucks' interior buildout can take from 90 to 150 days, he said. The 15th Street location got started first, so it may open by late summer. That had been a Phillips 66 gas station and a convenience store before becoming a used-tire store, for 26 years. "All three of them were challenging sites," Roark said. "They're dynamic sites that should do well for them." Starbucks doesn't just plop its businesses down anywhere, but studies demographics including projected growth, traffic rates, and how existing stores in the area are faring. More: Mayor Walt Maddox sees 'light at the end of the tunnel' for $68.9 million road project 'That gives them a good indication the market will serve at what they projected, or above," Roark said. "If there wasn't a need, we wouldn't have gotten this far." Roark and one of his partners are University of Alabama grads, so they were already familiar with the area. "When we first came to market, I drove by the (15th Street) store, and couldn't even get into the parking lot, it was so busy," Roark said. What's coming should be relief stores, hoping to draw some of that congested traffic, and make it easier for someone from Northport, for example, who otherwise would have to drive miles before seeing a green Starbucks mermaid. The newer 15th location is just a couple blocks from the University of Alabama campus, with its student population of nearly 40,000. Traffic count estimates on Lurleen Wallace indicate between 60,000 and 70,000 vehicles per day, Roark said, almost interstate traffic heavy. As the $68.9 million McWright's Ferry Road draws to an expected completion in the fall, that Starbucks should open up at a prime time, when traffic flow to and from areas north of the Black Warrior River is greatly eased. When a store reaches capacity, and can't handle more, "It's actually a negative impact," Roark said. "Customers might try a second alternative, a competitor." Reach Mark Hughes Cobb at This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Three new Starbucks are coming to Tuscaloosa: When will they open?
New York Times
02-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Taming the ‘Howling Infinite': ‘Moby Dick' Comes to the Met's Stage
When 'Moby Dick' opens at the Metropolitan Opera this week, audiences will experience a deeply American story of unchecked ambition, fomented grievances and a self-destructive desire for revenge. Based on Herman Melville's 1851 novel, the opera delivers an economical and resolute retelling of the fateful tale of the Pequod, a ship in pursuit of a vengeful white whale. The libretto, by Gene Scheer, hits the book's main conflicts without losing track of the action. The score, by Jake Heggie, is graceful and propulsive. The opera's ending is certain and clear. It's probably fair to say that more people know the story of the white whale from parodies or synopses than from reading 'Moby Dick.' But an adaptation is not just a summary of the book's major events. A society obsessed with efficiencies can be overly focused on directness. Skillful though it is, the opera, which had its premiere in Houston in 2010, has a kind of scrubbed and airless storytelling that leaves the singularity of the novel behind. This is the sort of adaptation that audiences have long responded to — a simplification of the book's billowy structure to emphasize its plot. But can a tidy adaptation truly represent this unruly book, with its dramas born of endless uncertainties? Or is the purpose of adaptation something different? A composer decides what aspects of the narrative can be told through music, while a librettist shapes the story through words that can be thrown out into the air by way of song. An aria reveals a character's singularity and ambition. Characters sing them to announce what they want and what lengths they must pursue to get it. Each creative turn adds distance from the book. Certainly, there are advantages to adapting a work as well known as 'Moby Dick.' There's a beginning, middle and end that have met the approval of readers, and that can serve as the ballast for any number of creative reinterpretations. There's less risk for a production, too. While Melville's original publisher, Harper and Brothers, considered the book a commercial failure when it came out, few works compare in influence and longevity. There are also distinct disadvantages to adapting 'Moby Dick.' Melville's language can be difficult. The book has hundreds of pages of exposition. And much of the story's foreshadowing comes through subtle cues, metaphors and allegories. The novel, at its heart, is a moral tale about how people deal with what they most fear, how they confront what they despise, and how they make sense of defeat. These are abstract agonies