The Magic Flute

The Minnesota Opera Company's April 2014 production of "The Magic Flute" is exciting, wholly innovative, and wonderfully thought-provoking. Whether the approach to opera on display in this show, an import from the Berlin Komische Oper via the Los Angeles Opera company is another question. Opera is generally static: a few people standing rigidly in place and singing in the approximate direction of one another, although careful to remain facing the audience sufficiently to project their voices across the auditorium. The orchestra is hidden. Sometimes, there are processionals and recessionals that cross the stage and, on other occasions, a chorus will gather and, more or less, motionlessly address their massed voices to the spectators. In this production of Mozart's opera, the dimension in which the singers act is flattened to a plane -- this is consistent with the ordinary staging of opera and true to the form but here heightened to an extraordinary point. On this plane, animated images are projected. The singers emerge through the surface of the plane by various doorways that rotate to reveal the singers pinned against the surface of the screen. In many instances, the actors hover in mid-air, seemingly occupying tiny shelves like religious statues poised high above the floor of a church. (The effect is initially startling and a little frightening -- the players are pinned to the wall like butterfly speciments so that it appears that a single misstep would plunge them twenty or thirty feet to the stage floor; I suspect that the singers are somehow harnessed into their position and spun into visibility through the screen as if on a kind of rotating "lazy Susan".) The singers can't really move in most instance since their motions must be coordinated with images appearing alongside them on the screen -- they perform with gestures, straitjacketed against the flat plane on which the film is projected, their torsos and faces, painted white to catch the light, like cameos or ivory bas-relief slightly extruded from the screen. The effect is something like certain Disney films or Robert Zemeckis' "Whose Afraid of Roger Rabbit" -- that is, live three-dimensional characters interacting with cartoon interlocutors in a stylized cartoon landscape. The images projected alongside the actors are, often, extraordinarily interesting and present a challenging and idiosyncratic interpretation of the heavily symbolic (or allegorical) action comprising the opera. There is always something for the eye to decode, decipher, or enjoy: little ruby-red hearts emerge from singers who are like alabaster busts protruding just slightly from the screen and the little hearts as images of love, spin and dance, and sometimes burst and shatter. The Queen of the Night is a white Egyptian torso suspended atop thirty foot-long spider legs that are as sharply pointed as lances -- the legs twitch and dance as she sings and, sometimes, vertiginous webs appear beneath where the actress is embedded in the screen high above the stage. There are many interesting comical effects: Papageno drinks a cocktail through a straw from a huge martini glass and, then, sees pink elephants that prance around and menace him. Love duets are staged between figures encased by the screen and surrounded by blue flowers and yellow buzzing bees and flocks of little stylized birds that flit here and there -- the "birds and the bees," you see. The eponymous "magic flute" is represented, annoyingly, I thought, as a nude Tinker Bell and the magic bells are portrayed as a dozen plump little female CanCan dancers. The interaction between the live singers and the animation is often astounding and, even, thrilling. However, there is something claustrophobic about confining all action to a single dimension, perhaps, a yard wide and the approach has certain definite limitations -- one of the highlights of the opera is when the magic bells set Monostatos's black fiends helplessly prancing; in most productions, the menacing black figure suddenly become ridiculous and comical and are, literally, danced off-stage. In this show, the black army is portrayed as actors wearing big, bad wolf masks and, when the bells sound, they stand motionless in a row deployed against the screen while the animation projects women's legs, complete with garter belts below their waists daintily kicking and pirouetting. The effect is extraordinary, but it's also static and not really very funny. Furthermore, the animation imposes a very distinct interpretative scheme on the opera -- we are more or less told exactly what to think about the strange, masque-like proceedings. The animation is by an English avant-garde company called "1927" and they spoil the great reveal near the end of Act One -- that is, the revelation that the aggrieved Queen of the Night, who portrays herself as a mourning mother is, in fact, perhaps, the villain of this somewhat misognyistic opera. By depicting the Queen of the Night, from the outset, as a giant spider it's pretty clear what she means and how we are to view her -- and this, I think, ruins an important ambiguity in the opera. Even more idiosyncratic is the determination to treat the noble, if pedantically didactic Sarastro, as a giant robot-master. In this show, Sarastro wears a sinister top-hat and frock-coat, has followers that are dressed the same way, and appears like a frightening figure from E.T.A. Hoffmann (or "The Tales of Hoffmann"), something like the character that animated Coppelia, half Dr. Mabuse and half Anton Mesmer. Sarastro is associated with dozens of robotic animals -- monkeys and horses and, even, elephants all built from gears and clockwork. The concept is that Sarastro's version of the Enlightenment is all soul-less automatons: springs, intermeshed gears and apparatus, monstrous devices that bear huge eyes at their apex. This is completely opposed to Mozart's vision of Sarastro and his noble Freemason followers, but is, I think, a valid, if reductionist, interpretation of the opera. But if Sarastro is merely a Dr. Frankenstein, a sort of mad doctor leading an army of sinister robots, then, the ostensibly happy ending to this opera makes no sense. The animators understand this and, at the very end of the show, the imagery projected on the screen stutters, breaks down, and, then, the film seems to melt. In the default of the projected images, with the machine broken, the chorus steps forth, no longer in any kind of discernible costume and delivers Mozart's final sententious messages about love and virtue and brotherhood singing straight to the audience. It's like a breath of fresh air -- we get a sense of liberation from the all-encompassing machine, in this case, the animated projections that have trapped and confined the actors throughout the three-hour opera. This works well, but makes hash of Mozart's intentions, although, I suppose, extracting an interesting, if controversial, argument of this kind from this sort of staple of the operatic repertory is a good thing. Less successful is the staging of Sarastro's famous aria, "In diesem heiligen Halle" -- perhaps, the most noble and ennobling scene in the play. As Sarastro sings, the Masons dress the heroine in a resplendent gowns, the apparel of a Masonic adept, an extraordinary and generous gesture since the Order forbids women from being present at its rituals or entering its temple. The animation shows us this scene occurring a wall ripped and shredded with a dozen peeping eyes peering into the sacred space where the heroine is undressed and, then, clad in the Masonic raiments. This makes no sense and is completely contrary to the tenor of the aria and the scene. At the performance that I saw, the singers seemed intimidated by the technical innovations and, perhaps, frightened by the elaborate rotating mechanisms that slung them out over the stage floor. Harnessed and belted above the stage, they seemed half-afraid to sing loudly. Furthermore, the two opposing principles -- male and female -- were weak. "The Magic Flute" makes its points sonically -- Sarastro's implausibly deep basso profundo is poised against the Queen of the Night's ridiculously high-pitched coloratura arias. Here Sarastro couldn't quite hit the low notes: I couldn't hear the bottom pitches that he is forced to excavate out of his belly. And the Queen of the Night couldn't quite get the high notes either -- a shame in both instances. The show is a great experience: it revives Mozart for you and makes you worry about his opera and re-think its premises -- this is a wonderful thing, but as an opera, this production doesn't exactly work.