Opera Boston gives new life to 'The Consul'
Since the triumphant premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti's ''The Consul" on Broadway in 1950, the opera has been repeatedly staged all over the world. In Opera Boston's adventurous season, it stands as the old fashioned repertory piece, and the company did pretty well by it last night.
''The Consul" is made stageworthy by craftsmanship, practicality, and topicality rather than real dramatic and musical distinction. It tells a resonant story; Menotti took his plot from a newspaper clipping about a woman in Central Europe after World War II who took her own life after failing to get a visa to join her husband in the West. There is no chorus and the orchestra is small; there are only two simple sets, and 11 singing parts -- and everybody gets something interesting to do.
The language of the libretto is overheated and the music is, well, promiscuous, borrowing freely from Mussorgsky, Puccini, Richard Strauss, and other composers of better operas than this. The piece does have some modern touches -- it opens with a recorded nightclub song (sung in perpetuity by the great cabaret singer Mabel Mercer) and closes with a ringing telephone. There are some surrealistic waltzy dream sequences; paradoxically in them real human feelings appear, while they are banished from the bleak waiting room at the nameless consulate. The score does boast a pretty trio and a skillful quintet, and a showstopping aria for the heroine, Magda Sorel, stonewalled by bureaucracy, hurling useless papers into the air, as she sings majestically of a better world to come.
The production paid tribute to a much-admired local soprano, Joanna Porackova, who enjoyed a great success in this role with Washington (D.C.) Opera in 2001. Last night Porackova gave her all, singing with consistent passion, power, and involvement, although tiring in the climaxes. A handsome presence, a little like Faye Dunaway, she's a somewhat florid actress who communicates enthusiastic belief in everything she's doing.
Anton Belov's ringing baritone served the role of Magda's freedom-fighting husband well; baritone Nikolas Sean-Paul Nackley did nicely in the part of a member of the resistance. Daniel Cole exuded menace as the Secret Agent. David Kravitz, Patrice Tiedemann, Victoria Avetisyan, and Laura Choi Stuart offered well-sung cameos as the victims of the waiting room. As The Magician, Frank Kelley's hands were quicker than the eye, and he sang, acted, and danced his semi-symbolic part with expertise. Mary Ann Stewart sang confidently as the apparently heartless secretary, but acted without imagination -- the part is more interesting if we see that efficiency is the secretary's shield against the horrors she must hear about every day. Stewart also seemed unfamiliar with how telephones and typewriters operated 60 years ago. Marion Dry, returning to the role of the Mother, which she sang here 24 years ago, barely out of school, offered sympathy and appealing contralto tone. Conductor Gil Rose drew a committed, secure performance from cast and orchestra.
Cameron Anderson's sets were basic but showed imagination, especially in the Consul's office, with its huge filing cabinets beneath a glimpse of an imperial eagle, and Nancy Leary's costumes nailed period and character. Daniel Gidron's direction brought a wonderful sequence at the end: as Magda commits suicide, above her, in high windows, the other characters begin the dance of death -- they look like flickering frames in a movie. In the rest of the piece Gidron's traditional, serviceable work looked like a black-and-white film noir with B-movie actors. It worked because that's what the music sounds like.
