One Sings, the Other Doesn't

By Michael Walsh

Two daring directors offer novel views of Shakespeare and Puccini

In Shakespeare's day, the play may have been the thing. Not any more. Today, especially in Europe, no self-respecting stage or opera director would think of missing an opportunity to reevaluate, re-interpret or otherwise revise even the most pedigreed plays and operas. Bizet's Carmen cut to four singers and 82 minutes to recapture the gritty spirit of Merimee's novella? Peter Brook undertook the radical surgery three years ago in Paris. Berg's Wozzeck set in a 19th century insane asylum? That was Hans Neugebauer and Achim Freyer's novel perspective in a Cologne production revived last season. Maxim Gorky's Summer Folk implausibly wed to a selection of Gershwin songs and renamed Hang On to Me? Peter Sellars performed the ceremony in May at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

Sometimes the experiments achieve their goal of revitalizing familiar works; other times they are merely self-indulgent displays of temperament. But, win or lose, the director as hero has emerged as the most powerful force in the theater today. At the Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles this month, two repertory staples got the full treatment: the Piccolo Teatro di Milano presented a visionary version of Shakespeare's The Tempest in Italian, directed by Giorgio Strehler, while London's Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in its U.S. debut offered the premiere of Andrei Serban's wrongheaded setting of Puccini's Turandot.

Many things can go wrong with a new opera production, and most of them did with the Royal's Turandot. The casting, for instance. In the title role, veteran Soprano Gwyneth Jones still has a preternaturally loud voice, but her control over it has long since departed, and her wobbly singing is now merely painfully impressive. Tenor Placido Domingo is one of the finest of operatic actors, but even his persuasive characterization of Calaf, the unknown prince who overcomes the ice princess's sexual misanthropy, could not disguise the fact that the part lies uncomfortably high for him. In the pit, Conductor Cohn Davis, leading the opera for the first time, delivered a limp, unidiomatic account of the score that reduced its most thrilling moments to polenta.

Indeed, about the only thing that could have saved this Turandot was an effective stage concept. But Serban, 41, the Rumanian-born theater director, who last season at the New York City Opera was responsible for a muddled, pseudo-avant-garde interpretation of Handel's Alcina, could never arrive at a consistent point of view. He crudely combined elements as disparate as Greek drama, Brechtian alienation (bare spotlights, plainly visible to the audience, illuminated the unit set) and--oddly in an opera that takes place in mythical China--conventions from the Japanese Kabuki and Noh theaters. Smaller details were just as mystifying. When the chorus pleaded for the moon to rise in the first act, it instead descended into what appeared to be an unlikely cross between a Chinese coachyard and the interior of the Globe Theater. And at the opera's conclusion, while Turandot and Calaf sang their love duet, Serban wheeled on the corpse of Liu aboard a bier, needlessly embellishing the point that Turandot is a Darwinianly brutal piece of work. Serban has been praised for his bold ideas in such plays as Chekhov's The Three Sisters in Cambridge, Mass., and Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro in Minneapolis, but so far opera has not proved to be his metier.

By contrast, Strehler's La Tempesta, which goes to the Center for the Arts at the State University of New York, Purchase, this week, is a model of its kind, a meditation on artifice and reality that posits the magician Prospero (Tino Carraro) as a director whose powers seem supernatural only to his innocent daughter Miranda (Fabiana Udenio) and his fellow characters. The sexless sprite Ariel flies suspended from a deliberately evident pulley; like some monstrous, crabbed spider, Caliban emerges from an undisguised trap door. When, at the end of the play, Prospero's charms are all o'erthrown, the simple set shatters, and Ariel, freed, runs into the audience and away.

Strehler, 62, a co-founder of the Piccolo Teatro and a highly regarded opera director whose credits include Verdi and Mozart at La Scala, Paris and Salzburg, achieves several coups: in the opening storm, violent crashes of thunder and the roaring of waves accompany his stunning use of billowing fabric and collapsing spars to create a vivid picture of a ship's foundering; later, when Ariel is transformed into a screeching harpy who terrorizes King Alonso and his courtiers, the stage suddenly blackens, obscuring everything but the hovering spirit and the tantalizing banquet that torments the starving men. Else where, a weak sun, low on the horizon, struggles to burn through a stubborn mist, and wan, lonely music (by Fiorenzo Carpi) moodily conjures up the desolation of the enchanted island.

Like Serban, Strehler introduces anachronisms into his production -- the commedia dell'arte for the comic duo of Trinculo and Stephano, for example, and a hint of Peking opera mannerism for Ariel -- but they effectively underscore the contrasts between the spirit and human worlds, making the confrontation even more pointed. This is a Tempest of clarity, strength and purpose -- exactly what was lacking in the Royal Opera's Turandot. The cross-cultural irony is inescapable: the English company presenting the Italian opera had failed, but the Italians staging an English classic had made a glorious success.

-- By Michael Walsh