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The Met’s new production of Franz Lehar’s The Merry Widow has its genesis in one star’s the desire for a swan song and another’s plan for a comeback: Renee Fleming, who is apparently about to depart the opera stage for good for the recording studio and solo tours, and asked the Met’s General Manager, Peter Gelb, to do Lehar’s light comic masterpiece for her last project. Gelb then approached Susan Stroman, the five-time Tony-winning Broadway director of The Producers, who has recently had a streak of bad luck projects, and asked her to cross over to the classical side, and direct and choreograph.
The choice of Stroman was inspired. She brings fully to life the ideal that opera is supposed to be a feast for the eyes as well as for the ears. Stroman made the decision to revert to the librettists’ original intentions, rather than what made it past the fin de siècle censors, and stage the third act at Maxime’s, the famous Parisian can-can club. In the 1905 production, this had to be toned down to a small show at Glawari’s mansion, where the second act is also set, but in 2015 Maxime’s is literally assembled onstage before our eyes. The lush set, by Julian Crouch, and colorful period costumes by William Ivey Long take up the entire stage – literally, as Ms. Stroman lowers her grisettes in by high wire – and the dancing is absolutely first-rate. The act forms the climax both choreographically and dramatically of a production that carries through on its promise to demonstrate what Broadway can show to opera, especially light opera.
On the other hand, I’m more than a little puzzled by Fleming’s self-nomination for the lead. (And I’m not alone.) The part is set too low for the high soprano where she really dazzles, and for much of the opera her singing sounds forced. Ms. Fleming said that she was drawn to the part by the chance to sing the second act’s “Vilja Song”—which she carries off beautifully. But by the time she gets to it, half the show had drearily plodded by and the audience was rightfully restless. Such high moments were few and far between for the international superstar.
Fleming plays Hanna Glawari, the widow of the title, a beautiful farmer’s daughter from the nation of Pontevedria (apparently a witty, thinly-veiled version of Montenegro, for those of us who aren’t up on their turn-of-the-20th-century Balkans politics) whose millionaire husband died on their wedding night. Pontevedria is on the verge of bankruptcy, having spent far too much money on its new Paris embassy (the scene of the first act – one imagines the Met sympathizes), and desperately needs Glawari, who is in Paris, to marry a Pontevedrian rather than a Frenchman and so keep her money in country. (I suppose A Point of Tax Law did not quite have the same ring to it as the title).
The Pontevedrians’ hopes alight on Hanna’s old flame, the hard-drinking, womanizing embassy attaché Count Danilo Danilovitch, played suavely and with a clear, melodic baritone by Nathan Gunn. But there are complications. She’s still hurt because he was too good for her when she was a farmer’s daughter; he’s bitter because she married a rich older man. Old grudges die hard, and it will take two more acts for them to kiss and make up.
In the meantime, a range of memorable secondary characters add much of the show’s charm. Chief among them is the five-decade veteran Sir Thomas Allen, who plays the elderly, cuckolded Ambassador Baron Zeta. The deft, stentorian 70 year old steals every scene he’s in. On the other end of the spectrum, making her Met debut, is Kitti O’Hara, a well-known Broadway actress cast as Zeta’s much younger wife. She brings serious acting chops and a sexual verve to the part. Her lover, Camille de Rosillon, is played straight as a straight man can be by Alek Shrader. Njegus, the count’s page, is not: Stroman took the part of the boy obsessed with the grisettes and transformed him into an over-the-top camp character portrayed by Carson Elrod. Some might think this offensive, while others will find Elrod’s ability for physical comedy winning. Given that the text of Njegus’ jokes was never changed, it in either case odd.
That’s by no means the only or the biggest problem with the libretto, which is the production’s main, almost unforgivable sin. The Met commissioned a full English translation, both dialogue and lyrics, from Jeremy Sams, who made the unfortunate choice to sacrifice everything to retain the rhyming couplets of the original German. This forced the occasional howler: the rhyme of “chanteuses” and “floozies” has the potential to go down in the Met lore of cringe-worthy moments. But usually, it just produces aggressively mediocre, forced dialogue: “I’ve dealt with respectable wives/Who lead unimpeachable lives./Alas, you don’t waver or falter./You’re fixed as the Rock of Gibraltar.”
While I did not have the ability to check the new libretto line for line, an extended switch over to the German subtitles also suggested that the switch in language carried a musical as well as linguistic price. The music was written for the hard, polysyllabic words in which German abounds, and the melisma that replaces them is grating and treacly. The sacrifice may also have been for naught: a quick glance around showed that most of the audience seemed to be relying on their in-seat subtitles during the duets anyway — such is the nature of unfamiliar, contrived lyrics.
The production also often feels disjointed: for all the pizzazz Stroman’s choreography adds to the production, when major moments arrive, they often seem tacked on. The second act’s “Who can tell what the hell women are”, for instance, was an excellent set piece of song and dance. But with the male characters moving across the stage in rhythm like Gladys Knight’s backup singers in “Midnight Train to Georgia”, and then taking their hats off to the audience in sequence like a 1930s chorus line, it was also choreographed in a manner that completely broke in character and style from anything that proceeds or follows it.
Ultimately, the production faltered because the whole is not greater that the sum of the parts. I would eagerly go and see anything else almost any of the Widow members were involved in after this: a play directed by Stroman, an opera featuring any of the secondary cast, anything in the higher range that Ms. Fleming should care to perform. (The exception, obviously, is Mr. Sams’ work, which I would approach with extreme trepidation.) But I probably would not go back to see The Merry Widow.
Nicholas M. Gallagher
Nicholas M. Gallagher is a staff writer at The American Interest. You can read him online at http://www.the-american-interest.com/byline/nicholas-m-gallagher/ or follow him on Twitter at @ngallagherai
