Two operas, written just over two decades apart. The weekend’s double-header at Florentine Opera and Skylight Opera offered a treat for fans of the golden age of opera buffa, but it also demonstrated the perils of staging opera in the 21st Century.
A confession – I’m came to both after recently seeing Peter Sellars’ brilliant staging of Handel’s Hercules at the Chicago Lyric, where he inflected the mythic war story with contemporary images, including a prisoner who sang an aria in full Abu-Ghirab-style prisoner garb (she sang most of the solo with a hood over her head). Sellars is renowned for his innovative ways with theater and opera, finding contemporary resonance in classical settings. In fact, Sellars burst on the scene with his own, now famous, adaptation of Cosi fan Tutti, set in a 1950s seaside diner.
Dimitri Toscas likes playing with classics as well. In 2008, he set a Skylight production of La Traviata in modern times, with Violetta as a pop diva. This time, directing Mozart’s Cosi fan Tutte, he takes the action into the, um, 1950s, in a big-city Chicago that, these days, is hard to distinguish from the “Mad Men”-world of infidelity, booze and gray flannel suits.
It works. Sort of. While the original opera is traditionally staged as a paean to the silly fickleness of women (and thus, ripe for revision), Toscas wants to get at the tensions in the battle of the sexes that emerged at the dawn of the 1960s. The women, thus, are not bamboozled when their fiancés disguise themselves to test their future wives’ fidelity. They catch on immediately, and take the men on a bit of a ride. And they face their own surprises as well, as unforeseen feelings surface. Namely – how do they really feel about their intendeds?
There’s a lot of potential here, but much of it is unrealized because Toscas’ vision seems to fall prey to his comic impulses, which are more Seth MacFarlane than Lorenzo DaPonte. The tension between the purity of noble love and the miasma of deeper urges is a terrific thing to explore on stage (as Shakespeare knew), and there’s a hint of these themes in Toscas’ Cosi. But there’s also an awful lot of silliness, some inspired, which Mozart, of course, would have loved. But some of the jokes and bits turn the story into a free-for-all.
That is, what story we can understand. When Sellars staged his Mozart operas, he did it with DaPonte’s Italian intact. The Skylight prides itself in doing opera in English, which is usually terrific, as the recent productions of Barber of Seville and Marriage of Figaro showed. But these shows used established and well-crafted translations. Toscas’ Cosi doesn’t. It’s written to fit the setting, so we get references to Elvis, bagels, and other 20th century conceits. That’s not the problem, though. The translation sits so clumsily on the music that the trademark Skylight clarity is lost in a mush of misplaced accents and beats. And just plain unmusical language.
Fortunately, the singers make the most of it. Particularly Mark Womack, Peter Clark, and Danielle Hermon Wood. Pasquale Laurino conducted the reduced orchestra with a great energy and finesse. But while this Cosi was often fun to watch and hear, it just didn’t hit home.
* * * *
If there’s an opera that’s ripe for reimagining, it’s Rossini’s L’italiana in Algeri. After all, the Algeri in this story is Algiers, or a generic location that stands for all the crass stereotypes of “the Orient” – harems, scimitars, and bearded, bald buffoons. But Bill Theisen (the Skylight’s Artistic Director making his Florentine debut) instead reveled in the pure old-fashioned-ness of it. And the result was a romp that testified to its own outrageousness. Only a PC-obsessed fool would think that this world has anything to do with the one outside the theater.
Theisen’s world is a candy-colored confection (the sets were imported from that exotic local, the University of Indiana School of Music) that offers one delight after another. His animated staging perfectly matched the frenzied spirit of the music, and his actor-singers were terrific comedians and seemed to have a ball.
Daniela Mack was Isabella, the Italian firebrand kidnapped and taken to Mustafa’s harem – he wants a little ethnic variety, it seems. She’s an impressive mezzo with a burnished tone and the facility to navigate Rossini’s rapid twists and turns. But more importantly, she has a commanding stage presence – there’s never a doubt about who’s in charge. Kevin Glavin (as Mustafa) is a deft comic actor who was in fine voice as well. Joseph Rescigno and the Milwaukee Symphony were pitch perfect – cadence after cadence after cadence.
