You know you’ve got trouble when the most entertaining part of a night at the Seattle Opera happens before you enter the lobby. The small band of anti-fur protesters, who seem to turn up for all Seattle events at which the rare fox stole might be spotted, clumped damply outside the opera house, jerking their plastic-covered placards in the faces of opera denizens, as if Seattle were a hotbed of baby seal battery, and the Seattle Opera House the mink-lined Met.
Of course, the Seattle Opera House is not the Met, and that’s part of the trouble. On the one hand, the venue was originally built as an all-purpose high-culture center, and therefore failed to benefit from the sophisticated, performance-specific acoustical and architectural design that, say, the brand new and generously endowed Benaroya Hall did. Because of this, experiencing an opera at the Seattle Opera House is something like experiencing an opera at the Airport Marriott. That half-moon shape and the ’70s-style paneling suck up sound like a sponge.
On the other hand, the Seattle Opera House ranks, perhaps unfairly, among the second-tier houses. This means that–without the resources of the first-tier houses–it often inherits the unfashionable, unwieldy cast-offs and dreadful portable set pieces of previous New York and Washington, D.C. seasons. Their current production, Samuel Barber’s Vanessa, is one such legacy.
Set in “an unnamed northern country, about 1905,” the opera tells the story of Vanessa (soprano Sherri Greenawald), a virgin Baroness who sips endless cups of tea in a well-appointed mansion surrounded by a thick birch forest. There she has pined away a couple of decades on behalf of her long lost love, Anatol. Her mother, the Old Baroness (contralto Sheila Nadler), who refuses to speak to her for no particular reason, and her dour virgin niece Erika (mezzo-soprano Kimberly Barber) round out the lively domestic scene. All these spinster sistahs need is a dose of testosterone, and sure enough, it arrives in the form of Anatol Jr. (tenor Paul Charles Clarke). Anatol Sr. sired Jr. with another woman before kicking off, and Anatol Jr.’s a self-serving, bed-hopping cad, but–in the grand opera tradition–both Vanessa and Erika fall hard. Only the Old Baroness seems unimpressed, but since she’s on the scene solely to serve as a sounding board for all the narcissistic teeth-gnashing that goes on, it doesn’t much matter what she thinks. Also in the grand opera tradition (particularly the Neapolitan variety), duty and virtue win out over love: Anatol Jr. marries an eager Vanessa and carries her off to Paris, and Erika sacrifices her happiness to stay behind and take Vanessa’s place in the waiting game.
The opera’s pretensions are further hampered by Seattle Rep Artistic Director Sharon Ott’s static, unimaginative direction. Ott is uncomfortable embracing some of opera’s best conventions, such as staging arias downstage center. (This is also the best way to get around bad acoustics.) But since Ott seems more comfortable with melodrama on a smaller scale, she consistently underutilizes the space and the gorgeous voices at her disposal. In a scene in which the wounded Erika, in the opera’s ultra-diva moment, unleashes some of the evening’s finest mezzo phrasing, Ott muffles her behind a set of folding screens, while the Old Baroness responds–in rich contralto anguish–seated stiffly in an overstuffed upstage chair. All we get is Grandma’s profile and a few high notes.
The lifelessness of this production ultimately has less to do with the venue or the direction, however, than it does with Vanessa itself. American composer Samuel Barber wrote the opera just 40 years ago, but Vanessa is a lumpy mix of earlier styles. The plot is vintage romanticism, the motivations mimic psychological realism, the characters are mere symbols. It never gels. Of course, none of this would matter if the music worked, but Barber’s lugubrious score lacks passion and musical depth. Worse yet, Gian Carlo Menotti’s libretto spews laughably incoherent pronouncements (“Brief is the day for blindness and madness,” and “He who hungers for the past will be fed on lies,” etc.), clunky comparisons (Erika is at turns a wild dove, a wounded bird, a red rose, and a Christmas rose), and mixed metaphors: “Like a burning phoenix, you soared out of the ashes of my shattered dreams.” If you’re looking for drama, you’ll fare better with the anti-fur set.