Marital strife is not exactly unheard of in opera, but in Leonard Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti we’re pitched straight in with bickering over the cornflakes. Sam and Dinah are an unhappily married couple in a seemingly utopian little white house in suburbia. “Pass the salt”/”You might at least say ‘please’” is about as civilised as it gets.
Sam escapes to the workplace and gym, while bored housewife Dinah fetches up in a cinema watching a dispiritingly awful film called Trouble in Tahiti. Confiding in her therapist, she sings one of the score’s highlights, There is a Garden, evoking a happier time in an aria that anticipates Bernstein’s own Somewhere in West Side Story (There’s a Place).
Back home later on, Sam and Dinah sit side-by-side, each voicing similar thoughts about their miserable situation. For the sake of their son, Junior (whom we don’t see, though he appears, suffering from mental disturbance, in Bernstein’s A Quiet Place, which incorporates Trouble in Tahiti), they try to patch it up and Sam suggests they go to the movies. We could go to Trouble in Tahiti, he says, and Diana, not wanting to admit that she had nothing better to do that afternoon, agrees.
The duet they sing before exiting hand in hand unmistakably echoes Walther’s Prize Song in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger. In the latter opera the hero composes the song specially to win the hand of the heroine, his delivery heralding what he fondly expects to be untrammelled marital bliss. In Trouble in Tahiti it’s the final irony in a score riddled with it.
That irony is prevalent in the contributions of a vocal trio, who pop up intermittently to sing of the joys of suburbia. Izzi Blain, James Wells and Tim Burton are all cathedral choir alumni and their expertise shone in Bernstein’s witty close harmony numbers. They have some clever stage business too: clinging to hand-straps to simulate a moving train, or holding toothbrushes as microphones to elevate a number about domestic banalities to a performative level. Finn Lacey’s taut, inventive production is enhanced by the skilful lighting of Beri Valentine, creating spaces for characters to brood on their own.
Alexandra Meier is an admirable Dinah, Peter Norris a more effortful Sam. Conductor Olivia Tait paces the drama well, drawing decent performances from her small ensemble, crossing stylistic boundaries as fluently as Bernstein himself.
