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 Mérimée'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.