Alcina by Handel (review)

ALCINA Composed by Handel Directed by Andrei Serban New York City Opera (New York) William 0. Beeman It has become a commonplace in the twentieth century to view opera as the most hopeless of theatrical genres, impossible to deal with in any fresh or original way. Then comes Andrei Serban ready to tackle a whole series of classic operas and treat them like Chekhov, drawing out the most dramatic aspects of their essence, staging them in imaginative ways, and in general causing audiences to see them anew. After dealing in this way with The Marriage of Figaro and Traviata, Serban seemed to be taking on an impossible task in trying to bring freshness to Handel's ultra-Baroque Alcina, almost quintessentially a non-dramatic work with vast stretches of florid music sung by lone singers planted solidly stage center. Nevertheless, his rendering of this work at the New York City Opera, in conjunction with musical director Raymond Leppard, manages to be continually interesting, with surprising theatrical novelty throughout. The story of the opera, drawn from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, concerns the sorceress Alcina, who detains people on her enchanted island, turning them into rocks and beasts when she tires of them. Her current favorite, Ruggiero, has a sweetheart, Bradamante, who comes to the island with her guardian disguised as a man. Alcina's sister, Morgana, falls in love with Bradamante, and has some difficult time understanding what is going on when the girl must confess that she is a female. Eventually, Ruggiero is reunited with Bradamante (after himself having a few starts at being approached amorously by what he thinks to be another male). Alcina's power is broken, and she descends with her sister to the underworld. When one understands that Ruggiero was originally a castrato role, now played by a woman, one sees that Serban already has a pretty contemporary stage situation to play with. Here is a woman playing what purports to be a male being approached by another woman disguised as a male, who is in turn being wooed by another woman who thinks she really is a male. The plot begins to look as if it were written by Charles Ludlam. Serban takes this and allows it to be played to the hilt. In particular he takes the role of Morgana and converts her into a vamp cum clown. She is both funny and seductive, and manages this without losing a note of her florid Baroque singing style. 81 In essence, however, Alcina is a fantasy. In this production all of the people turned into beasts are in the spirit of the evening. They are in fact alligators in evening dress. Moreover, they are In stark black and white, a theme carried out throughout the color scheme of the stage. In the choruses they sing in Alcina's court, they move with comic stateliness producing an unbelievable choreography that keeps the proceedings both fanciful and formal-a perfect contemporary comment on Baroque opera. Serban is always at his most original when dealing with space. His recent production of Uncle Vanya at La Mama allowed the audience to look down into Vanya's home, which was nearly full-scale.The stage movements there became the movements of real people transiting real living spaces. In Alcina Serban had a different problem: how to soften the starkness of the operatic stage, and somehow draw the audience into the spirit of the fantasy . He did this by placing full length mirrors on the stage from top to bottom . The audience was reflected in them, and thus became part of the ac- (n C C', 0) tion. In so doing, he was able to transform the stage of the New York State Theater into an arena. Alcina then stopped being a remote and pristine production -it became in effect folk theatre. The folk theatre theme was itself given a contemporary feel when the heroes of the piece, in doing battle with the sorceress, had to confront her hoards of beasts. These were represented by a wall full of reptiles painted in the same stark black and white as the black-tie alligators had worn. If one 82 tired of the...