A valiant, vibrant ‘Hamlet’
Shakespeare, being Shakespeare, defies most attempts at operatic adaptation. Anyone coming at the Bard with music paper in hand had better be Verdi, and even he backed down at the prospect of turning “King Lear” into an opera.
Still, there are ways to finesse the issue, and Ambroise Thomas’ 1868 French opera “Hamlet” — now playing in a handsomely imagined and vibrantly sung production at West Edge Opera — offers a fine example. Like similar undertakings by Rossini and Donizetti, Thomas’ “Hamlet” takes the dramatic elements it needs from the source and jettisons the rest.
In this case, that means making sure there are bravura vocal opportunities for the two leads, as well as an array of smaller roles with plenty to do, some orchestral and balletic pomp, and a happy or tragic ending depending on how you feel like staging it. The result isn’t Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” nor, to garble T.S. Eliot’s line, was it meant to be, but it amounts to a stirring and often vivid summation of the Parisian operatic style of the period.
Direct comparisons, in other words, are largely beside the point. If Thomas hadn’t included a short (and feeble) setting of the “To be or not to be” soliloquy right after intermission, I doubt anyone would have blinked an eye.
Certainly the performance of “Hamlet” I witnessed on Sunday, Aug. 13, at the Pacific Pipe warehouse in Oakland — the second installment in a three-performance run as part of the company’s summer season —
exemplified a similar sort of whatever-works pragmatism. Music Director Jonathan Khuner adapted Thomas’ lush orchestral score to chamber size without any loss of grandeur, and conducted a performance marked by a blend of imposing heft and expressive clarity.
Director Aria Umezawa talked tough in defense of the opera in her program note, but it wasn’t clear that she had detected any kind of coherent theatrical through-line in the piece. The setting was vaguely futuristic or dystopian, with Maggie Whitaker’s costumes setting the chorus in gray-and-black hoodies and welder’s visors, and Jean-François Revon, the workhorse set designer behind all three of the summer’s productions, created an ingenious array of canvas-like geometrical panels to render Elsinore like some kind of shadowy painter’s garret.
What the production had in place of a unified vision was a series of imaginatively staged individual scenes, including a few quietly effective shadowpuppetry sequences (one for the appearance of Hamlet’s father’s ghost, another for the play-within-a-play), a fiery showdown between Hamlet and Gertrude, and especially an account of Ophelia’s mad-scene-cum-suicide that was stunning in its theatrical inventiveness.
Ophelia may not be the title character, but she’s a doomed woman in a 19th century opera, so you just know the composer’s attention is focused on her above all. Soprano Emma McNairy, who has become the company’s matinee star after last summer’s turn in Thomas Adès’ “Powder Her Face” and her dazzling “Lulu” of the previous season, notched one more glorious addition to her catalog, adorning her Act 1 love duet with Hamlet with little sprays of perfectly placed coloratura and infusing the character’s final scene with unquenchable dramatic potency.
Baritone Edward Nelson, sashaying sullenly around the stage, sang the title role with grace, expressive power and a range of vocal color, but there was a certain dramatic blankness about his performance that didn’t dissipate even when he was stirred to action.
There were more ferocious contributions from the great Susanne Mentzer in a no-holdsbarred performance as Gertrude — luxury casting if ever there was — and the redoubtable bass Philip Skinner as Claudius; the duet between these two, a haunting pas de deux of guilt, recrimination and graveyard-whistling, was a high point of the performance.
In smaller roles, tenor Daniel Curran was a bright-toned Laertes, Kenneth Kellogg an ominous ghost and Paul Cheak a winningly garrulous Polonius. The chorus, largely drawn from the ranks of Volti, sang with wondrous alacrity.
“Hamlet” gets a bad rap from observers who too glibly measure it against its illustrious source (I have been guilty of this myself, when the San Francisco Opera performed the piece in 1996). But the West Edge production strikes a valiant blow in defense of the always-wise principle of taking a work on its own terms.