What to do with a Giuseppe Verdi opera that involves a virginal woman being degraded, abducted and treated as so much property, comes with no female chorus and yet is beloved at least in part for its rollicking, macho, musical virility?
That was one challenge for the director Mary Birnbaum. The other was that, in a fiscally responsible world of adaptive reuse, the artistic director of Opera Saratoga is opening the new Lyric Opera of Chicago season with a 19-year-old physical production, featuring towering (and costly) Robert Innes Hopkins verticals on a grand revolving set, formerly the backdrop of Stefano Vizioli’s 2006 staging and replete, then and now, with an epic costume design from Broadway’s Jane Greenwood that offers every possible permutation of masculine courtside puffery. Here, Verdi’s swaggering male courtiers peer, preen and primp, their security of privilege and power permeating all that Verdi composed for them to sing.
The happy result is, to my mind, as good an encapsulation of the former Lyric general director Anthony Freud’s artistic philosophy as anything: make clear you are moving interpretively with the sensibilities of the times but don’t waste everyone’s time by so undermining the pleasures of the traditional repertoire that you’re engaging in a bait-and-switch with the audience. (Freud is now gone but he carefully curated this production; his successor, John Magnum, is not yet at Lyric full-time and did not appear on stage on opening night Saturday.) But we sure know that Birnbaum is in the house as she offers up a “Rigoletto” that’s part revisionism, part rehabilitation and yet thoroughly evincing of the traditional ribald pleasures of Italianate opera-going, which are, of course, rooted in the musical expression of the lusty vitality of life. Especially in this title, which combines musical lightness with raw expressions of agony wrought by folly although rationalized as a curse.
The men of Birnbaum’s “Rigoletto,” which include the Russian baritone Igor Golovatenko, a star of the Bolshoi Opera, in the title role of the hunchbacked court jester and the Mexican tenor Javier Camarena as the perfidious Duke of Mantua, the twit of a man with designs on Rigoletto’s daughter, Gilda, encapsulate that latter quality. Both of these men are superb singers and compelling actors; Golovatenko’s Rigoletto is an encapsulation of tortured yet paternalistic regret while Camarena’s Duke dances expertly on the edge of sexy seducer and a piece of deceptively polished royal trash. You never think for a moment that Gilda would be safe with him, or even enjoy him after a week or two, even though Birnbaum clearly is positing that Gilda wants to be a sexual and political player out of the shadow of a father whose own voice is collapsing in on itself. (Metaphorically speaking, that is; collapsing could not be further from the truth.)
Mané Galoyan, the physically diminutive Armenian soprano who plays Gilda, is spectacularly complex and clearly Birnbaum’s muse, with Gilda one moment clinging to her dad (Galoyan’s hair even became attached to Golovatenko’s doublet opening night) and the other peering out from behind her hair and her anonymity to try and wrestle some kind of future for herself, as vocally manifest to moving effect. The production (which also stars mezzo-soprano Zoie Reams as Maddelena and the imposing Soloman Howard as Sparafucile) implies some of the father-daughter possessive complexities explored by Arthur Miller in “A View From the Bridge,” and yet it separates Gilda very effectively from Rigoletto’s patronizing parenting, suggesting a woman who, had she been born in a different era, would be running something, not trying to escape insecure men.
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Yet Galoyan appears to be having enormous fun, conversing musically as she does with conductor Enrique Mazzola, who works apace with a composition famed for its breaking down of formative barriers and a relationship to the narrative that you’d now describe as filmic, and also, it feels, conversing with the acoustics of the very opera house itself. No mere victim here.
All that said, Birnbaum does not get in the way of one’s empathy with Rigoletto, without which the machinery of the opera does not work. Golovatenko embraces his ruminative soliloquies, set as they are between song and speech, his powerful baritone rising and falling with circumstances that never get any better for him. And to his great credit, Camarena unifies the light-hearted melodies his character emits, for his own selfish pleasures, with the rawness of the music when he does not get his way; you see what attracts Gilda and yet also while she should stay away for her own good.
Well, “good” is a relative term there. That, along with enlightened enjoyment, really is the whole point of Birnbaum’s staging.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
cjones5@chicagotribune.com
Review: “Rigoletto” (4 stars)
When: Through Oct. 6
Where: Lyric Opera House, 20 N. Wacker Drive
Running time: 2 hours, 40 minutes
Tickets: $54-$334 at 312-827-5600 and www.lyricopera.org
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