OPERA REVIEW: THE MAGIC FLUTE
30 JAN/11

JOHN COULBOURN - QMI Agency
Rating: 3.5 out of 5

If David Copperfield isn’t looking over his shoulder, maybe he should be.

Director Diane Paulus has apparently set her sights on a disappearing act that would make Copperfield’s famous now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t routine with the Statue of Liberty seem downright picayune. For while Copperfield was content with merely erasing an American icon from the New York skyline, Paulus is apparently determined to alter the landscape of the world of opera in her determination to make every last bit of magic disappear from the landscape of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s THE MAGIC FLUTE.

And, truth to tell, she comes impressively close to achieving just that in the Canadian Opera Company production that premièred on the stage of the Four Seasons Saturday. And, to make her achievement even more impressive, she does it with precious little interference with either the fanciful libretto created by Emanuel Schikaneder or with the genius of Mozart’s enduring score.

In the case of the former, she and her design team (sets and costumes by Myung Hee Cho and lighting by Scott Zielinski) simply attempt, at least for the first act, to transform the opera into a play-within-a-play — a sort of fanciful homage to a late 18th century birthday party for the opera’s heroine Pamina. But while Paulus et al cite Shakespeare’s work as their inspiration, what they actually manage to achieve on stage smacks more of Chekhov’s THE SEAGULL in the hands of amateurs than any sort of professional take on A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. It’s a dull, stilted affair, only too rarely enlivened by flashes of design inspiration, each too quickly dulled by a directoral vision best described as stolid.

But ultimately, the work is saved, not just by Mozart’s enduring genius but by the quality of the artists assembled by the COC to bring the work to life. It turns out that even under Paulus’ plodding tutelage, artists the likes of tenor Michael Schade (cast as the hero Tamino) and soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian (cast as his lovely and loving Pamina) can shine, particularly when they are backed by the superb COC Orchestra under the flawless direction of Johannes Debus.

Still, one can’t help but wonder just how much more entertaining — even magical — the opera might have been if artists like coloratura Aline Kutan, baritone Rodion Pogossov and soprano Lisa DiMaria had received a bit of real direction for their performances as the Queen of the Night, Papageno and Papagena respectively, instead of simply being moved around like chess pieces and told to look busy.

Meanwhile, from a design perspective, Cho seems, at best, uncommitted. While her opening scenes seem at first to be very much of the period, at least as interpreted by Disney, that illusion is shattered by the arrival of the Queen of the Night and her court, collectively wearing enough black vinyl to reupholster an entire suburb’s rec room. And while Cho occasionally comes up with dazzling bits to distract her audience — a LION KING-inspired menagerie in the first act, a bespangled trial by fire and water in the second that suggests Toronto’s sequin industry is back on an even keel in the wake of PRISCILLA’s departure — Paulus fails to capitalize on even those, smothering them with the same turgid staging that overlays the rest of the production.

In the end, of course, it is no more possible to remove the magic from THE MAGIC FLUTE than it is to take the wonder out of ALICE IN WONDERLAND or the beauty out of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST. But thanks to Paulus’ determination to turn sleight of hand into slight of hand, the magic is most definitely in the ear of the beholder, not the eye.