This weekend we saw the infrequently performed Le Comte Ory at the Met. So infrequently performed it made its Met debut only in 2011. We were excited to see an opera with music we had most likely never been exposed to before in any form. The singing was top notch across the board. If there were Golden Globes for opera, Juan Diego Florez would definitely be nominated for best performance by a leading man in a comedic role. Pretty Yende was excellent and wildly received by the audience. There was an especially vocal group of Yende admirers somewhere house left in the balconies, but the entire audience went wild for her.
It was a fun, lovely, engrossing and very fast moving evening musically as led by Maurizio Benini. I never felt time drag once. The house was packed as well. And, as I said, the audience was very enthusiastic and vocal. (I seriously may buy Florez’s recording of the opera.)
However why are we seeing the barn stage within a stage conceit here? Le Comte Ory has the exact same production team (Sher/Yeargan) as Elisir, which I loved, and Barber, which I hated. A stage within a stage within a barn with exposed beams and pulleys and ropes and sandbags and a raised platform of unvarnished wood. The similar set up worked in Elisir somehow as the majority of characters are meant to be peasants in a rural town so the exposed barn motif fit for me. There was also far less Meta/deconstructionist theatre convention in Elisir. The Barber staging, as I said, didn’t work for me at all. Enragingly so.
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| Pippin |
Metatheatre can be riveting theatrically when it works: Pippin, Rosenkranz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Marat/Sade, Godspell, even Equus. It’s really effective in Pippin, but it was built into the book, not inflicted on it as a topical afterthought or attempt to be edgy.
I really don’t think it fits here. It can be a wonderful conceit in a smaller space to create different space and setting and movement and depth of meaning but at the Met it just feels like cheating. I am all for trying new theatrical conventions in opera, and I know Bartlett Sher is a highly acclaimed theatre director but perhaps his style just doesn’t translate to such a larger space. And it was distracting. I found myself watching the stagehand roll the bed up and down in Act II and wondered what he was doing there as the actors didn’t acknowledge him and he was standing inches away. As he continued to roll the bed up and down I was concerned it was hard to elevate with three people in it. During the storm I was confused. Was there an actual storm in the story or was the storm a fabrication by Ory to get into the Countess’ bedroom? “Stagehands” were walking around the stage with sheets of metal to make thunder sounds. Are these men working for Ory or are they just a theatrical conceit? If you’re going to go Metatheatre-esque at the Met maybe do it the way Robert LePage did in the Tempest. La Scala cut down the middle, yes exposing gears and the stage workings and shifting the walls of theatrical reality but FILLING THE SPACE AT THE MET. That was visually breathtaking.
But here every thing feels both cramped AND empty. The raised platform on stage forces the performers to move around in clumps on the constrained stage within-a-stage but also the bare bones barn/theatre set creates so much empty space that the performers although grouped together feel smaller and farther away from the audience. Even the beauty of the costumes (designed by Catherine Zuber) seems at odds with the set onstage. They felt intended for a REAL production of the opera.
However, I do think Sher is very good at working with the singers as actors. I watched much of the show through opera glasses from dress circle (I often followed Florez around the stage) and found much of the comedic timing and interactions between the principal singers to be very specific and tight. Even though it was within an ill-defined space. I found this too in Sher’s Elisir. There is much to be said for this specificity of interaction between characters. Too often it is missing in opera.
But the barn motif left me feeling that as much as I enjoyed the music and singing I would love to see the same cast in a real production. The knights’ entrance at the end was jarringly off. What are those knights in armor doing at that Square Dance? It literally felt like a Medieval Times dinner theatre cast had crashed a taping of Hee-Haw. I loved the music and performers but long to see it again with a different production.
-Elizabeth Frayer and Shawn E Milnes
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