played out through a cast of characters who don't really evolve. Instead, they press on becoming archetypes of unrealized ambitions. Though Ishmael (called Greenhorn in Scheer and Heggie's opera) narrates the book, Captain Ahab (the tenor Brandon Jovanovich at the Met) is the star of the opera, an apt, dramatic choice: He is the novel's most complex and developed character. In the novel, Ahab is most tender, though inconsistently, in his interactions with Pip, a 14-year-old cabin boy. In the opera, Pip's story serves as the turning point that reveals Ahab's heartlessness. Pip is an innocent, and his naïveté stands in contrast to the sailors' confidence. His survival is in the hands of the crew, and his presence raises the stakes of the voyage. After a mishap, Pip (sung by the soprano Janai Brugger) suffers immensely; his resulting fear is a harbinger of troubles to come. Pip's transformational moment occurs earlier in Scheer's telling than in the book, a dramaturgical choice that speeds the narrative along, while keeping all the novel's essential notes. Setting Melville's thorough and moody prose to music seems a natural. Its lyrical quality invites music that reaches for harmonies: The text is full of open vowel sounds, made when the tongue doesn't obstruct the flow of air. That can be useful to singers when they harmonize, especially in choral performances. Melville's diction can also be oratorical, organized with the driving energy of a sermon. In 'The Lee Shore,' a funerary chapter offered as testimony for a sailor who will be lost to the sea, the narrator weighs the disappointment of a life unfulfilled against the finality of death, 'Better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!' There's a natural lyricism in Melville's sentences, even as the narration drifts between pessimism and optimism. Often, he attempts to name feelings that reside someplace deep and unseen. He does this by embracing rhythmic patterns used in poetry. Consider the narrator's need to reckon with 'a damp, drizzly November in my soul.' This frequently cited passage in the book's opening paragraph carries a pattern of stress and intonation. But Melville's sentences are often lengthy as they wind through multiple ideas. This makes them difficult to sing. Scheer's libretto is forthright in its characterizations. Its lines, many lifted right from the book, are deceptively simple, written with great control. Some are as short as one or two words. Through the muscular interpretation of the chorus, these monosyllabic utterances — 'Aye!,' 'Ding!' — become brief, euphonious hollers. Not all adaptations of 'Moby Dick' are faithful to the disposition of the novel. The British composer Robert Longden and the librettist Hereward Kaye created a bawdy musical about the staging of 'Moby Dick' by the girls of St. Godley's Academy for Young Ladies. (It opened on the West End in 1992, was widely panned, and closed after just a few months.) The performance artist Laurie Anderson created an avant-garde version of 'Moby Dick' in 1999, called 'Songs and Stories From Moby Dick.' The book is really about 'enormous heads,' she says in the show — specifically Melville's, which was 'full of theories and secrets and stories,' and the whale's, which was monstrously large. Some more conventional adaptations could be interpreted as acts of devotion to Melville's messiness. Dave Malloy's 2019 version, performed at A.R.T. in Cambridge, Mass., reckoned with the eclectic style of each chapter. It also explores the ways gender and race create their own subplots in the narrative. Another recent adaptation, created by the English actor Sebastian Armesto and simple8, a production company that specializes in minimalist productions, told many of the story's crucial moments through sea shanties. But perhaps it's a bad idea to assume that a retelling of 'Moby Dick' should do anything other than honor the adapting artists' commitment to it. At best, their vision will just as discernible as Melville's is. At worst, one could always pick up the book. One thing that distinguishes Heggie and Scheer's adaptation is the frequency with which it has been performed (a distinction that is also rare for a contemporary opera). Before coming to the Met, it was performed by opera companies in Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Dallas, San Francisco and more. You could argue that it has become canonical, despite being only 15 years old. Are there too many adaptations of Moby Dick? Probably not. Hard times breed bitter men like Captain Ahab, and there is always another one filled to his hat's brim with grievances; always another who feels more than justified in his anger; always another who is ready to drown those around him in his misery.
