"Opera Company's "Fidelio'

Beethoven wrote only one opera, so a director’s temptation to craft a unique and memorable production isn’t easily overcome. In the Opera Company of Philadelphia’s current Fidelio, director Robert Driver yielded quickly by hiring sculptor Jun Kaneko— an artist praised for his intuition— to design both the towering sets and dozens of costumes for the company’s new production.

Unfortunately, Kaneko’s visually disconcerting imagery and jarring costumes evoked an evening of unintentional pop-culture references in an opera that appeared to have been set against the linoleum tiles in my bathroom shower. Perhaps the $2 million spent by OCP on Fidelio’s sets and costumes alone delivered a better return on investment than the Dow-Jones Average last week, but that’s not saying much.

Even as the orchestra began to play the overture, the curtain rose on a blinding white checkered backdrop that filled with an array of computer-generated colors and forms, making it clear to one and all that this Fidelio belonged to Kaneko. Throughout Act I, this visual slideshow continued to play in the upper-left hand corner of the three-story-high set, with intersecting lines streaking down the screen reminiscent of the jarring Light-Cycle scenes from Tron. As the emotions of the lyrics and music shifted, the basic backdrop, like a mood ring, continually changed colors.

Later, when the evil governor Pizarro (Greer Grimsley) sang about murder, an oversized, upside-down papier-mâché head descended from the rafters, bleeding colors from the eyes and mouth, while a band of soldiers dressed in the helmets and goggles of the ’80s pop band Devo stood underneath. The visually incongruous costumes continued, displaying polka dots vying with stripes that seemed designed by the writers at “Nickelodeon,” and when Florestan (Anthony Dean Griffey) finally appeared in Act II, Kaneko clad him in a striped jumpsuit and hairstyle reminiscent of Richard Simmons. The patchwork prisoner uniforms looked like stitched together versions of the two-person cow costumes I expect to see two weeks from now at Halloween parties.

Shades of ‘The Muppet Show’

I could go on. The latticework prison mesh that obscures the action throughout the second act blurred the action. When the backdrop rose on the release of prisoners, no doubt Kaneko intended something magnificent, but what he got was the movement of silhouetted characters in stacked archways that imitated the opening credits of "The Muppet Show."

Lighting designer Drew Billiau struggled to illuminate the action with his graded, emotive pastels and overhead lights in Act Two, but all of Kaneko’s efforts conspired to divert the audience’s attention from the music, not to mention the story of Fidelio (Christine Goerke), who hopes to free her husband from Pizarro’s grasp by disguising herself as a man to earn the trust of the local jailer Rocco (Stephen Morscheck). That Beethoven created such stirring music to illustrate librettist Joseph Sonnleithner’s intense adaptation of Jean Nicolas Bouilly’s play Léonore, or that three of the singers performed so amazingly makes Kaneko’s distractions that much more of a shame.

Emotional heroism

To be sure, Sonnleithner filled the libretto with concepts like Duty, Loyalty and Justice that I suppose might reflect the black-and-white design of Kaneko’s set. But Fidelio is no abstract intellectual opera; it’s a romantic ideal about real emotions and concrete acts of virtue. When Fidelio sings, “Is there no compassion, no humanity left in your savage hearts?” she makes a plea as real as that of any woman seeing her husband unjustly imprisoned.

Beethoven understood what such an emotional and heroic story required musically, crafting arias— superb trios and quartets (not to mention a rare, supremely pleasing duet of two baritones)— laden with conflicting impulses toward the abstract ideals of the play. While the voices of Marzelline (Ailyn Pérez) and Jaquino (Brian Anderson) get swallowed up by the mammoth set, those of Goerke and Grimsley soar. Griffey’s gorgeous tenor makes it worth waiting a whole act to hear him sing just a few arias. Great choral singing (by the prisoners) enhances the yearning for freedom felt throughout, and the power of the music is undeniable.

It worked with Maurice Sendak

Yet even early into Act I, Kaneko’s sets and costumes created so much visual dissonance that I couldn’t bear to watch the stage any more. I still wanted to hear the music and singing; I just didn’t want to see this production.

Why did the Opera Company spend all this money on someone who has only designed one other opera? It might make sense to hire a children’s book creator like Maurice Sendak to design the sets for Hansel and Gretel, as the Opera Company did last year. But Kaneko’s annoying work in Fidelio won’t hook art lovers, and may even turn away the operaphiles who do actually come to hear the music.

After a while, I closed my eyes and just listened. Of course, you can play a CD at home, at a much lower price.