The
Met’s Las Vegas Rigoletto
November
30, 2013
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| Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera |
We're in Las Vegas, circa 1960. “The Duke” is a Sinatra-like
singer and the powerful owner of a casino where vice, money and decadent
entertainment abound. He’s also a serial womanizer who can never get enough of
the ladies. In fact, his entourage of suave men in shiny tuxedos often procures
fresh prey for him. The hunchback Rigoletto is a comic who works for the Duke
and is always poking fun at everyone, often pushing jokes too far. Enter a
wealthy Arab sheik that Rigoletto needles obscenely as a cover to the Duke's
recent conquest of his daughter. The humiliated sheik explodes in a rage and
curses both the Duke and his comic. In a city where luck and superstition rule,
a “maledizione” is serious stuff.
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| Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera |
Rigoletto gets off his comic shift and goes home to his only
family, his beloved daughter Gilda – a beautiful pious young thing he keeps
locked up at home at all times (except to go to Sunday mass). He is too afraid the
vicious men of the town may corrupt his good little girl. Bad luck has it that
somehow the Duke managed to lay eyes on sweet, chaste Gilda and decides he
wants her. This time his trick will be to play the part of a lovey-dovey
penniless student, which works pretty well. Gilda falls romantically head over
heels for the “student” who also seems totally taken though that, too, could
just be another womanizing strategy.
The Duke’s entourage decides to play a prank on Rigoletto and,
thinking that Gilda is his lover, they abduct her and bring her to the Duke for
his entertainment. The Duke deflowers Gilda at lightening speed and immediately
thereafter loses interest. When Rigoletto discovers what happened to his
innocent daughter he is rage-crazed and swears to avenge her honor. His bloody
vengeance involves a hired (but honest) assassin and his slutty sister and it
may or not go as planned...
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| Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera |
Does this sound like an 1851 opera? Or more like a modern mob
movie? The Met showed us that time and place hardly matter as this story could
be set in 16th century Mantua or 1960s Las Vegas and work equally well. Either
way, it’s rife with dramatic tension, fiercely passionate Verdi music and some
of the most beautiful singing.
It was a thrill to see the Met’s 2012 Las Vegas Rigoletto again. The singers in last year’s inaugural
cast for the debut of this new production were so spectacular that it hardly
mattered where they set it. Revisiting it again this year with a new cast and Pablo Heras-Casado conducting, we stand
by the conviction that this modernized production works. The sets are dynamic
and elaborate and the story is only made more vivid than if they had kept it in
sixteenth-century Mantua with men in tights and puffy sleeves.
This time we decided to follow the Met English subtitles
throughout the opera. And not out of necessity (being Italian speakers and
knowing Rigoletto by heart) but
rather because we heard that subtitles, too, were innovated by this production.
The Met pushed its modernizing efforts to the point of revising the traditional
English translation of the Italian libretto to jazz it up with 1960s Vegas
slang. Updating the subtitles to match the era in which the opera is set is
sure blasphemy to purists and really a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it
can engage the non-Italian speaking audience in livelier ways than a verbatim
translation of 19th-century poetic language, which is admirable. On the other
hand, however, it may be distracting and fall into the trap of going too far
and radically changing the sense of the original, which is, indeed, a mortal sin
even by our standards.
The Met did not fall into such trap and offered a refreshingly
updated and often clever translation by Michael Panayos and Paul Cremo, without
ever departing from the original core meaning but rather just massaging the
text with glittery period touches that most times worked pretty well. Here’s an
example:
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| Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera |
Original Libretto:
DUCA
Ma
dee luminoso
In
corte tal astro qual sole brillare.
Per
voi qui ciascuno dovrà palpitare.
Per
voi già possente la fiamma d'amore
Inebria,
conquide, distrugge il mio core.
CONTESSA
Calmatevi
…
Traditional Translation:
DUKE
So
bright a star should be shedding
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| Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera |
You
would make every heart beat faster here.
The
fires of passion already flare
headily,
conquering, consuming my heart.
COUNTESS
COUNTESS
Calm
yourself!
“Rat Pack” Translation:
DUKE
Your
movie-star looks
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| Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera |
Every
heart in this club
should
be beating for you
You’re
irresistible, baby
you
make me burn with love
you
send me to the moon!
COUNTESS
Take it easy, fella!
The “astro,” or star,
metaphor carries over into a reference to movie starlets, and the Duke’s court
is appropriately reconfigured as a club, while the Petrarchan language of the
consuming fires of love translate directly into hepcat talk. It’s colorful and
clever and almost even more successfully poetic with respect to the otherwise
rather bland conventional English translation also presented here. After all,
the Duke’s character is the kind of superficial lady’s man who would have come
up with zingers like: “Come on, baby, let’s give it a whirl!”
When it comes to narrative strategies, Michael Mayer’s production
not only remains true to the core of the original opera but also adds several
touches that flesh out better the characters. The Duke’s is one of the
characterizations that benefited most from the Vegas take. In classic
productions, when in Act II he is sad because he thinks Gilda has been kidnapped and
he starts going all mushy about she being “the one,” it is always a bit hard
to believe since the Duke is supposed to be a chauvinist womanizer. This
production has him do lines of cocaine and drink hard liquor while he sings
these arias, thus suggesting, in line with the core of the character, that the
Duke was just babbling under the effects of hard drugs and stiff alcohol, and,
no matter how convinced he sounds in his singing, his convictions are as
steadfast as a feather in the wind. Later, in Act III this Sinatra-like Duke
sings the famous misogynistic aria “La donna e’ mobile / qual piuma al vento”
while twirling around the pole of a strip club, making it clear (in case there
was any doubt) that he’s the fickle one, not women.
