SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Britten,  A Midsummer Night’s Dream:  Seattle Opera Young Artists Program, soloists, members of the Auburn Symphony, cond. Brian Garman, dir. Peter Kazaras;  Meydenbauer Center, Bellevue, WA, 29.3.2009 (BJ)


Peter Kazaras has done it again. At first I had my doubts, but this production by the artistic director of the Seattle Opera Young Artists program convinced me that taking Britten’s most enchanting opera out of an Athenian forest and plunking it down in a classroom in a British boarding school was no self-indulgent exercise of directorial whimsy. As in last season’s L’Enfant et les sortilèges, which Kazaras set in a subway station, the physical environment was used as a blank slate, and the enchantment was in the mind, and in the music.

Casting A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a tall order to start with: you need a team of children for Shakespeare’s fairies and two adult singers–one of them a countertenor–to play their king and queen; another dozen grown-ups to represent both the polished Athenian nobles of the plot and the “rude mechanicals” who so gauchely yet endearingly try to entertain them with a play-within-the-play; and a fleet-footed young actor to play Puck, the mischievous imp whose carelessness sets the story on its accident-prone course.

Still, the Young Artists program succeeded in filling all those diverse categories convincingly. On Donald Eastman’s purely functional set, an accomplished cast including a chorus of charming children enjoyed the support of some brilliant orchestral playing under Brian Garman’s authoritative musical direction. Heidi Ganser’s costumes were both colorful and serviceable, though perhaps a school uniform that leaves the knees visible is not the best way to dress a queen of the fairies. Despite that handicap, Tytania was neatly and persuasively played by Megan Hart, whose agile soprano line coped skillfully with Britten’s occasionally stratospheric writing. Opposite her as Oberon was Anthony Roth Costanzo, a young countertenor of rare musicality. His voice commands all the requisite colors throughout the range, and he projected it with tellingly nuanced dynamics and insinuating dramatic insight.

Leading the uproarious sextet of “mechanicals,” baritone Jeffrey Madison seized every opportunity the plum role of Bottom offered him and ran with it to hilarious effect, while his colleagues Jonathan Silvia, Thomas Forde, Marc-Antoine d’Aragon, Alex Mansoori, and Marcus Shelton played their serio-comic rustic roles to the hilt. Bray Wilkins, Elizabeth Pojanowski, Michael Krzankowski, and Vira Slywotzky made two attractive pairs of lovers, properly reunited and married at the end alongside Jeffrey Beruan’s Theseus and Margaret Gawrysiak’s Hippolyta, and David S. Hogan combined the quicksilver side of Puck with a nicely proletarian dialect touch.

It might seem perverse to take the magic out of an opera only to put it all back in. But Peter Kazaras loves to challenge us, and himself. Whatever he touches, he touches with genius, and this time around he created a Dream that was not to be missed.

Bernard Jacobson

Note: a version of this review appeared also in the Seattle Times.

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