Opera Company's 'Cinderella' (1st review)

The Three Stooges wept, or:
Opera as three-ring circus

DAN ROTTENBERG

Rossini’s Cinderella was first performed in 1817, when opera was a cutting-edge art form and the European folk tale of the sweet but abused stepsister was already more than a century old. Rossini pumped new life into an uplifting but familiar story by converting it to a farce, with farce-worthy music to boot: In Rossini’s version, the ugly stepsisters are not so much nasty as ridiculous. A century and a half later, Walt Disney added the notion of addlebrained, pot-bellied cartoon fairy godmothers who can’t quite hang onto their magic fairy dust. But today we live in an age of multi-taskers with short attention spans, when most people are accustomed to watching split-screen TV, talking on the phone and reading a newspaper all at once. A traditional stand-’em-up opera, no matter how clever or melodic, won’t suffice.

So the Opera Company’s current production has updated the farce concept by setting the story in what appears to be the 1950s, with Cinderella toiling not by a fireside but in a kitchen seemingly lifted from a Westinghouse TV commercial, stepsisters dressed in bathrobes and hair curlers, and the prince in a uniform worthy of a Park Avenue doorman. In case these novelties wear off (as inevitably they do), director Davide Livermore provides other sight gags and distractions, most notably giant pop-art images projected onto a screen overhead, sort of like the giant screen at Lincoln Financial Field that competes for Eagles fans' attention with the actual players.

A few problems

So far, so good. But the problem, for one thing, is that the novelty of pop-art opera isn’t especially novel: The Opera Company itself performed a mod Così fan tutte way back in 1988. For another thing, the farcical elements in this production are strictly visual; the 19th-Century libretto remains untouched, so our 1950s heroine is still ludicrously pining for a handsome prince when she’d more likely prefer to lasso a lawyer or a shopping mall developer.

Most important, farce works best not as an end in itself but when it delivers some point. (During the overture to the late lamented Pennsylvania Opera Theatre’s production of Offenbach’s farce, The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein, a character strode on stage, stopped the music and scolded the audience for failing to rise for the national anthem of Gerolstein.) In this production of Cinderella, a robotic vacuum cleaner buzzes around stage like a character in Star Wars, but to what purpose? (If Cinderella has robots and modern appliances to perform her chores, how hard can her life be?) The singers enter and exit not through the wings but through the refrigerator— to what point? The ugly stepsisters dance around holding pineapples over their heads; they scamper off and on stage while the prince and his servant sing about them; they pop up in the side boxes and the aisles— but again, what is the point? That they’re not only ugly and nasty, but hyperactive as well? Even the Three Stooges and Abbott and Costello had some underlying purpose to their antics.

Inventive, but distracting

In the production’s most inventive bit of overhead projection tomfoolery, we see the baritone Daniel Belcher (as the prince’s servant Dandini) jumping out of his bed, hastily pulling on his clothes, hailing a cab, alighting on Broad Street and talking his way past an Academy of Music usher just as the real Belcher enters the rear of the auditorium, singing his first lines as he walks down the aisle. This is all very cute, but unfortunately it totally detracts from whatever was transpiring on stage (I’m damned if I can remember).

In this conception, the ugly stepsisters are far more interesting than the repressed and boring Cinderella. As the sisters, the zaftig mezzo-soprano Leslie Mutchler and the gawky soprano Kiera Duffy were loads of fun, at least for the first 15 minutes, after which their repetitious Laverne-and-Shirley schtick grew tiresome. Ruxandra Donose as Cinderella displayed a commanding presence and unleashed a mezzo-soprano voice that struck me as powerful but not sweet. Her on-stage persona, at least, seems more suited to a bitchy role like Carmen or even Lady Macbeth than a pure and humble servant girl; as the unfortunate Cinderella, Donose just didn’t seem all that unfortunate. Even Disney’s cartoon Cinderella gave us more reason to empathize with the poor girl than Donose does.

One redeeming note

What redeemed the production for me was the sonorous tenor voice of Lawrence Brownlee as Don Ramiro, the prince. When this man steps on stage and opens his mouth, you experience the sort of sublime high that art at its best is supposed to provide. Of course it helps that Brownlee is singing Rossini, whose music is always pleasant to the ear (even if, let’s be honest, every Rossini opera sounds alike). During Brownlee’s solos, it was all I could do to resist rising from my seat and shouting at the projection booth, “Will you stop with these distracting gimmicks already and let the man sing?”



To read a response to this review, click here.
For another review of Cinderella by Steve Cohen, click here.
For Lewis Whittington's review, click here.