OPERA REVIEW : ‘Faust’ Falters at Music Center

The Music Center Opera opened its season Friday night with a new--well, sort of new--version of Gounod’s beloved old chestnut, “Faust.” The word, I fear, is dreary.

Much of the production looked familiar to opera-going fossils cursed with half-decent memories. That’s because the Gallic devil-may-care opus was staged by Frank Corsaro, the bad-boy director responsible for the New York City Opera “Faust” frequently seen here between 1968 and 1979.

Corsaro never was noted for his sensitivity to the musical pulse or the verbal text. At his best, however, he illuminated the challenge at hand with intriguing flashes of theatrical wit.

His old “Faust” suffered its share of tasteless gimmicks--a bleeding statue of St. Sebastian providing wine for mean Mephisto, for instance, and a perversely grisly ending that denied Marguerite her candy-coated salvation. Still, Corsaro heightened the elemental contrasts between good and evil, stripped away many a hoary cliche and, with the assistance of an inspired designer, Ming Cho Lee, played the drama amid a vibrant, lusty, brightly stylized evocation of the Medieval Germany dictated by Goethe and Gounod.

Where, oh where, is Ming Cho Lee when we need him?

For his second “Faust,” Corsaro has chosen a new designing collaborator, Franco Colavecchia. Together, they have managed to get lost on the trendy road to devious updating.

Logically or not, they have moved the erstwhile rustic romance to the age of the Industrial Revolution. Everything is urban. Everything is dark.

A grim unit set--it looks like a barren warehouse--harbors all the action. Primitive background slides are changed and different window dressings are rolled on and off to suggest Faust’s morgue (it used to be his scientific laboratory), the prison, the town square, the church, and, least convincing, the heroine’s chaste abode. In this milieu, Faust’s ardent apostrophe to nature becomes a silly joke.

Magic tricks? Forget ‘em. Dazzling transformations? Not a trace. Brilliant abstractions? No such luck. Imaginative innovations? Hardly.

What we see, most of the time, is clumsy, prosaic and contradictory. The aged Faust now fondles the hair of a pretty blond corpse in the prologue, adding a hint of necrophilia to his list of sins. The rejuvenated Faust addresses “Salut! demeure” to a cumbersome cluster of potted plants in front of brick walls.

The devil gloats that the susceptible Marguerite is opening her window--”Elle ouvre sa fenetre!”--but there is no window here. The soprano simply strolls onto an all-purpose balcony as David Anglin’s dishonest supertitle declares “she steps into the night.”

Those infernal supertitles can also turn cutesy. The giddy Dame Marthe exclaims to herself, in an aside, that she finds Mephisto charming--”Il est charmant!” The translation on the proscenium, however, projects a vernacular distortion: “Charmed, I’m sure.”

The verbal points may seem small. They are annoyingly symptomatic, however, of an interpretive attitude that hinders more than it helps.

All may not be lost in Corsaro’s current Faustspielhaus, yet little is won. The martyred Sebastian still bleeds wine (here an ineffectual trickle), but a shaft of light now gives Marguerite at least a hint of spiritual triumph at the gallows. The original spinning scene, one of Gounod’s finest inspirations, has at last been restored, and one must be thankful for that. Unfortunately, the nervous motion of the wheel, so exquisitely delineated in the orchestra, is contradicted by the mechanical loom on the stage. Problems like that arise when the plot is pushed forward 300 years.

By the ever-probing standards of the naughty 1990s, Corsaro now looks like a conservative. He doesn’t turn “Faust” into a farce, a dream play from outer space or a sociopolitical diatribe. He doesn’t stretch for phony relevance. We should be grateful for large favors. If only he trusted the composer and librettist enough to leave the innocent kitsch alone.

The opening-night performance could have been salvaged to a considerable degree if it had sounded a lot better than it looked. Alas, it sounded only a little better than it looked.

Lawrence Foster conducted with much fervor and an obvious appreciation of the grand, graceful yet propulsive line. Unfortunately, he slighted finesse in the process. Subtle nuances were rare, and the dynamic scale--onstage and in the pit--seemed to range from forte to fortissimo (and fortissississimo when inexcusable microphones blasted sinister offstage voices into the house).

The totally non-Gallic cast seemed to find the French style as foreign as the French language. An exception was Suzanna Guzman, who introduced an uncommonly elegant and sympathetic Siebel. Even with the welcome reinstatement of “Si le bonheur a sourire, t’invite,” however, a strong Siebel cannot save a faltering “Faust.”

Jorma Silvasti, the Finnish tenor remembered here as Kimmo in Sallinen’s “Kullervo,” was attempting the title role for the first time. He turned out to be theatrically rather stolid, vocally rather tight and dry. Perhaps he fell victim to opening-night nerves.

Although Veronica Villarroel brought compelling poignance to Marguerite’s agonies, her singing was uneven--hard-edged and strident one moment, soft and suave the next. Her trills in the Jewel Song emerged as weird approximations, and her accent implied that this very German heroine of a very French opera hailed from a very Spanish clime.

Most disappointing, perhaps, was the Mephistopheles of Barseg Tumanyan, remembered in Los Angeles for his stolid King Philip in “Don Carlo.” He rolled his pleasant basso through the score with monochromatic competence and, in the process, conveyed as much menace as the friendly captain of the neighborhood soccer team.

One thought in vain of the dark and delicious evil that used to ooze from Norman Treigle on the stage, even when he was standing still. One would gladly have settled for the lesser but still imposing demonism demonstrated by Samuel Ramey in 1979. With tame Tumanyan, the devil hardly got his due.

For reasons unknown, Rodney Gilfry forced his lovely lyric baritone close to the breaking point as a rather stiff Valentin. Martha Jane Howe, stalwart of the San Diego Opera, made an auspicious Los Angeles debut as Marthe, and Tod Fitzpatrick did what can be done with the aborted song of Wagner.

Lewis Brown designed the functional costumes. F. Mitchell Dana presided over the dim lighting scheme. Peggy Hickey devised chaotic choreography for the Kermesse (the endless “Walpurgisnacht” ballet was mercifully cut, as usual).

The dressy first-night audience--which didn’t exactly fill the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to the rafters--applauded dutifully. The ovations stopped well short of delirium.

If this “Faust” was a triumph, it was a triumph of mediocrity. Co-commissioned by the Lyric Opera of Chicago, it moves next to the Windy City. Perhaps the bracing breezes of the Midwest will waft some vigor into the project.

* Gounod’s “Faust,” presented by the Music Center Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Remaining performances on Friday and Sept. 21, 24 and 28 at 8 p.m., Sunday at 1 p.m. Tickets $21-$115. Information: (213) 972-7211.

* ‘ELEKTRA’ RETURNS: Music Center Opera revives its quirky production of the Strauss work. F5