Yahoo
26-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
An opera based on Melville's masterpiece, 'Moby-Dick,' docks at the Met
When Leonard Foglia was invited to direct an opera based on Herman Melville's masterpiece about a white whale, his first reaction was: 'Moby-Dick. That's great!' 'Then I ran to a used bookstore and got the book,' he recalled, 'and I thought: 'Oh my God, what am I in for here?' It's so daunting. I didn't panic, but I thought, 'How do we do this?'' How he and his collaborators did it will be on display at the Metropolitan Opera beginning March 3. The opera is composed by Jake Heggie to a libretto crafted by Gene Scheer. See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories. By signing up, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy. To begin with, Scheer had to whittle a novel of more than 600 pages down to a 64-page libretto. He kept as much of Melville's language as possible, and estimates that 40% to 50% of his libretto can be found in the original text, though he often tweaked the phrasing to make it more singable. Heggie and his initial partner, Terrence McNally (who withdrew for health reasons), had already decided to lop off the opening chapters, which take place on land. They set the entire opera aboard the whale-hunting ship Pequod. Another crucial change was renaming the narrator, calling him Greenhorn to reflect his status as a novice aboard the ship. Now the book's famous opening line, 'Call me Ishmael,' is transposed to the very end of the opera when the character has matured. 'In the novel, Ishmael is telling a story that happened many years ago,' Scheer said. 'But in the theater, you want to see it happen in real time. … We're watching him take in all the experiences so that when he says 'Call me Ishmael,' he's ready to write the book. In essence, this opera is the education of Ishmael.' Tenor Stephen Costello, who is performing the role for the fifth time and is the lone cast holdover from the Dallas premiere in 2010, sees his character as 'the only one who really has an arc. 'He goes on the Pequod because there was nothing for him on land,' Costello said. 'So he's either going to die at sea or figure out who he is.' In addition to Costello, the Met cast includes tenor Brandon Jovanovich as the vengeance-obsessed Captain Ahab. Pip, his cabin boy, is written as a 'trousers role' (a male character portrayed by a woman) and will be sung by soprano Janai Brugger. Starbuck, the first mate, will be baritone Peter Mattei, and bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green will sing the part of Queequeg. Karen Kamensek conducts the eight performances through March 29. The opera, commissioned to celebrate the opening of a new opera house in Dallas, has been a success from the beginning, drawing praise from audiences and critics — and even scholars. Bob Wallace, a professor at Northern Kentucky State University and past president of the Melville Society, admired the opera so much that he wrote a book about its creation. 'Scheer and Heggie did a brilliant job of shrinking the novel to make it fit the stage and yet preserve so much of the essence of it,' he said in an interview. As much as critics admired Scheer's adaptation and Heggie's tuneful, atmospheric and at times gripping score, they lavished special praise on the physical production, with sets by Robert Brill and projections by Elaine J. McCarthy. The action, Steve Smith wrote in The New York Times, 'played out against a multimedia-enriched staging that ranged from striking to near-miraculous.' Perhaps the most stunning effect is the way animated projections superimposed on a climbing wall that is curved a bit like a skateboard ramp create the illusion of the crew leaving the Pequod to board three whaling boats. 'A lot of the excitement and thrill of watching this is due to the work of the production team,' Scheer said. 'Lenny kept saying to me, 'You imagine it the way you want it, and let me figure out how to do it.' That often involved imposing unusual physical demands on the singers. For instance, when Pip gets lost at sea, his character sings the equivalent of an operatic mad scene dangling high above the stage, with projections making it appear he's treading water. 'I said to Janai when we first rehearsed it,' Foglia recalled, 'OK, you can just get mad at me now, because you have to sing your hardest aria hanging from not even a full harness, just a single wire.' In addition, Queequeg and Greenhorn climb up and down ladders to sing at the top of the mastheads. Ahab, who has lost a leg in a prior encounter with Moby-Dick, has to hobble on a wooden prosthesis. And Greenhorn — finally named Ishmael — ends the opera grabbing onto a whale hook from a passing ship that lifts him to safety. 'I joke with them that everything opera singers count on in life — having both feet planted on the ground — I've taken away from them,' Foglia said.
