Die lustige Witwe is set in Paris, where the delegation from the mythical Slavic nation of Pontevedro (the inspiration was the not-so-mythical Montenegro) are in a panic that newly widowed Hanna Glawari, who had wed Pontevedro’s richest banker, will take her 20 million out of the country by marrying one of her many Parisian suitors. The diplomatic solution: get handsome eligible Count Danilo to propose to her. Indeed, Danilo has already proposed to her once, back home, but his uncle forbade the match because Hanna was a commoner — whereupon she snagged the banker. Now they’re both on their high horse, he because she married for money (and he has too much pride to propose to that money), she because he didn’t stand up to his uncle. Baron Zeta, who’s the Pontevedran ambassador to Paris (Danilo is his secretary), has other problems: he suspects it’s his wife, Valencienne, who lost the fan with the incriminating “I love you” written on it. His suspicions are correct, and though Valencienne is trying to give up her lover, young Parisian nobleman Camille, she’s not having much success.
The bottom line for any Merry Widow is an engaging Hanna and Danilo, and Teatro Lirico had that in German soprano Christin Molnár and Bulgarian tenor Orlin Goranov, she throwing out bubbly hints of Beverly Sills, he working the audience with easy charm, his voice breaking with emotion as he recalled the delectable grisettes at Maxim’s. At their first meeting, she recognized him by his snoring and he her by the feel of her ankle (no Moral Majority in Pontevedro, it would seem), and they teased each other mercilessly, but the tension between them dropped after the first act, and their “Mädel/Reiter” duet was cut. Platinum-tressed Bulgarian soprano Snejana Dramcheva played Valencienne as a garish Charo; she hardly looked at Camille, and when she wasn’t vamping the audience, she was mugging (“Oh my God, it’s my husband, he’s going to find out!!!”). She was much more in character in the third act, where Valencienne joins the grisettes. (This makes no sense for the wife of the ambassador, but it’s Lehár’s doing, not Teatro Lirico’s, and anyway you don’t go to operetta for the plot.) As Camille, Paul Horman (surname subsequently provided by the company) was attractively boyish, but he was stiff and ill suited to Dramcheva and had little voice: his “Rosenknospen” (“Rosebud”) aria was barely audible.
The comedy from Baron Zeta, Njegus, and Hanna’s Parisian suitors was very broad (complete with gratuitous “local” Starbucks references); the men’s “Weiber” (“Girls, girls, girls, girls”) chorus was energetic if a little ragged in its choreography. The single set — a kind of French-window ballroom backdrop — was shabby; when Danilo plopped down on a red velvet settee, clouds of dust rose. The singing was generally good, but the orchestra under Krassimir Topolov was often too loud, and at times, as when Valencienne and Camille entered the pavilion, the strings went flat. Worst were the two — yes, just two — third-act grisettes, the same ancient-and-anorectic-looking duo who’d appeared in act one as Parisian ladies and in act two (wearing the same Parisian clothes) as Pontevedran folk dancers, their best dancing days well behind them.
But then the waltz — the waltz, “The Merry Widow Waltz” — starts swirling, and Hanna and Danilo swirl with it (the orchestra just right here), their “Lippen schweigen” (“Lips are silent”) reminding us that music says what words can’t. The “Weiber” chorus is reprised, and as everyone dances about and good feeling floods the house, you’re reminded that though it isn’t impossible to mess up Lehár’s masterpiece, it’s damned hard.
