Verdi’s opera gets a new staging from Bartlett Sher that moves the action to Weimar Germany in the 1920s.
By Heidi Waleson
Jan. 3, 2022 4:20 pm
New York
Amid the Omicron-related cascade of theater, dance and concert cancellations, the Metropolitan Opera’s New Year’s Eve show— Bartlett Sher’s new production of Verdi’s “Rigoletto”—went on as planned. Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, gave a brief curtain speech thanking the company and the audience, and noting that thanks to the Met’s stringent health measures (“You have no idea,” he said wryly), none of its performances have been canceled. It was not business as usual, of course. The gala dinner was called off, there were some empty seats, and Mr. Gelb urged the audience members to keep their masks on. Still, there was plenty of festive attire and selfie-snapping, and Quinn Kelsey, who sang the title role, took his bows in a 2022 tiara as confetti dropped on the audience. Just when we started taking live performance for granted again, we were reminded how easily it could go away.
That would be a shame, given the incandescent performances delivered by Mr. Kelsey and Rosa Feola as his daughter, Gilda. The opera’s principal characters can seem particularly unsympathetic—the court jester, the libidinous duke he enables, and the ditsy, easily duped daughter whom he basically imprisons. But Mr. Kelsey found unusual nuance in Rigoletto, both as singer and actor. His booming baritone has both volume and lyric poignancy, and he assorted those traits to create new sides of the character with every appearance. In the first scene, his voice scraped harshly as he did his job, taunting Count Ceprano with his wife’s infidelity. Alone in the next scene, he shed that mask along with his jester props—red gloves, black ruff—and ruminated about his own evil deeds with a soliloquy that encompassed both guilt and fear. In Act 2, when he implored the courtiers to tell him where they had taken his abducted daughter, you could hear that real begging did not come easily to him, and in the subsequent duet with Gilda, their mutual devastation was palpable.
Ms. Feola also rose above Gilda’s vacuous innocence to create a character with some agency. Her luminous soprano made “Caro nome” more than just a star turn. It was thoughtful and deeply felt, and you sensed the character’s through-line, connecting her love for her father and this new feeling for a mysterious young man. Piotr Beczala’s Duke, on the other hand, was one-dimensional—vocally bright, hearty and focused on getting what he wants. Even “Ella mi fu rapita,” in which he suggests that Gilda could make him change his ways, offered no variety.
Mr. Sher’s production, created in cooperation with Staatsoper Berlin, ostensibly updates the story’s Renaissance Italy setting to Weimar Germany in the 1920s, but there is little in Michael Yeargan’s set or Catherine Zuber’s costumes that conveys a strong sense of period, or why that period is thematically significant. The set, a giant cube, rotates on a turntable. In the first scene, courtiers wearing “old Hollywood” slinky dresses, uniforms or black tie spill through tall, narrow doors on all sides until the set comes to a stop, revealing a huge reception room with gold pillars and blood-red walls. Subsequent rotations take us to Rigoletto’s multistory house and the assassin Sparafucile’s den of iniquity—both generically impoverished, though the latter has a bar setup in the center. The set also turns in midscene on occasion. This supplies some drama, but more often distraction, upstaging the singers at critical moments. For example, when Rigoletto, dragging the zippered body bag containing what he thinks is the murdered Duke but is actually Gilda, suddenly hears the Duke singing, we’ve lost track of him and his horrified reaction because we are focused instead on the turning set.https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
Mr. Sher’s directing also has mixed results. The opening party scene is lively and precisely choreographed to demonstrate the underlying violence and nastiness of the Duke’s regime. Little moments are telling: Rigoletto kicks Monterone’s cane out from under him and makes him fall; in Act 2, the courtiers do the same to Rigoletto. Giovanna, Gilda’s companion ( Eve Gigliotti ), is here made part of the conspiracy to destroy Gilda—she takes money from the Duke; watches, unfazed, as her charge is abducted; then leaves with a suitcase. The more nuanced theatrical characterizations of Rigoletto and Gilda also take this production out of the realm of the obvious. But there are more confusing choices as well, most notably the scene in which Gilda substitutes herself for the Duke as murder victim. During part of it, with the aid of some drenched red lighting designed by Donald Holder, she appears to be in two places at once.
Andrea Mastroni was a businesslike Sparafucile, lacking some of the assassin’s menace despite his handsome, velvety bass; Varduhi Abrahamyan, a properly blowzy, assertive Maddalena, helped make the Act 3 quartet a vocal high point of the evening. Craig Colclough was a potent, disheveled Monterone. Conductor Daniele Rustioni proved a sympathetic accompanist to the singers, but he did not keep the score’s dramatic tension at a consistently. high level. In a way, the whole show suffered from that lack of pure animal energy—it was almost too subtle. “Rigoletto” is a barn-burner—you have to gallop along with the sexism, violence and sentimentality in order for it to work. In this production, despite some gripping theatrical and vocal moments, the all-consuming sense of tragedy was missing.
—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).
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