Publicity photo

photo by Nathalie Bauer

It’s apt music for the theater piece to come: Gluck wrote it for “Don Juan,” for the title character’s descent to hell. Here, it serves not to send a serial seducer to his doom, but rather to introduce a serial murderer—Jack Unterweger, a 20th century Austrian who murdered women on two continents as he duped authorities and charmed literati who thought him reformed after a first incarceration for murder. He committed suicide when he was finally sent back to prison. Actually, maybe he was a serial charmer, too, given all those he fooled, and maybe he’s in heaven now, because when Unterweger—portrayed by the one-and-only John Malkovich, enters to begin “The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer,” he’s all in white—blinding white—jacket, pants, socks, shoes. And he’s spiffy, unsullied, cocky, even, sporting dark glasses and a snappy black-and-white polka-dot shirt.

It’s an impressive entrance, and it wooed the audience at Hill Auditorium Saturday, there for the opening of the University Musical Society Choral Union Series and to hear what Being Jack Unterweger was all about.

But the sum of what followed in this hybrid evening of theater was less than that of its parts: monologues for Malkovich—ostensibly there with us to read from an autobiography he’s written from beyond the grave; and classical and baroque arias about women in distress (representing Unterweger’s victims) sung by sopranos Sophie Klussmann and Claire Meghnagi, accompanied by the Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra. The orchestra’s director, Martin Haselbock, conducted.

The idea behind this musical drama, for which Michael Sturminger wrote the libretto (he is also credited as director), is more cogently explained in the program notes than it is played out on stage, where it tends to drift without much purpose or revelation.

Sturminger seems intent on focusing on truth—there’s a funny scene where Malkovich reads us the Unterweger Wikipedia entry, filled with lies that Unterweger himself planted—and Malkovich’s segments return time and again to questions of why. But those questions are pushed away—Does Dr. Jekyll know Mr. Hyde? he justly asks. And the audience is repeatedly pushed away, too.

There’s a lot of irony and distancing, of breaking the dramatic spell with a quip or a funny bit of business to keep us at bay. We’re constantly reminded that the painting, so to speak, is just a flat piece of canvas. So Unterweger never really acquires any human depth as a character to care about. Still, Malkovich is charming and seductive, a sociopathic smiler, a strangler with a tender streak—and that much is pretty riveting.

The singing was largely compelling, too, vocally and dramatically, as the singers interacted with Malkovich/Unterweger, archetypes of the women he has victimized. They get killed and caressed as they sing, have their bellies petted, their breasts probed, their necks nuzzled. It somehow seems a little strained—why is Unterweger/Malkovich covering Klussmann with books as she lies “dead” on the stage, for example?

Klussmann started off a little shaky in pitch in her first aria, Mozart’s “Vorrei spiegarvi,” but was remarkable thereafter—maybe she was nervous about her upcoming garroting, or perhaps it warmed her throat. The orchestra, too, was a little off to start—the ensemble could have been tighter—but it found its footing as the evening went on.

But six long arias that have largely identical sentiments and similar form and style begin to make the eyes and ears glaze over, no matter how well they are sung. And even with the highly colored performances that Klussmann and Meghnagi delivered, these arias—by Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Vivaldi and von Weber—did not seem the ideal way to give emotional heft and underscoring to Unterweger’s story. (As a side note, surely some of the English supertitles for these Italian arias can be improved: no need to go all archaic with “foraminate” and “dispiteous.”)

Rather than repurposed music, a score composed for the show would have seemed more on key. Also, just as it’s fair to ask what the music does for the text, it’s interesting to consider what the text here does or doesn’t add to the music. I think “The Infernal Comedy” comes up somewhat blank on both accounts, rather like the pages of the book Unterweger finally reveals to the audience.