Opera Boston gets bawdy with 'Vie'
"La Vie Parisienne" ("Parisian Life") is not the most famous of Offenbach's operettas, but it may be the naughtiest.
Opera Boston has chosen this relatively unfamiliar work to open its season. Director Rick Lombardo issues a warning. "This is definitely not a family show -- it is quite bawdy. `Parisian Life' is about the life of lust and partying. It is fun, sexy, and colorful. There are two can-can sequences to enjoy watching."
Last year Opera Boston enjoyed a triumph after it hired local theater director Scott Edmiston to stage its production of John Adams's "Nixon in China." So it seemed natural to ask Lombardo, artistic director of the New Repertory Theatre in Newton, to stage "La Vie Parisienne." Lombardo's productions of music-theater pieces such as Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd" and Weill's "Threepenny Opera" have been acclaimed.
"La Vie Parisienne" is his first production for an opera company, but he says "Sweeney Todd" feels like an opera to him.
In the decade after 1858, Offenbach produced a string of witty hits that created a genre and influenced composers in other countries; four or five of them regularly hold the stage to this day. In 1877 he came to America and John Philip Sousa played in his orchestra; in England, Gilbert & Sullivan owed a lot to Offenbach.
He wrote "La Vie Parisienne" in 1866 for the acting company at the Palais-Royal in Paris; most of the vocal demands are tailored to actors, not full-fledged opera singers. The most famous 20th century revival was mounted by Jean-Louis Barrault for his own theater company. Opera Boston went another route, choosing a cast of stage-savvy opera singers.
Lombardo, who has not worked with operatic performers before, says he went into rehearsal with "a certain amount of trepidation about how funny everybody could be. I was afraid I would have to do a lot of coaxing, but I've fallen in love with these people -- everyone is funny, and I haven't felt for a moment that I was directing them any differently from the way I would direct actors."
The cast mingles long-established performers such as baritone Robert Honeysucker, mezzo-soprano Gale Fuller, and tenor Frank Kelley with representatives of the new generation of New England singers such as Aaron Engebreth, Kathryne Jennings, and Charles Blandy.
Fuller may be the best sport among local divas. She can sing as well as most celebrity mezzos when she appears in a starring role, but she also willingly takes on character parts to which she brings a sumptuousness of tone and a spark of personality such roles often lack. As Metella, the greatest courtesan in Paris, Fuller has a leading role that is also a character part.
"In a way," Fuller says with a smile, "Metella represents the dark side. She's been around the track."
Lombardo elaborates. "Metella is the party girl, but she is also wise and soulful. So much of the story is silly and ridiculous, but then Metella comes along. She knows how much fun the life is, but she also knows about the morning after."
In the past, costumers sometimes had to labor to turn the glamorous Fuller into a hag or a nun. The mezzo is happy because this time Nancy Leary designed "glorious gowns" for her. The production moves the action forward about 15 years from the original, which was set during the World Exhibition in 1867. "This enables us to have sexier, sassier costumes for the women," Lombardo says, "with lots of shoulders, lots of decolletage."
The scenic design is by Anita Fuchs, a German-born designer who has studied at Boston University. Carole Charnow, Opera Boston's general director, says Fuchs came in to interview for the job of prop mistress. "When I saw her portfolio, I knew this was the person we were looking for."
The set is a series of "portals" drawn from design elements of the Eiffel Tower. Lombardo was so impressed by Fuchs's work that he signed her for the New Rep's next show, "Permanent Collection." "Her work," he says, "leaps right off the page -- it is a very modern style but also classical."
Not everything has been smooth sailing for the company. It took them a long time to track down the English version of "La Vie Parisienne" that Geoffrey Dunn made for Sadlers Wells in London in the 1960s. "We had been working with a literal translation," Lombardo says. "It was unsingable, unactable, even unsayable."
But when the English stage version arrived, the company discovered that the translator had taken some liberties -- among other things, he had combined two roles into one character; Opera Boston had hired a singer to take a role that wasn't there anymore. But the company managed to get it all straightened out, and to reconstruct the original part.
Lombardo feels the music "elevates" the farcical plot and promises, "The audience will leave humming the tunes." Fuller adds: "When I leave the rehearsals, I am even humming other singers' music."
