‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Review: A Visit to Dystopia

Boston Lyric Opera’s staging of Poul Ruders’s operatic adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s novel gives the audience an up-close view of a horrifying near-future.

Caroline Worra as Aunt Lydia (center) in ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Photo: Liza Voll By Heidi Waleson May 7, 2019 2:46 p.m. ET

Boston

In the last two years, a television adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” Margaret Atwood’s dystopian 1985 novel, has pushed the story to the forefront of the present-day zeitgeist. Women wearing Handmaids’ red dresses and white winged caps have become emblems of #MeToo protests, a visual reminder of the novel’s depiction of the sexual subjugation and silencing of women. Now, Boston Lyric Opera has mounted Poul Ruders’s gripping stage version, which had its world premiere in Copenhagen in 2000 and its only U.S. production at the Minnesota Opera in 2003. The score has lost none of its ferocious impact, and BLO’s ingenious, immersive staging in a Harvard basketball arena ensures that the audience cannot escape its message.

Paul Bentley’s deft libretto follows the novel closely. “The Handmaid’s Tale” is set in the not-to-distant future, when America has been violently transformed into a theocracy, the Republic of Gilead, with women relegated to second-class status, forbidden to hold jobs, have money, read or write. Ecological devastation and pollution have produced rampant infertility, so women who had children in the “Time Before” are allotted to high-ranking men (Commanders) and their wives to serve as reproductive vessels. These Handmaids are strictly policed and deprived of all agency, including their names. The heroine is called only Offred (“of Fred”); her struggle is to remember the past (the opera skillfully interpolates Time Before scenes), particularly the child who was taken from her, and to try both to survive and to hope for some alternative future. It won’t be easy: The rules are rigid, and punishment is extreme.

Chelsea Basler as Moira and Jennifer Johnson Cano as Offred Photo: Liza Voll

The large, noisy orchestra and the swift pace of the opera’s three dozen scenes, many of them fleeting, create the almost unrelenting stress and disturbing atmosphere of this environment for the characters and the audience alike. A new edition of the score has slightly reduced the size of the orchestra to 62 players, making for a better balance with the voices without any diminution in impact. BLO also wisely eliminated a pair of framing “symposium” scenes. The opera is now focused squarely on Offred, sung with passionate intensity by the rich-voiced mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano, a consummate actress, who is onstage throughout. She is the only character who has arias, well-crafted mediations that take us into Offred’s mind and feelings, in contrast to the ritual phrases (“May the Lord open;” “Under His Eye”) that make up her daily interactions.

Aunt Lydia, trainer and enforcer of the Handmaids, personifies Gilead’s oppressiveness. Soprano Caroline Worra played her with ramrod demeanor, and made her vocal character—high, steely, with upward leaps—reflect her sadistic pleasure in wielding power as much as her olive uniform, helmet-like hairdo, and cattle prod did. The other excellent singers were precise in their supporting roles: Maria Zifchak exuded resentment as the Commander’s wife, Serena Joy, a silenced gospel singer, whose former trademark song, “Amazing Grace” is malevolently twisted and darkened in the orchestration. Kathryn Skemp Moran brought a piercing brightness to the broken Janine, who thinks she is still a waitress; as tougher women, Michelle Trainor (Ofglen) and Chelsea Basler (Moira) each had her own take on resistance. Felicia Gavilanes brought a poignant innocence to Offred in the Time Before. Matthew Dibattista made the most of his cameo as the sleazy gynecologist who offers, with a bit of tenor falsetto, to impregnate Offred; as the Commander, David Cushing used his sonorous bass-baritone to evoke both patriarchal privilege and uncertainty. The chorus of Handmaids, singing Bible texts in chorales, became the brainwashed majority. Conductor David Angus led a taut, balanced performance.

Director Anne Bogart, aided by movement director Shura Baryshnikov, cannily zeroed in on the group rituals of Handmaid life in Gilead, which included processions, practicing for childbirth, attending at a birth, and executing transgressors. Designer James Schuette created a simple cinderblock and neon-lined well at the center of the basketball arena. A few bits of furniture—Offred’s bed, the Commander’s table, a shop sign—were quickly whisked in and out as necessary. Costume colors established everybody’s status in the hierarchy and video designer Adam J. Thompson supplied the creepy images of the executed hanging on the Wall, a menacing symbol of the consequences of disobedience, which the Handmaids visit regularly. Brian Scott’s lighting segued between the chill of the present and the warmth of memory.

The space required some sound enhancement for balance and J Jumbelic’s artful sound design kept the voices, for the most part, sounding natural. Whatever the trade off, the immediacy of the experience in this unconventional space, with the audience on bleachers on three sides and the orchestra behind the singers instead of in a pit, was worth it. The opera was powerful on a proscenium stage; here, its horror reached out and grabbed you.

—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).

