An Ancient ‘Daniel’ Given a ‘50s Sensibility

“Daniel and the Lions,” a liturgical play from the 13th century, is a work of considerable historical interest: It is from works like this that our sense of musical theater emerged.

But in some ways, its modern history is even more interesting than its place in music history, as curiously was indicated in a production by the Ensemble for Early Music on Saturday afternoon in the glorious gothic interior of the Immanuel Presbyterian Church on Wilshire Boulevard--another good idea in the Da Camera Society’s Chamber Music in Historic Sites series.

The curious part is that this “Daniel and the Lions” felt dated not in the sense that this is an ancient art, remote from us because of its monophonic musical style and its language of medieval Latin. Old music performed in what we suspect is the old way has been a regular part of the modern musical landscape for some time, and the popularity of Gregorian chant in the last couple of years has made it even more so. So “Daniel” hardly sounds foreign.

The quaint production seemed dated not because it enacted a medieval sensibility, but rather because it revealed a 1950s sensibility--in the same way, say, that Cecil B. DeMille’s epic “The Crusades” feels dated from the 1930s, not from nine centuries earlier.

And in fact this production of “Daniel” is a direct descendant of the 1950s, when Noah Greenburg staged it (then known as “The Play of Daniel”) with his groundbreaking Pro Musica Antiqua. Twenty-two years ago, Frederick Renz, with his Ensemble for Early Music, took up where Greenburg left off.

Our more “modern” thinking about early music has evolved differently. Progressive proponents of early music have found that an “authentic” way to present early drama can be with highly innovative modern stagings, since the drama never was meant to seem quaint to its audiences.

Still, Renz has made his “Daniel” a specialty and taken his production around the world. The story is a good one, reminding us of the courts of Belshazzar and Darius and of Daniel being thrown to lions for his wise selfless prophesies, and with the intervention of an angel to turn lion into pussy cat.

The lion is the hit of the show, a wonderful effect produced by three separate operators (one for a large wooden lion head, one for each of the paws). But all those processionals are stiff, the costumes are predictable, and the acting is wooden, even though that may be meant to convey the stylized dramatic approach taken in the medieval times.

Of course, there is a certain charm in such lack of slickness. But again, it is the charm more of remembering the 1950s than of returning to the 1250s.

Musically, the performance and the scholarship behind it seemed OK but no better. The instruments sounded colorful but were played without much flair. And of the singers, only Philip Anderson, as Daniel, seemed to have both the flexibility of voice and the dramatic surety to appear at ease.

One could take a different kind of delight in the countertenor Marshall Coid, partly for his campy transvestism as Belshazzar’s queen (the only hip thing in the production, although basically by accident, since historically men sang women’s roles) but also because he best pointed out the archaism of the whole enterprise, since he happens to be an avant-garde violinist, a composer and a TV sitcom actor, all of which he does a lot more naturally than he sings old music.