The reigning opinion among many of my female friends and acquaintances is that women have a genetic moth-to-flame predisposition to fall, hard, for bad boys---the men with lust in their hearts, devil-may-care in their souls, men marked by sartorial déshabillé, wicked men with that come-and-get-it twinkle in their lascivious eyes. Bad to the bone boys, that’s the ticket. Sting has a marvelous little song appropriately entitled “She’s Too Good for Me” that might well pass for the Bad Boys Anthem (“She don’t like the tales I tell/ She don’t like the way I smell/ She don’t like the way I look/ She don’t like the way I cook/ She don’t like the way I play/ She don’t like the things I say/ But oh the games we play/ She’s too good for me”). He’s a bad boy . . . but she’ll keep him around. Oh yes, indeed. You betcha.
Sadly, full exploration of this remarkably self-destructive tendency of the female psyche has not found its way to the opera stage, though only partially through the fault of composer or librettist. Half the blame must be laid squarely upon producers and directors for their own oversight - and oversight it is, because the passionate words of opera’s less-than-heroic males are presented in broad daylight - in church naves, in taverns, in public forums - unmistakable, not hidden away or subtly camouflaged at all. The Bad Boys of Opera are there, all right, fanning out their bright, attractively dangerous peacock feathers that seem irresistible to the female of the species. (I’m thinking here of Puccini’s poor, tormented, and very horny Scarpia - and Verdi’s irrepressible, if a tad randy, Duke of Mantua.)
Producers and directors have missed the ball by painting these characters with monochromatic brushes (daubed an impenetrably deep black), when there are considerably broader dimensions to their bad boy personalities. On the other side of the gender equation, composers and librettists have gone astray by successfully providing the flawed males with the necessary bad boy pheromones to seduce their female targets, but then foundered by creating females that are unrealistically, uncharacteristically impervious to the Bad Boy Bait. The heroines are not permitted to react the way that Girls-Who-Love-Bad-Boys can be counted on to react. Let’s take a look at a perfect case in point.
The Operatic Bad Boy nearest and dearest to my own heart is Jack Rance (he’s even got a sexy monosyllabic macho name). Jack, of course, is the less-than-likable sheriff of the mining town in Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West (which, coincidentally, happens to be my favorite Puccini score, if not my favorite Puccini opera, and which also contains the most hilarious if downright insulting depiction of Native Americans ever presented in the world of music: I commend Billy Jackrabbit, “a Red Indian,” Wowkle, “his squaw,” and their respective bits of grunted dialogue to the reader for independent assessment).
Fanciulla’s Wild West is a tough, tough place to be, with much of the action taking place in a saloon replete with rugged, unwashed characters who smoke like fiends (“Cigari per tutti!”), drink like fish (Whiskey per tutti!”), and worry a lot about gun-toting, bandolier-bound banditos. They also get very weepy about homes, friends, and family they’ve left far in the distance in their relentless pursuit of gold in them thar California hills. In the very midst of all these hard-drinking, ceaselessly cigar-puffing ruffians, Puccini plunks down his sweet and sexy heroine and bartender du jour, Minnie.
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Black-hatted Jack Rance, it seems, has a real thang for Minnie, wants her so bad he can taste it. And he’s not at all reluctant to let her know how he feels, either. Toward the end of the saloon scene, Jack sidles up to the bar, sits on a stool beside the lovely Minnie (who, it turns out, does double duty teaching the Bible to the illiterate saloon denizens - “Ecclesiastes per tutti!” - this chick is a dyed-in-the-wool HEROINE, the real thing!) After all the bad stuff we’ve seen and heard about (and by) Jack until this point in the opera (and there’s plenty more to come, including a poker game with Minnie’s virginity and the Good Guy’s life - more about him below - at stake), we are unprepared for the tender, passionate, utterly moving aria that Rance flings desperately at Minnie in a final attempt to woo her to his side. He, it turns out, is also one of those weepy, sensitive guys who have left home and family far, far away (we’ll overlook the probability of an abandoned Mrs. Rance back home with his beloved Mama - yet another Bad Boy characteristic designed to radiate light and heat toward those reckless female moths). Sad to say, Jack’s impassioned plea falls on Minnie’s perhaps saintly, but nevertheless deaf, ears. . . .
Had Puccini (and his chief librettist, Carlo Zangarini) done right by the Bad Boy Principle, Minnie would, at this point, have tossed in her bar towel, tucked up behind Black Jack on his horse, and ridden off to perdition and endless nights of randy perversion with Rance Resplendent, Bad Boy Rampant. But the composer and librettist betrayed the Principle and placed Minnie foursquare in the arms of Dick Johnson, our aforementioned Good Guy, complete with fey, bland, two-syllable surname, an alias - “Ramerrez” - and all the strength and derring-do of a wet noodle (it’s Minnie who must rescue him from the hangman’s noose in Act III, rather than the other way around). Sorry, Giacomo.
Calling Dick a bandit, giving him an a.k.a. and a love song, and enlisting opera’s Big Kahuna, Enrico Caruso, to premiere the role at the Met in 1910 does precisely nothing to get “Ramerrez” a better score than Rance on the macho-meter. What self-respecting female would ride off into the sunset with this hopeless (and helpless) turkey? One can easily imagine Dick some six months later, knitting booties and trading Red Indian gossip with Wowkle and Billy Jackrabbit at the fireside while Minnie is chopping down redwood trees to build a new log cabin for the growing Johnson-Ramerrez family. Ugh. Methinks Minnie and Dick would have been in Wild West divorce court long before their marriage was a year old . . . or that Minnie would have been seeing Ol’ Jack for a bit-of-this on the side. . . .
In my ideal production of Fanciulla, “Bad Boys per tutti!” would be the battle cry, much of the overt Simon Lagree treatment of Jack Rance would be greatly toned down, and the strength and passion of his doomed love for Minnie ratcheted way, way up. Bad Boy Jack deserved much better. So did Minnie. . . .
Russ MacKechnie
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