LO SPEZIALE

Hybernia Theater

March 14

Drugs at this apothecary do more than cure headaches.

The glorious mess that swirled around the revolving stage at the Hybernia Theater on Monday night was a Czech classic, an earthy contemporary take on an 18th-century opera buffa. Though it was presented as the penultimate offering in the Opera 2011 festival, it would have been more accurately billed as a theater piece based on Joseph Haydn’s Lo Speziale (Lékárník in Czech, The Apothecary in English).

The opera is a frothy romantic comedy about the wooing of Grilletta, a young woman in the care of Sempronio, the aging owner of an Italian apothecary. He is competing with Mengone, his shop assistant, and Volpino, a wealthy customer, for her affections. Grilletta favors Mengone, but needs three acts of flirting, cajoling and manipulating – all set to incredibly beautiful music – to get the clumsy young clerk to the altar.

The National Theater Brno’s production moves the setting to a contemporary lékárník, with a very clever giant Ibuprofen package as a backdrop. The mischief that unfolds in the shop is also strikingly modern: drug abuse, sex on the floor, even an implied spanking. Adding to the contemporary gloss, a series of Czech subtitles provides not a literal translation but a running commentary on the action, with references to pop culture icons such as the Internet, marijuana, Tiger Woods and “Affleck and Lopez.” At one stormy point, the words disappear entirely and the screen shows a series of lightning bolts.

Worse for non-natives, the opera is given a Czech wrapper. It opens at a Czech train station, where Grilletta, recast as a Bohemian naif, departs for Italy. After she arrives, she sets up a suitcase and a teddy bear at the front of the stage, which she returns to periodically for extended Czech-language monologues. These got the only laughs of the evening, suggesting that more than the setting of the original opera was lost in translation.

The production has inspired moments. In the first act, prompted by Mengone, Volpino pops some pills and begins to hallucinate, seeing customers with giant heads. He then drifts into an extended dream sequence in which Grilletta is kidnapped and he goes to her rescue, a surreal ballet that is great fun to watch – once you figure out what’s happening. Like much of the extraneous action constantly bustling around the singers, it can be more confusing than entertaining, especially with the stage itself spinning in circles most of the night.

Good voices might have saved this, or at least made it respectable. But the singers were so weak that Ondrej Šaling (Mengone) had to sing-speak his way through one aria rather than sing it outright, because he obviously couldn’t hit the high notes. The women were better. Soprano Tereza Merklová Kyzlinková turned in some sweet, lilting passages as Grilletta, and mezzo-soprano Andrea Priechodská brought a honey voice and smart acting chops to the trouser role of Volpino.

Under the baton of Ondrej Olos, the music was flat, which was a shame. Played on its own by a better ensemble, the enchanting score for Lo Speziale would stand with almost anything Haydn wrote during his formative years in the Esterházy court. But the music takes a back seat in this production – deliberately, it seems, to keep the focus primarily on the sex and drug shenanigans and whirling, high-gloss set.

As a stage production, Lo Speziale is bursting with energy and imagination, and apparently no small amount of Czech wit. All of which makes it a poor fit with a light period comedy buoyed by radiant classical music. Separately, the production and the opera have their own beguiling strengths and charms. Together, they’re like a train wreck, a spectacular and mesmerizing collision of wildly conflicting elements that generates a lot of flash and dazzle before ultimately collapsing under its own weight.

For a look at Lékárník: http://www.ndbrno.cz/opera/lekarnik-en?highlightWords=Lékárník

KEEPING IT SURREAL

Estates Theater

March 10

March 8

Lust on the loose in a landscape of the mind.

There was every reason not to expect much from last night’s performance of Edgar. The opera, Puccini’s second, is considered an inferior early work, interesting only as a precursor to later successes like La bohème and Tosca. And the production came from the F.X. Šaldy Theater in Liberec, another of the minor-league companies participating in the Opera 2011 festival.

But that’s the beauty of the festival – you never know when you’ll discover a hidden gem. Edgar not only held its own as entertaining opera, but showed how even the flimsiest material can become something special in capable hands.

Based on a lyric poem by French author Alfred de Musset, Edgar tells the story of a man torn between two loves: Fidelia, a virtuous village girl, and Tigrana, a fiery gypsy temptress à la Carmen. Fidelia’s brother Frank also longs for Tigrana, setting in motion a series of romantic complications that end in tragedy. The opera is essentially a melodrama played out by cardboard characters, set to overwrought music with plenty of emotional impact but no finesse.

Or so it seems. Digging beneath the surface, director Martin Otava found something darker and more compelling – a Freudian drama of a man whose id, ego and superego are at war. Tigrana leers and storms about the stage as pure lust, the basest emotions unleashed; Frank, after a knife fight with Edgar, becomes the voice of reason and higher intelligence; and Fidelia is the ideal in between, the balance point between rational and irrational. In that framework, the cardboard characters make perfect sense – as symbols or stereotypes, not flesh-and-blood creations.

The set was a landscape of the mind, a collision of oddly angled columns, walls and steps with stark elements like a single blossoming tree. Clearly inspired by the work of Josef Svoboda, it neatly blended surreal and abstract elements, and made bold use of contrasting colors – hot red for Tigrana, virginal white for Fidelia, and all-black or all-white costumes for the chorus/villagers that might have been designed by Dali. With a background screen changing colors to match or contrast the action in the foreground, the overall effect was like being in a dream.

That sensation was reinforced by the music, which runs at a fever-high emotional pitch for most of the opera. On a literal level, it seems ridiculously overheated, at times bordering on bombastic. But as a soundtrack for a psychodrama, it’s perfect.

And the singers were outstanding. Lívía Obručnik-Vénosová (Fidelia) and Kateřina Jalovcová (Tigrana), both regulars on the State Opera and National Theater stages in Prague, gave bravura performances. Obručnik-Vénosová’s crystalline soprano was an ideal fit for her role, and heartbreakingly beautiful in the final act. Jalovcová’s smoky mezzo was threatening from the moment she walked onstage. Tenor Rafael Alvarez (Edgar), born and trained in Mexico, and baritone Anatolij Orel (Frank), born in the Ukraine and trained in Kiev, provided solid counterpoints.

Last night’s performance was also a reminder that, while Edgar may not get much respect, it offers a great primer on Puccini, with clear musical indications of what lies ahead. In fact, during rewrites of the original score, the composer took out sections and used them later in Tosca. And the funeral march in Act III of Edgar was good enough to be played at Puccini’s real-life funeral in 1924, with Arturo Toscanini conducting. Besides, how can you not love an opera that features not one, but two murders in the final minute?

On Tuesday, the Silesian Theatre of Opava brought its production of Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila to the same stage, with less satisfying results. After a promising grand opera-style opening with a chorus of Israelites pleading for deliverance beneath a giant flaming Star of David, the performance slowed and sagged under the weight of weak direction and choreography – the latter a serious detriment in an opera that features two major dance sequences, including the famous bacchanal in the third act.

Kisun Kim and Ilona Kaplová turned in heroic singing efforts in the title roles, but the real musical star of the evening was conductor Damiano Binetti, who drew fine textures and colors from the orchestra, and did an impressive job of following the singers when they needed a moment or two’s grace. The chorus was also notably good in a work whose spine is complex choral passages. And how can you not enjoy an opera that ends with the hero literally bringing down the house?

For a closer look at the F.X. Šaldy production of Edgar: http://www.saldovo-divadlo.cz/programme/f-x-salda-theatre/performance_id/196/

For more on Samson et Dalila (in Czech): http://www.divadlo-opava.cz/repertoar/predstaveni/charles-camille-saint-saens-samson-a-dalila/