‘Pagliacci’ Review: Betrayal Under the Big Top

Boston Lyric Opera’s staging of Leoncavallo’s opera transformed the traveling theater troupe setting of the work into a circus.

ByHeidi Waleson

Sept. 30, 2019 5:12 pm ET

Boston

The itinerant Boston Lyric Opera has made a virtue out of its homeless state. It finds the right-sized venue for each work, and frequently transforms unexpected spaces into theaters, thereby providing fresh new perspectives on an old art form. Last week’s season opener was a staging of Leoncavallo’s “Pagliacci” at the DCR Steriti Memorial Rink in Boston’s North End. BLO transformed the traveling theater troupe setting of “Pagliacci” into a circus, creating an entire environment inside the rink. This ingenious production, directed by David Lefkowich, with set designs by Julia Noulin-Mérat, was intended to give the century-old verismo (slice-of-life) opera style the shock of the new. Could it make the audience feel as though we were watching a real onstage murder?

Not quite, but it was a fresh way to experience this operatic chestnut. Audience participation began an hour before the opera performance, when we were invited into a “fairground” set up with booths—a ring toss, a palm reader—as well as acrobats, clowns, a magician and other performers. It felt homemade, like a small-town event. We were then ushered into an orange-and-blue-striped circus tent, in which the semicircular seating came right up to the small thrust stage (the orchestra was positioned behind the singers).

The immediacy was further heightened by Charles Neumann’s modern-dress costumes; the colloquial (if occasionally awkward) English translation by Bill Bankes-Jones; action that flowed seamlessly from the stage into the audience; and especially by the excellent chorus members, including children, who sang and vividly acted their parts in the aisles and from regular spectator seats. Since the ensemble members are the audience of the play-within-the-play, who anticipate, heckle and finally witness the actor Canio’s murder of his unfaithful wife, Nedda, in the middle of the commedia dell’arte performance, this positioning, and their casual clothing, designed to blend, cleverly jolted the actual spectators into that role as well.

Mr. Lefkowich’s sharp directing, aided by David Angus’s well-paced conducting, zeroed in on the explosive interpersonal environment among the principal characters and the brutality it provokes. Baritone Michael Mayes was a singularly nasty Tonio, the Fool of the theater troupe, strutting his Prologue dressed as a ringmaster and later sexually assaulting Nedda. Tonio tells Canio about Nedda’s affair; he imbued the opera’s final line, “The comedy is finished,” with the lip-curling satisfaction of a plot well-executed. Lauren Michelle brought a pretty soprano and a touch of world-weariness to Nedda; her duet with baritone Tobias Greenhalgh, ardent and impetuous as her local-guy lover, Silvio, was imbued with a poignant hopefulness. It was the only passage sung in Italian, giving it even more of a fairy-tale quality; real life for the likes of Nedda is abuse and murder. (Silvio’s natty sweater and scholarly glasses also suggested that the two were not in the same social class.)

Rafael Rojas, who has an impressive, clarion tenor, played Canio as a domestic tyrant with a hair-trigger temper. The famous aria was imbued with self-pity; when he violently broke character in the middle of the play, twisting Nedda’s arm and demanding the name of her lover, it seemed completely realistic as well as horrifying. Tenor Omar Najmi was a nicely callow Beppe, coming into his own as the guitar-strumming Arlecchino in the play.

Other notable contributions came from aerialists Leah Abel and Molly Baechtold, who performed on hanging silks during the overture and the entr’acte music, and a parade of gaily dressed, kazoo-playing clown supernumeraries. Pablo Santiago’s lighting subtly moved the focus from the stage to the seats when necessary, and Anne Nesmith’s wigs and makeup, along with Mr. Neumann’s costumes, underlined the contrast between the elaborate artifice of the play and the ordinariness of real life. And even though I knew what was coming, when Mr. Greenhalgh ran onto the stage from his seat in the audience, and Ms. Michelle, throttled with a length of cloth, crumpled to the floor in her poufy, polka-dotted Colombina costume, I gasped along with the chorus.

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).