Oh yeah … this is singing! This is singing, dancing and jumping up and down. And it’s making us crazy!
Nightcharm’s favorite baritone Nathan Gunn — can we ever get enough of those pecs! Those pecs that were so lovingly lit in the Munich production of Billy Budd, above — Nathan Gunn, our Nathan, is finally starring at the Met in what we hope will be his breakout role.
He plays the lead in a new opera, An American Tragedy (right), based on the the Dreiser novel about a poor but ambitious stud who murders his floozy girlfriend so he can marry a high-society deb.
Surely, you remember the movie,
A Place in the Sun, where Montgomery Clift (then, still Jason Priestly pretty) played the stud, Elizabeth Taylor (in full ravishing bloom) played the rich chick, and the most beloved movie floozy of all time, Shelley Winters was everything you could ask for in cheap and lurid.
Nathan has the superstar looks — aw hell, Nathan has the porn-star chest! — that could easily floor both those dames — not to mention our own brother-in-arms Montgomery Clift. Now there’s a four-way we’d pay to see!
Writes Anthony Tommassini, opera critic of the New York Times:
Though An American Tragedy is essentially a conventional work and whole stretches of [Tobias Picker's] score would not be out of place in a Broadway theater, the opera is accomplished, dramatically effective and thoroughly professional. It’s hard to imagine a more compelling cast. Admirers of the baritone Nathan Gunn who have been waiting for him to have a major success at the Met will cheer his portrayal of the protagonist, Clyde Griffiths, the uneducated, ambitious son of street-corner evangelists in the Midwest who yearns to join the upper crust. The production by the director Francesca Zambello could not be more gripping …
Those wary of contemporary music will find Mr. Picker’s Neo-Romantic idiom much easier on the ears than, say, that garish shocker Shostakovich‘s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. While John Adams (in Doctor Atomic), Thomas Adès (in The Tempest) and Poul Ruders (in The Handmaid’s Tale) have pushed at the boundaries of the genre, Mr. Picker hews to melodramatic and operatic conventions. Yet he does so with undeniable skill …
In the novel, the moneyed set in upstate New York embraces Clyde partly because of his wholesome good looks. Yet Clyde is not conceited; he does not preen and strut. Shamefaced about his background, he is genuinely delighted to find that people think him handsome. The hunky Mr. Gunn ideally conveys this quality in Clyde in his intelligent and vividly acted portrayal. Though he may not have one of those sizeable “tree-trunk Verdi baritone voices,” as Mr. Gunn has put it, he sings with virile sound, rich nuances and utterly clear diction.
Gunn, who can play anything from a half-naked punk lazing on a dresser (left) in an modern-day version of Britten’s Rape of Lucretia to the birdman Papagino from The Magic Flute in an outlandish harlequin costume that would not be out of place in the Cirque du Soleil, has other tree-trunk qualites stimulatingly obvious to his fans.
On his website, where an mp3 immediately downloads and serenades you with a manly few bars of Sheandoah, Nathan keeps a journal, which we never fail to read — ever alert for unintended double entendres. Recently he took us backstage at the Met, which he likened to “air-traffic control at La Guardia,” what with all the sliding bits of scenery and people rushing about changing clothes:
“There are so many different scenes [in An American Tragedy]” he wrote, “and so many different characters that the dressers are busily running from one side of the stage to the other
“I know this because I am one of those people. My dresser, David, is working his butt off making sure that I’m looking appropriately clothed from one scene in the opera to the next. It’s not an easy thing when I’m in every scene but two. ”
Nathan, if your dresser David ever takes a vacation, we have a lot of volunteers at Nightcharm who would be happy to keep you “appropriately clothed.” Or half-clothed, as the case may be.
Big shout-out to Nightcharmer Bob who tipped us off to the American Tradgedy debut.
You can learn more about Nathan Gunn on his website.
© 2005 – 2006, John Calendo. All rights reserved. Nightcharm.com
Hopefully all of the Xposure will garner him a good recording contact to do more solo cds. I is a pity that his only solo recording was done six years ago. He has a lovely strong baritone with a full bottom range. Worth giving a listening.
ooh, his site has a pic of a guy kissing him on the forehead.
Great voices and super bods. A unstoppable combination.
Thanks for sharing.
It’s ‘Clift,’ not ‘Cliff.’ There was also a film version done in 1931 with gay actor Phillips Holmes and Sylvia Sidney, who 54 years later played the grandmother in ‘An Early Frost.’