L’ELISIR D’AMORE: Fairly entertaining, though the shticks steal the spotlight from the music. |
Boston Lyric Opera has returned to Donizetti’s charming L’elisir d’amore (“The Love Potion”), whose hit tenor aria, “Una furtiva lagrima” (“A secret tear”), Pavarotti sang so feelingly. The new production (at the Shubert Theatre through March 25), a joint venture with Opera Colorado, is set in “Town Green USA, early 1900s.” Characters are dressed (by Martin Pakledinaz) as if they’d stepped out of Grant Wood or Thomas Hart Benton. Everything takes place in and around a park bandstand (brightly designed by Allen Moyer, with Paul Palazzo’s lighting working hard to save it from monotony). There’s some disconnect between all this Americana and people singing in Italian — as if we were in the Italian section of Town Green. I’m not a fan of opera in translation; Donizetti’s music is innately Italian. But this “concept” might have worked better in English. Opening night, a football rolled into the pit and lighting and chorus cues were missed. Still, this is a slick and fairly entertaining enterprise.Stage director James Robinson, who did BLO’s Eugene Onegin (in which the naive Tatiana imagines she’s in bed with Onegin during her famous letter aria) and Abduction from the Seraglio, maintains his bad habit of letting his shticks steal the spotlight from the music. The hapless Nemorino is here an ice-cream vendor. During his first duet with Adina — the girl he loves, even though she’s so much more sophisticated — Robinson has him make a sundae while Adina is singing. Her music is lovely, but our attention is on the ice cream. Robinson’s last joke is his lamest — this sentence is funnier than what Nemorino writes so painstakingly on his ice-cream sign.
And Robinson’s characters aren’t consistent. Soprano Maria Kanyova (Tatiana in Robinson’s Onegin) conveys Adina’s intelligence and irony. But if she really cares for Nemorino, why does she dismiss him so unreservedly? Her later jealousy when her girlfriends suddenly find Nemorino attractive (they’ve learned he’s inherited a fortune) comes out of nowhere. And though Nemorino is a lovable booby, in his drunk scene, Met tenor Eric Cutler breaks into a series of dances (a two-step, a Charleston, even a vaudeville time step with a cane) that turn him into the Music Man. Character, schmaracter — why not go for a few easy laughs?
Kanyova has stage savvy and a more than serviceably pretty though not especially glamorous voice with dicy high notes. Baritone James Westman as Nemorino’s rival, the blowhard sergeant Belcore, and bass Dale Travis as the quack doctor Dulcamara (whose love potion is a bottle of rotgut) give amusing if generic performances. Young soprano Ji Young Yang, as a peasant girl, can probably sing a high Z, though she’s relentlessly arch. The excellent chorus is also full of characters.
The best voice is Cutler’s healthy, ringing, and agile tenor, and he’s acquired a new freedom on stage. The opening-night audience gave his “Una furtive lagrima” a big hand, though it lacked the long seamless line and imaginative phrasing that makes Nemorino’s amazement at learning he’s loved both comic and heartbreaking. Cutler seemed to be singing syllables. Ronald Haroutunian’s haunting introductory bassoon solo got it exactly right.
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