The buzz on Broadway may be all about the revival of Hair, but
the San Francisco Conservatory Opera Theatre has brought the Spirit of
the Sixties to life in their staging of Jacques Offenbach's operetta Orpheus in the Underworld.
Offenbach seems to have taken delight in reducing the time-honored
classics of Greek mythology to all-too-human (and therefore usually
ludicrous) situations (as in La belle Hélène).
However, he used the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to take just as much
liberties with music history as with Ancient Greece. Thanks to Claudio
Monteverdi, this myth tends to be associated with the birth of "opera as
we know it;" but Offenbach's primary target is the sober dramatism of
Christoph Willibald Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, which just
happened to be one of the major features of the current season at the
Metropolitan Opera. Considering some of the reviews that the Met
production received, Gluck may have gotten more respect out of
Offenbach's spoofing than he got from Mark Morris' staging for the Met;
but, as I observed in my preview
of this production, San Francisco Conservatory Opera Theatre decided to
take Offenbach's spoofing to the next level by transplanting the world
of Greek mythology in the fertile soil (literally in Act I) of Sixties
San Francisco.
My personal experience has taught me that
operetta works best when you remain faithful to the basic story line and
leave everything else up for grabs. Offenbach's librettists,
Hector-Jonathan Crémieux and Ludovic Halévy baked a delicious cake
lampooning the solemnity of the Greek myths; and director Richard
Harrell restricted his attention to the icing, while leaving the cake
itself intact. That icing included an English translation by Buck Ross
with a good ear for casting outrageous jokes in clever rhymes. (It
should be observed, however, that Ross was content only to suggest the
obvious off-color rhyme for "Venus;" Cole Porter came out and actually wrote
it into a (too) seldom-performed "Parody version" he wrote for the
refrain of "You're the Top!") Then we have the plot line itself, which
reduces both Orpheus and Eurydice to almost negligible significance
while dwelling on the high jinks of the Olympic Pantheon. Jupiter in
particular came off as if he was channeling the Lemur King Julien from Madagascar,
with a little bit of Ricky Ricardo thrown in for good measure. In such
a setting both flower children and stoners were perfectly at home; and
everything came together in that final "Infernal Galop" ("Can-can")
scene, which I shall take over the ritualistic monotony of "Let the Sun
Shine In" any day! As I wrote in my preview,
there are only a few performances remaining between now and Sunday
afternoon at the Cowell Theater; but this bit of operatic adventurism
is definitely a "must see!"
No comments:
Post a Comment