It was fun to see the first performance of the new Metropolitan Opera production of “La Damnation de Faust” last Friday night – French Canadian director Robert Lepage made his debut at the august Manhattan institution with a multi-media approach that clearly divided the house.
You could tell that the older traditionalists in the audience felt the former Cirque du Soleil stager’s elaborate video projections overwhelmed the acting and the singing of the live performers. The buff, non-singing male acrobats, dressed as devils, who swung around the stage on ropes also gave the performance a distinct Las Vegas feel.
The cultural trendsetters who tend to think “new” equals “genius” could be heard buzzing in the lobby during the one intermission in the two-hour-and-forty-five minute show.
I thought my young friend Francesca put everything into perspective on our way up the aisle when she suggested that most of the projected visuals were so repetitious — and mind-numbingly protracted — that Lepage had turned the stage of the Met into the world’s largest screen saver.
“You’re absolutely right!,” a stranger behind us chimed in when he overheard my friend’s spot-on comment.
The Met program notes point out that composer Hector Berlioz’s version of the Faust story is generally presented as a concert piece rather than as a fully staged opera because of the long orchestral passages.
The opera also suffers from the fact that the plot has become so religiously archaic and socially conservative (Hell is the exclusive preserve of men who have catted around on Earth and Heaven is a place for female virgins).
Lepage inexplicably drops the special effects projections in the final scene where poor old Marguerite (the fantastic soprano Susan Graham) ascends to Heaven by slowly climbing a giant ladder all the way to the top of the Met’s very tall prosenium arch. Just when we need a burst of light and excitement the production peters out (the rigid formation of choral singers around the ladder put me in mind of one of those Pentacostal church services you still see on some cable channels).
It might be a sign of the basically conservative nature of the opera world — and the art form’s need to build broader and younger audiences — that The Met would hire a director who includes in his Playbill bio a “permanent show” in Vegas called “KA.”
You could feel a great deal of warmth in the house for conductor James Levine — who has been ailing recently — but people seemed to be sitting on their hands during most of the opera.
You can make up your own mind about this “Faust” without traveling into Manhattan. Saturday’s matinee performance is being presented as part of the live Met HD transmission series at 1 p.m. at Fairfield University’s Quick Center for the Art. There will be an encore HD showing at 7 p.m. at the Quick. Tickets are $22 for adults, $20 for seniors, and $15 for students and children. For more information call 254-4010.
