Reviews 2012
Reviews 2012
✭✭✭✩✩
by Johann Strauss, Jr., directed by Christopher Alden
Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto
October 4-November 4, 2012
“Chacun à son goût”
Canadian Opera Company General Director Alexander Neef has clearly been looking through the company’s production history to see which operas that Company has neglected over the years. He must have noticed that Die Fledermaus (1874) by Johann Strauss, Jr., a popular work in opera houses all over the world, has not been produced by the COC since 1991. To repair that omission he commissioned a new COC production from Christopher Alden, who previously directed its Der fliegende Holländer in to great acclaim in 1996 and its controversial Rigoletto of last year.
Operettas are seldom given concept productions to the same degree that operas are mostly because they are thought to be less substantial, less universal and much more of their time. The good news is that Alden disagrees with that view and believes that Strauss’s operetta could not have maintained its popularity this long if it did not touch on something essential in the human condition. Looking at the settings of the three acts – bedroom, ballroom and jail – he sees something fundamental in the natural human desire to experience hedonism to the full followed by an equally natural reaction against excess once the impulse to pleasure has been sated.
To find a more accessible historical analogue for the action, he moves the period from Strauss’s present of 1874 to the late 1920s, just before the stock market crash and the rise of fascism. He turns Dr. Falke of the original into a psychoanalyst so that Falke’s revenge on Gabriel Eisenstein for once having humiliated him becomes Falke’s invitation to Eisenstein and those around him to indulge their libidos and make fools of themselves. Falke is the “Fledermaus” or “bat” of the title since Eisenstein once left him unconscious in a city park still in his bat costume from a masquerade ball, forcing the doctor to make his way home in costume.
The problem with Alden’s approach is that it causes the action to be shaped by two competing forces – the psychological and the politic – whereas in the original it is shaped by only one – Falke’s revenge plan. One could say that Strauss’s operetta has lasted so long, besides its ravishing score, because it adds to the traditional marital infidelity plot the eternal question of appearance and reality. Eisenstein, his wife, her maid and the warden all get invited to a masked ball not by chance but as part of a plan that involves them all.
Alden’s version starts out well enough as long as it adheres to the psychoanalytic aspect. Dominating the stage for all three acts is a giant version of Eisenstein’s musical pocket watch that he uses to attract women. Its swinging suggested both hypnosis and the historical pendulum of Alden’s concept. Falke (Peter Barrett) can control Rosalinde’s waking or sleeping with a snap of his fingers or a ring of his Pavlovian bell.
Unfortunately, as soon as the concept involves the fascist reaction to the excesses of the party, control over the action is confusingly split between Falke and the police. Alden establishes this double perspective early. When Eisenstein (Michael Schade) and Rosalinde (Tamara Wilson) receive their invitations and dream of the coming masked ball, a floor-to-ceiling crack appears in Allen Moyer’s gray set for Rosalinde’s bedroom and colorful party guests from the Act 2 dance in embodying the libidinous freedom the two hope to enjoy. After Eisenstein exits, Rosalinde is gaily frolicking with her lover the tenor Alfred (David Pomeroy) when the police come to take Eisenstein in for his five days in jail that loss of a lawsuit has cost him. In a break with tradition, accompanying the warden Frank (James Westman), Alden has the jailer Frosch (German actor Jan Pohl). Frosch is not the comic drunken jailer we normally first meet in Act 3, but a humorless, protofascist policeman and opponent of Frank. Frank is soon in bed with both Alfred and Rosalinda, apparently more turned on by the man than the woman, while Frosch stands apart looking on with scorn.
In Act 2 we see Falke gleefully stage managing the arrivals and meetings of his guests in order to try to shake the host Prince Orlofsky (Laura Tucker) out of his eternal Russian boredom. Frosch is at the ball, too, gazing in disgust at the majority of the guests, male and female, whom designer Constance Hoffman has clad in witty styles of drag. During the lovely choral piece “Brüderlein und Schwesterlein”, which Falke introduces as a hymn to the belief that all humankind is one big family, Alden has Frosch pointedly walk past exuding menace as if the brotherhood of man were a dream to be crushed. Rather than Frank taking Eisenstein off to jail at the end of Act 2, Alden had Frosch fire his pistol and arrest and incarcerate all the partygoers. Falke’s henchmen tug on Orlofsky’s glittering curtains, instantly changing his palace into a concrete prison.
