Reviews 2010
Reviews 2010
✭✭✩✩✩
by Giuseppe Verdi, directed by Paul Curran
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
February 3-28, 2010
The COC’s current production of Verdi’s Otello is a major disappointment. Helmed by Paul Curran, who directed the COC’s thrilling Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk and starring Clifton Forbis, who sang Siegmund in the COC’s magnificent Ring cycle, one expected great things. Instead, the production is “grand” in all the wrong ways and, what is worse, emotionally uninvolving.
The design, direction and conducting all compete as the root cause of this debacle. Paul Edwards’ set features a large pile of rubble throughout that inhibits the stage movement of the chorus and, distractingly, is still there in Desdemona’s bedroom. Edwards’ Renaissance costumes, all in deep red, for the Venetian court in Act 3 along with an improbably large golden statue of a lion are meant to overwhelm us with their opulence, but to no narrative purpose. They are simply effects for the sake of effects. Unlike the others, Desdemona’s wardrobe bizarrely comes from the 1960s, with one unflattering outfit after the next including a baby doll top and a sleeveless gold lamé gown. When she goes to sleep before her murder, a huge cross forms in the distance behind her bed--a Symbol with a capital S--but why? As in King Lear, evil triumphs here, not good.
Curran’s direction is surprisingly old-fashioned. The chorus moves from one decorative pose to another and the principals sing directly to the audience not to each other. It’s no wonder then that none of the characters’ relationships is well established. Many consider Otello as Verdi’s greatest opera, but you would never know it from Paolo Olmi’s unnuanced conducting. Passages are either very soft or very loud with nothing in between.
All this would undermine the work of any cast. Clifton Forbis has an enormous voice but brusquely barks out Otello for the first two acts as if it were Wagner not Verdi. Tiziana Caruso’s voice is huge but beautiful and she is capable of lovely shading and detail in ways Forbis never attempts. Scott Hendricks makes a superior Iago, glorying at every success of his evil plot. If only Forbis’ acting moved beyond the generic, we might care about the downfall of a great man. The COC last staged Otello in 2000. Let’s hope the company can rise to the challenge of this great work before another decade is over.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review appeared in Eye Weekly 2010-02-05.
Photo: Tiziana Caruso and Clifton Forbis. ©Michael Cooper.
2010-02-05
Otello