Watch out, she's got a gun!

Pockets of buildings like this dot the neighborhood, neglected for the past 65 years. Some have bullet holes from the Russian invasion in 1945. To recap: President Roosevelt, inexplicably smitten by Uncle Joe Stalin in Yalta, agreed not to march into Berlin before the Russians did. Witnessing this, Churchill correctly predicted a Cold War. He pointed to the Russians’ abandonment of the Warsaw citizenry to Hitler’s goons as proof that Russia would go on to seize Poland after Hitler was buried. Which it did.


Anyway, this building. It overlooks the S-Bahn tracks behind my building. There is a bridge there where you can watch them glide by, whisper-quiet. Come to think of it, the neighborhood’s main drag, Schoenhauser Allee, has a Chicago-y feel to it because of the elevated S-Bahn tracks that run its length.


Which brings us to tonight’s “Armida” by Christoph Gluck, a seldom-staged and recorded work. The story is conventional enough: Armida tells a group of Crusaders that she's about to be deposed as queen. This is a gambit to snare her lover, Rinaldo. He says fuck this, I’m going with my Crusade buddies, and Armida goes nuts, extracting her revenge. But we’re in Berlin where director’s theater or “Regietheater” is in the ascendance -- meaning the story is a picnic of mutilation, torture and nudity. Some bemoan this Tarantino-ization of the opera house, but I’ve got an open mind. That’s Armida in the blue powersuit getting her pistol-whip on. (Photo from operachic.com).