DIE LUSTIGE WITWE: Like the Pontevedro without Hanna’s millions, this production was a little
shabby and threadbare but nonetheless good-hearted and, in the end, hard to resist. |
It’s never a good sign when a company can’t get the name of the work it’s performing right. The program cover for Teatro Lirico d’Europa’s presentation at the Cutler Majestic Theatre on Saturday did read, The Merry Widow, but inside, the original German title appeared as Die lustige Weiber rather than Die lustige Witwe. Perhaps the usually reliable (and perhaps overextended) Bulgarian troupe still had Franz Lehár’s catchy “Weiber” chorus ringing in its ears. Or perhaps it had confused Lehár’s hit 1905 operetta with Otto von Nicolai’s 1849 opera adaptation of Shakespeare, Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor.That wasn’t the end of the program puzzles. Camille de Rosillon was to be sung by “Gueorgui Dinev” and Njegus by “Guergui Dinev.” However you spell it, there’s just one Georgi Dinev at Teatro Lirico (I believe he sang Frosch in the Fledermaus the company brought here in 2005), and there’s no way any performer, however accomplished, can play both roles because Camille and Njegus are on stage at the same time and even sing together. There was a pre-curtain announcement that “Paul — ” would be singing Camille; I didn’t catch Paul’s last name, and though I was sitting in the fifth row, I didn’t hear much of his whispery singing, either.
Operetta, with its more modest vocal demands, might seem easier to stage than opera, but it isn’t: everyone has to look good and move well and enunciate and glitter and be gay. The best productions of Die lustige Witwe I’ve seen, both in 2003, were from the Komische Oper in Berlin and New England Light Opera here in Boston; the worst, in 1999, was at the Met, with a static Plácido Domingo and Frederica von Stade. Like the Komische production, this one was presented in the original German (American companies usually do The Merry Widow and Fledermaus in English); the jokes are better, but the subtitles have to keep up, and these didn’t, being out of synch when not missing altogether. (When Baron Zeta finds what he doesn’t realize is his wife’s fan, reads the words “Ich liebe dich” written by her lover, and snorts that the woman’s husband must be an idiot, his clerk, Njegus, mutters, “Das hat er recht!”; “He got that right!” should appear on the screen, but there was nothing.) “Discreet” — a key word in an operetta about sexual diplomacy — was invariably misspelled “discrete.” Enunciation was poor as well.
Die lustige Witwe is set in Paris, where the delegation from the mythical Slavic nation of Pontevedro (the inspiration was the not-so-mythical Montenegro) are in a panic that newly widowed Hanna Glawari, who had wed Pontevedro’s richest banker, will take her 20 million out of the country by marrying one of her many Parisian suitors. The diplomatic solution: get handsome eligible Count Danilo to propose to her. Indeed, Danilo has already proposed to her once, back home, but his uncle forbade the match because Hanna was a commoner — whereupon she snagged the banker. Now they’re both on their high horse, he because she married for money (and he has too much pride to propose to that money), she because he didn’t stand up to his uncle. Baron Zeta, who’s the Pontevedran ambassador to Paris (Danilo is his secretary), has other problems: he suspects it’s his wife, Valencienne, who lost the fan with the incriminating “I love you” written on it. His suspicions are correct, and though Valencienne is trying to give up her lover, young Parisian nobleman Camille, she’s not having much success.
The bottom line for any Merry Widow is an engaging Hanna and Danilo, and Teatro Lirico had that in German soprano Christin Molnár and Bulgarian tenor Orlin Goranov, she throwing out bubbly hints of Beverly Sills, he working the audience with easy charm, his voice breaking with emotion as he recalled the delectable grisettes at Maxim’s. At their first meeting, she recognized him by his snoring and he her by the feel of her ankle (no Moral Majority in Pontevedro, it would seem), and they teased each other mercilessly, but the tension between them dropped after the first act, and their “Mädel/Reiter” duet was cut. Platinum-tressed Bulgarian soprano Snejana Dramcheva played Valencienne as a garish Charo; she hardly looked at Camille, and when she wasn’t vamping the audience, she was mugging (“Oh my God, it’s my husband, he’s going to find out!!!”). She was much more in character in the third act, where Valencienne joins the grisettes. (This makes no sense for the wife of the ambassador, but it’s Lehár’s doing, not Teatro Lirico’s, and anyway you don’t go to operetta for the plot.) As Camille, Paul Horman (surname subsequently provided by the company) was attractively boyish, but he was stiff and ill suited to Dramcheva and had little voice: his “Rosenknospen” (“Rosebud”) aria was barely audible.