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Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera
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Another stroke of genius is the Rat Pack transformation of the Duke’s entourage that perfectly
reflects the goliardic spirit of the courtiers, and very entertainingly so.
Their chorus scenes are extremely vivid and effective, with a group of men in
shiny multi-color tuxedos and a lot of hair gel gallivanting around in grand
early-1960s cinematic style, all while singing Verdi. The three main Rat Pack
characters, Borsa (Alexander Lewis),
Marullo (Jeff Mattsey) and Count
Ceprano (David Crawford) were
definitely more fleshed out here than in other productions. Inspired by the
likes of Sammy Davis, Jr., Dean Martin and Sam Giancana, they evidently had a
lot of fun with their roles and they were a pleasure to watch with their
shenanigans, especially during some of the musical interludes.
This production at times even improves the narrative when compared
to a more traditional setting. In fact, in Act II classic productions always
struggle with a weak plot point when Rigoletto cannot hear the courtiers
kidnapping his screaming daughter while he holds a ladder because he has a mask
over his eyes (that allegedly also covers his ears?!?). Mayer cleverly solves
the problem by sending Rigoletto “upstairs” in an elevator so that he’s not
physically there when the actual kidnapping occurs and his failure to notice is
thus made credible.
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| Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera |
Željko Lučić was just so
spectacular last year that it was going to be a tall order for Dmitri Horostovsky to match his
predecessor’s performance in the eponymous role. With his action movie star
good looks, Dmitri is not your typical Rigoletto. And boy did they do a number
on him in make-up! His transformation from “barihunk” into old hunchback with
paunch and a few strands of white hair combed across an almost bald
scalp was terrific, particularly since the proud shaking of his flowing silver
mane is one of Dmitri's signature moves in virtually every other role he
performs. Also, one would think that both his haughty acting and fierce singing
style generally better suit a sexy villain rather than the hunch-backed,
pathos-invoking paterfamilias at the center of Verdi’s Rigoletto.
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| Photo credit: Ruby Washington / The New York Times |
Dmitri’s acting was intensely accurate and generally successful in
getting into character, showing a range that we rarely see from him. In the
first scene he was hamming it up with the lounge dancers and twisting his hips
like Elvis as he taunted the sheik, rendering the comic side of Rigoletto very
energetic when compared to traditional settings. Horostovsky was a fairly
convincing tender father in his duets with Gilda, however his best stage
presence (not surprisingly) was in the raging bits, so much that in “Cortigiani, vil razza dannata,” he was a
bit too busy forcefully acting and running from one courtier to the other,
affecting a bit the intensity of his singing. While Dmitri’s angry-edged
baritone sounded on the snarling end at times, he consistently delivered deep
dark tones with hints of a smooth sweetness that made for a vocally charismatic
Rigoletto. The evening we saw him, his voice felt unusually restrained in the
first act, but when he loosened up he was sensational. His duets with Gilda
were as lovely and heart wrenching as ever, “Fanciulla piangi” making the fanciulla of us cry copiously
and Dmitri’s vocal performance in the third act ranged from vengeful to deeply
dramatic to desperately defeated, just the way we like a Rigoletto.
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| Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera |
But it was the young soprano, Sonya
Yoncheva, who stole the show while stepping in to replace Aleksandra Kurzak
(pregnant with tenor Roberto Alagna’s child). Yoncheva sang consistently
stronger than anybody else on stage, outshining even all of the seasoned Met
veterans in this cast, including both Horostovsky and Polenzani. The piercing
purity of her voice streamed effortlessly from her petite frame. With her frail
yet powerful lyricism and her charming presence, Yoncheva dominated her scenes
gracefully and tragically. Fresh faced and youthful, she really looked the part
and embodied all the vulnerability of the poor tragic naïve Gilda. Yoncheva did
not win Placido Domingo’s Operalia competition in 2010 for nothing – definitely
a singer to keep an eye on.
Matthew
Polenzani is growing on us, while we were not convinced by his Nemorino in
2012, we enjoyed him in Maria Stuarda and Così and really
appreciated him as the Duke. He delivered clean, fresh sound, clear
articulation, on point tempo and musicality, and great Sinatra-like acting. On
the whole, he is highly likeable, but he still does not stir the deep turmoil
that a world-class Italian-style tenor should be capable of. We find Polenzani
to be often too high pitched; lacking a certain manly depth, with his voice
still sounding almost too young, remaining too firmly on the surface.
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| Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera |
Slovak bass Stefan Kocán
always exudes charisma with commanding stage presence and his Sparafucile was
no exception. While we've seen and loved him before in the role, this time his
acting got even better, portraying the honest villain (he may be a hired
assassin but he's not a thief!) with the sleek confidence of a film noir actor.
Vocally, Kocán has a deep, rich and smooth tone that somehow comes as a
surprise from such a young singer and is always a pleasure to hear. We wish
there were more extensive bass roles around so that we could get more Kocán
–looking forward to seeing him as Konchak in Prince Igor in February!
A lot has been said about the spectacular sets of this production,
for which no detail was small enough, from the diverse use of the “neon
vocabulary” throughout the three acts, to the wink-wink references to the Met’s
own decorative elements (gates, chandeliers, curtains), to the Nevada license
plate of Sparafucile’s car ("SPARFUC"). We can only let the pictures
speak for themselves and salute the Met’s set design team for the terrific
effort.
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| Photo credit: Ken Howard / Met Opera |
This production is to us the perfect example of a clever new take
on a classic and thus a must see for virtually everybody: it may entertainingly
lure opera-virgins into the art form, convert the traditionalist to
modernizations of classic repertoire and refresh Rigoletto for those who know it by heart. Let’s hear it for Met
Opera taking more calculated risks like this!
– Lei & Lui
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