 |
|
Though all this ought to be good news for The Merry Widow, the results are more mixed. Though the show, a frothy if rich-bodied offering from 1905 that has all but come to define operetta, boasts plenty of gorgeous compositions from Franz Léhar, it's ultimately an intimate affair that struggles to find its footing in the gigantic house. Yes, this is partially due to lengthy scenes of spoken dialogue, which (unlike the singing) are amplified for easier audience consumption. (Sound designer Mark Grey has done a fine job on that front, for the record.) But more than that, the story and music lack the sky-sweeping ambitions that flourish in big opera venues such as the Met. Because this isn't a big tale, the fervent, if earnest, attempts of everyone involved only make it seem smaller than it actually is. There's little epic appeal, for example, in the main plot, which wonders whether the title character, Hanna Glawari (Fleming), will marry a fellow Pontevedrian, particularly one-time flame Count Danilo Danilovitch (Gunn), and thus let her sizable inheritance be used to bolster the foundering principality. And there's none at all to be found in the secondary concerns of Valencienne (O'Hara), the wife of the Baron (Sir Thomas Allen) who's concocted the scheme for Hanna, as she romances behind the scenes with the much-younger Camille de Rosillon (Alek Shrader)—considerably more than half of their entanglement involves the displacement of a fan on which he wrote to her "I love you." Even given how elaborately muddled and intertwined these issues eventually become, culminating in a glorious counterpoint of confusion at the Act II finale, inflating this without causing it all to burst would not be easy under the best of circumstances. Sams seems to realize this in his libretto (Viktor Léon and Leo Stein wrote the original, based on Henri Meilhac's play L'Attaché d'Ambassade), and goes low where he can—he tries to keep things, if not exactly coarse, then at least common enough that you won't miss the heights you're not experiencing. This plays well enough in some places—particularly the reconfigured third act, set (as in many adaptations) at Maxim's— but it points to an underlying problem of mismatched tone that affects just about everything else.
Much the same is also true of the performers. Fleming and Gunn are largely ideally cast, and share a sumptuous chemistry that keeps you as involved as anything in seeing whether they'll actually manage to get together. And of course their singing is beyond reproach: Their conviction pierces straight to the center of her "Lilja Song," his "Diplomatic Attaché," and their curtain-ringing duet at evening's end (coloqually known as "The Merry Widow Waltz"), and both have an easy way with romance and comedy alike. Even so, though they project a faint aura of wackiness, never seems fully real by the standards of this fantastical world, but instead at odds with it, as though staring at a department store window display. O'Hara sparkles still less—she aims a little too accurately at naturalism—though her voice is easily on par with her colleagues', and Shrader marshals a compelling high tenor but little personality. Only Allen locates and maintains the proper balance, and is a delight throughout, though his role is a small and mostly functionary one; from his perch behind the podium, Davis also succeeds at keeping the spirit correct. Even more readily on display: Crouch, whose backdrop-heavy sets have a lush painted-picture-postcard feel, and Long, working in full glitter-to-gutter mode. Both fare much better in their similar attempts to fashion a single world out of disparate pieces, without sacrificing the raw beauty or natural eccentricity of either side of the argument. They show openly what too many others involved with this version of The Merry Widow forget: that we, like operetta itself, are usually better off when there's not an uncrossable gulf between whimsy and reality.
The Merry Widow
|