The Phoenix’ Review: An Exciting Life Turned to Ash

An opera about Mozart’s collaborator Lorenzo Da Ponte dulls down that librettist’s picaresque story.

Thomas Hampson as Lorenzo Da Ponte in ‘The Phoenix’ Photo: Lynn Lane By Heidi Waleson April 30, 2019 3:32 p.m. ET

Houston

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte were a perfect partnership, creating “Le nozze di Figaro,” “Don Giovanni” and “Così fan tutte,” three of the greatest operas ever written. One could only wish that some of that alchemy had rubbed off on Tarik O’Regan and John Caird, respectively composer and librettist (as well as director) of “The Phoenix, ” which is based on Da Ponte’s life story and had its world premiere on Friday at Houston Grand Opera. Instead, their opera is text-heavy and musically repetitive, with none of the quicksilver wit of the man who was its inspiration.

Da Ponte’s picaresque life story is certainly good fodder for theater. Born to Jewish parents in Italy in 1749, he converted with his family to Catholicism at 14, and got an education by studying for the priesthood. Banished from Venice for debauchery, he made his way to Vienna and for a few halcyon years collaborated with Mozart. Then their patron Emperor Joseph II died (as did Mozart), and Da Ponte was dismissed from court. Da Ponte married and moved on to London, where he was librettist for the King’s Theatre. Beset by creditors, he and his family fled to America in 1805, where he embarked on a series of commercial endeavors (grocer, schoolmaster, distiller, opera house impresario), all of which failed. He died in 1838, at age 89.

Messrs. O’Regan and Caird constructed the tale as a kind of tragicomedy. The 83-year-old Lorenzo (Thomas Hampson) and his son Enzo (Luca Pisaroni) have written an opera about Da Ponte’s life to raise money for the New York opera house venture. “The Phoenix” (which is also the title of the Da Pontes’ opera) is its dress rehearsal, with action occurring both onstage and backstage, sometimes simultaneously. Six principal characters play all the main roles in the opera-within-an-opera, with the Da Pontes playing themselves, and Enzo also playing his father as a young man. The title refers both to Mozart’s wry description of a great librettist—a mythical creature “forever talked about, but never seen”—and to Da Ponte’s own serial rebirths from the ashes.

Early scenes nod to the real Mozart-Da Ponte technique of integrating serious and comic moments; the orchestral language, particularly the use of mallet instruments, is fresh and appealing; and the imaginatively harmonized choral numbers are arresting. However, the solo vocal writing, particularly Lorenzo’s lengthy narrations of his early life, is uninteresting, and so much of the music is slow that the pacing of the opera sags. At first, these serious numbers have some dramatic force: there is the plaintive lullaby that Da Ponte and his Venetian mistress sing to their child; the somber departure of Emperor Joseph to war; a passacaglia for chorus and soloists that ingeniously marries Da Ponte’s life in London to the ebb and flow of the Thames. But as one ponderous set piece follows another, particularly in Act II, the disasters and failures, rather than Da Ponte’s urge for life, are what resonate, and not in a fun way.

There are other technical drawbacks. The libretto alternates between English and Italian, with so much information packed into it that the listener is glued to the supertitles, regardless of which language is being sung. There are a great many episodes, but while we are continually told things about Da Ponte and his aspirations, the music never really lets us feel his complexities as a character. In part, the division of the role was the problem: Mr. Hampson, who had a distractingly bad wig and sounded stentorian, was more of a narrator than a participant. Mr. Pisaroni’s lyrical baritone was more affecting, but the opera still painted both the rakish young Lorenzo and the ambitious Enzo in broad strokes.

Mezzo-soprano Rihab Chaieb sang the role of Maria Malibran (the famous 19th-century singer); in the Da Pontes’ opera, she played Nancy, Lorenzo’s long-suffering wife, and Mozart—the two people Lorenzo truly loved. She was better as the fey, unearthly Mozart; as Nancy, her voice took on a slightly metallic edge. Tenor Chad Shelton was Patrick Kelly, who had all the other male roles (Casanova, Emperor Joseph, etc.); they seemed musically interchangeable. As Giulietta and Faustina, high sopranos Lauren Snouffer and Elizabeth Sutphen supplied some welcome comic relief, battling performance nerves backstage and each other on it, as a pair of dueling divas in London. Patrick Summers was the efficient conductor; he also played the fortepiano continuo for the secco recitatives.

David Farley’s rickety-looking set evoked the backstage of a simple theater and used the turntable for fluid scene changes; cleverly, when Da Ponte got to America in Act II, the background opened up to suggest bigger spaces while maintaining the theater conceit. He also designed the basic period costumes. Lighting designer Michael James Clark differentiated the many locations; for example, sneaky, dark Venice from enlightened Vienna. Mr. Caird’s functional directing got the story from episode to episode, but it couldn’t help the opera catch fire.

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).