ROMP WITH ROSSINI
L’italiana in Algeri offers laughs for troubled times
If you are overdue for a deep, hearty laugh that lifts a weight from your shoulders and reassures you that life is absurd, Santa Fe Opera is here to help. The company’s production of Rossini’s opera buffa L’italiana in Algeri (The Italian Girl in Algiers) is just the tonic in troubled times.
This is a revival of a delightful production the late, much-missed Edward Hastings created here in 2002. In the years since it has been mounted by 15 other companies around the United States and Canada, making it the most widely traveled of all Santa Fe Opera productions. Now it returns to its home stage, overseen and judiciously updated by director Shawna Lucey.
The ingenious sets (designed by Robert Innes Hopkins like a huge pop-up book that toggles between locations), the parade of colorful costumes (by David C. Woolard), and lighting (by Duane Schuler) that helps guide the eye where it needs to be are every bit as ingratiating as we remembered them. At times they conspire to suggest a color comic strip come alive.
Updating the action from circa 1805 to circa 1920 offers beguiling opportunities without detracting from the logic of the plot — if we can even speak of this as a logical plot. Instead of being captured after a shipwreck along the Algerian coast, heroine Isabella is now a daring aviatrix who has crash-landed her biplane while racing from Italy to rescue her boyfriend, Lindoro, from the clutches of Mustafà, the Bey of Algiers. A surfeit of silliness ensues. It’s the sort of thing that might have happened if the Marx Brothers had hijacked Casablanca.
Lucey and her cast hit the sweet spot when it comes to interpreting operatic comedy. The action is peppered with clever sight-gags without resorting to clichéd pratfalls and spit-takes. All of these ridiculous characters actually seem to take themselves seriously, which makes them inherently funny. Rossini doesn’t stint in arming his singers with vocal effects that stir risibility, but the performers seize those opportunities without presenting them like parodies. Every singer in the cast is up to the demands of the composer, who assumed that opera singers would be trained to a fare-thee-well in the exacting techniques of bel canto.
Mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack, as Isabella, took control of the action like a glamorous but fearless protagonist sprung from a period photo-play. Rossini cruelly placed her most famous aria, “Cruda sorte,” right at her entrance; and, in the event, Mack sounded a bit uneasy there before settling in for mostly splendid singing as the evening proceeded.
Her rapid-fire coloratura was usually stunning, especially at the top and bottom of her range, where the tone behind the fireworks projected most forcefully. A highpoint of the evening — but there were so many — was her spot-on rendition of the scintillating Act Two aria “Pensa a la Patria,” effectively an opera seria aria in which she encourages Italian patriotism among her countrymen, pausing along the way to cast insults at a cohort who annoys her.
Scott Conner, as her nemesis Mustafà, was not the oft-encountered thumping basso who merely infuses the part with bluster. Instead, he proved a lighter, more elegant bass singer with a voice both resonant and agile. He was a laughably vain autocrat. I would have been just as happy if Lucey had not taken pains to underscore comparisons with present-day overlords, but at least she was ecumenical: On one hand, this Mustafà bares his chest (in a way) and poses over a tiger he has shot, while on the other he revels in seeing his name adorn the palace and busies himself typing telegrams that are revealed to be tweets. (OK, it really was funny; but can we not have a night off from current cares?)
Baritone Craig Verm, as his overtaxed henchman Haly, suavely rendered his Mozartian aria “Le femmine d’Italia,” but he also proved a valuable ensemble player, the more so since his timbre approached Conner’s with uncanny similarity.
Jack Swanson was a sweet, earnest Lindoro, sporting a light and lovely, high-flying tenor, rock solid in rhythm, spitfire in patter, and unfazed in the face of relentless coloratura. If I am not mistaken, that was a high C he interpolated into his aria “Ah come il cor di giubilo.” He is the real deal for a Rossini role such as this, and I don’t doubt that opera-lovers will be hearing more of him.
Patrick Carfizzi brought a droll bearing and a sonorous, well-modulated, Italianate baritone to his portrayal of Isabella’s sidekick Taddeo. His is a voice of serious heft that could easily fill a house larger than our own. Soprano Stacey Geyer was pure-voiced and expressive as Elvira, Mustafà’s long-suffering wife (soon to be ex-wife, if he gets his way), and mezzo-soprano Suzanne Hendrix added to the high spirits as her vampish confidante Zulma.
The production reminded listeners of how valuable the Apprentice Program is to the company. Geyer is a current member of the program, and Swanson, Carfizzi, Verm, and Hendrix all polished their skills as apprentices in years past, as did director Lucey. Current apprentice singers also make up the company’s excellent chorus, prepared by Susanne Sheston, which added considerably to the general hilarity.
Several instrumentalists deserve special praise for their obbligato contributions, particularly flutist Bart Feller and horn-player Kelly Cornell. Corrado Rovaris kept things moving at a quick clip in the pit, sometimes leaving the singers struggling to keep up with the orchestra but even then adding to the breathless urgency of the preposterous proceedings.