Verdi, Falstaff: Seattle Opera Young Artists Program, soloists, members of the Auburn Symphony, cond. Dean Williamson, dir. Peter Kazaras;  Meydenbauer Center, Bellevue, WA, 01.4.2007 (BJ)

 

It was possible to have mixed feelings – no, enough of this pussy-footing: I had distinctly mixed feelings, confronted by the on-stage goings-on that preceded the Young Artists Program’s new production of Falstaff. For fully half an hour, director Peter Kazaras treated us to the sight of the cast going through their preparations–helping each other to put on their costumes, eating and drinking, switching off cell phones, greeting and hugging (and occasionally a bit more than hugging) each other–while cabaret-style music played on a supposed backstage sound-system.

You could see the purpose behind all this, which was to engage us audience members, simply as people, with the members of the cast seen simply as people. In a way, this was a highly desirable result. It put them and us all in the same world. Yet by the very same token, it took away the possibility of the specifically operatic experience of magic, when we have settled in our seats, the conductor has entered and taken his bow, the curtain goes up–and voilà, there we are suddenly transported into a quite other world.

Up to the moment, then, when Verdi’s music (skillfully arranged for chamber orchestra by Jonathan Dove) pitchforked us into the delights of the opera itself, it was definitely a sense of pluses and minuses in conflict that filled my mind. But as the performance continued under Dean Williamson’s firm conductorial hand, I found myself increasingly delighted –or seduced, to use the word Kazaras emphasized in an absorbing post-performance discussion –by a magic that needed no artificial separation of spheres to work its enchantment. This may sound like a frivolous point, but let me tell you: when I went out into the lobby for the first intermission, and a few girls from the audience passed by, I recognized them at once as belonging to the same species as the young women – whether those of the Young Artists Program, or those of Verdi and Boito, or those of Shakespeare it matters not at all – I had been watching on stage. That doesn’t often happen, and I relished the moment.

In any case Kazaras, whose work I first learned to admire when I saw his Turn of the Screw in last season’s Young Artists production, is clearly a director as intelligent as he is articulate, and impressively capable of making his points with taste, discretion, imagination, and consistency. And when, for the opera’s denouement in that vertiginous final ensemble, the characters all started taking their costumes off again, to stand revealed as the motley crew of youngsters we had seen at the start, the point of his conception stood triumphantly revealed. It was a stroke that reminded me of the final sequence in Olivier’s film version of Henry V, and it was equally touching, and even more than equally compelling as a profound identification of theater with life.

Along the way, there were many other touches of invention to admire. Donald Eastman’s set presented us with an assemblage of cobbled-together props that were, totally in keeping with the director’s vision, seen to be cobbled together, and culminated in a Herne’s Oak constructed out of a pair of step-ladders and a crazy canopy of chairs – again, poetic truth trumping literal verisimilitude. In Cynthia Savage’s colorful and stylish costumes, the cast moved with brilliant precision and energy around the stage, and Connie Yun’s lighting at times silhouetted characters against a gently illuminated backdrop with a beauty of effect that took the breath away. I have never before seen a Falstaff that so bewitchingly evoked the sense of youthful love and loveliness – akin to that of the great duet in Berlioz’s Trojans – that Verdi was miraculously able, in his 80th year, to set upon the stage.

And this was achieved not only dramatically but musically also, as I must hasten to stress before you conclude that I’ve forgotten about the singers, or singing actors as they might better be called. As usual with Young Artists Program productions, there were two casts. I saw only one of them, but every member of it, from Michael Anthony McGee as Falstaff, Holly Boaz as Alice Ford, Sasha Cooke as Meg Page, and Ani Maldjian and Marcus Shelton as the young lovers Nannetta and Fenton, down to those in supposedly minor roles – Jared Rogers as Bardolph, Marc Webster as Pistol, and Ted Schmitz as Dr. Caius–sang and acted splendidly. (There are, after all, as someone once said, no small roles, only small singers.) There was not a weak link among them, either in voice or in dramatic conviction. It may be invidious, in commenting on so uniformly excellent an ensemble, to single out two voices. I found the Ford of Jonathan Lasch and the Mistress Quickly of Teresa Herold to be the most thrillingly resonant and firm-lined members of the cast. But the others are not far behind, and given that the Program rejoices in the possession of no less a vocal instructor than the redoubtable Jane Eaglen, they must surely look forward to comparable results in the future.

In conclusion, I shall simply apologize for my mixed feelings at the start of the afternoon, and thank Peter Kazaras, his performers, and Seattle Opera’s General Director Speight Jenkins for unmixing them to such irresistible purpose.

 

Bernard Jacobson