Alden’s plan to show a turning point in history plus present both the influences of psychoanalysis and fascism leads only to confusion. Linking Falke’s revenge plan to his confronting the characters with their libidinous side works well even if it results only in comic overacting. Falke’s collusion with Frosch to expose Eisenstein’s flirting with the disguised Rosalinde, however, suggests that Frosch is somehow part of Falke’s plot. Conceptually, this makes no sense. Psychoanalysts had to flee fascist Germany and Italy not just because so many were Jewish but because fascists came to view their ideas as decadent. Since Alden chose to bring these subjects up in this operetta, he should discover how they really fit together.
Adding to the confusion of the overall concept is Alden’s often illogical blocking. In general he removes characters from the stage if they have nothing to say or sing even if their silent presence is required. When the disguised Rosalinde’s status as a Hungarian countess is challenged, she says she’ll prove it by singing a Hungarian song, whereupon Alden empties the stage. Shouldn’t the people who challenged her be present to hear her proof? Alden has men turn the curved grand staircase about while Rosalinde is singing her csárdás, but I would prefer seeing how an onstage crowd reacts to her song than having the set pointlessly moved about. In Act 1 Dr. Blind exits first through the front door of the Eisenstein residence, only to reappear later at the back door and then later in the audience. In fact, he is supposed to remain on stage from his first entrance until his final exit. Eisenstein himself exits for no particular reason only to re-enter and sit on the floor before he decides to exit again. Alden has carried his bizarre pillow fetish from Rigoletto over to Die Fledermaus. Even though the party guests have paraded about in couples, when it comes time for the grand waltz of the evening, they each dance pokily alone holding a pillow rather than whirling about in couples as the music clearly calls for.
Fortunately, the music is consistently well sung. Tenor Michael Schade revels in the chance to play comedy and sings with total security and detailed word-highlighting. Soprano Tamara Wilson is certainly his match as a comic actor and effortlessly sustains her final high notes, all except the important one at the end of her Act 2 csárdás. As Adele, Rosalinde’s maid, Ambur Braid, the only principal without a perfect German accent, wins the audience over with the vivacity and accuracy of her coloratura passages. It’s too bad that after the dizzlying flights of the famous “Audition Aria”, Alden has Frosch’s goons pull Adele away so that Braid cannot receive the applause she is due.
Peter Barrett is an authoritative, full-voiced Dr. Falke, cloaked in an aura of mystery (and a pair of bat wings). David Pomeroy shows off his rich tenor in Alfred’s many excerpts of Italian opera. Baritone James Westman steals the show as the sexually ambiguous Frank. As Orlofsky, Laura Tucker has a fine mellow mezzo-soprano and speaks German with a fine Russian accent. She suffers under direction that does not emphasize her important release from boredom into laughter.
Under conductor Johannes Debus the score comes up sparkling, fresh and lean since he consistently emphasizes its satirical over its sentimental qualities. Rosalinde’s csárdás thus comes off as more as a parody of Brahms than an authentic expression of feeling which perfectly suits Rosalinde’s disguise as a counterfeit Hungarian.
During the final “Champagne Song” Alden does not have Rosalinde reconcile with Eisenstein, but instead walk off in dismay. Since the song and Orlofsky’s reprise of “Chacun à son goût” rather contradict Alden’s notion of ending the operetta in repression, Alden has Frosch conveniently disappear to the sidelines. I thought Alden’s production initially intriguing but ultimately unsatisfying. The audience, however, greeted Alden and the creative team with sustained applause and volleys of bravos. “Chacun à son goût” indeed.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review will appear later this year in Opera News.
Photo: Tamara Wilson (in white) with Michael Schade, Ambur Braid and members of the COC Chorus. ©2012 Michael Cooper.
For tickets, visit www.coc.ca.
2012-10-05
Die Fledermaus