San Francisco. (North America).(The Merry Widow, Falstaff, Jenufa)

Within five minutes of the opening skirmish in San Francisco Opera's attack on The Merry Widow, its new script had touched upon such non-Pontevedrian matters as rolling blackouts and mutual funds. Such were the with-it fancies of playwright Wendy Wasserstein, brought in to tin-plate the spoken dialogue in the Victor Leon--Leo Stein libretto with a contemporary gleam. The songs themselves were left alone (in Christopher Hassall's serviceable 1958 English translation); in this context, their sweet verses came across with a positively Shakespearean resonance.

Director Lotfi Mansouri, in collaboration with Richard Bonynge, had created this version of the Widow, with Hassall's text, in 1981 as a vehicle for Joan Sutherland, padding out the eighty-plus minutes of its already generous score with borrowings from elsewhere in the Lehar canon -- an interminable ballet to a medley from Der Graf von Luxemburg, a bland final piece from Paganini and a comic aria (for the flunky Njegus) that Lehar had tacked onto the Widow later in its history. All told, San Francisco's Widow, in Mansouri's restaging intended as his company farewell, held its audience -- depressingly paltry as witnessed on December 5 -- captive (if not exactly captivated) a near-Wagnerian three and a half hours. The Los Angeles Opera production [see p. 83], first staged by Utah Opera in May 2000 -- running simultaneously in the same version with the same director and designers but without the trendy-Wendy, lugubriously unfunny text -- zoomed past at twenty minutes shorter.

Michael Yeargan's sets -- nearly identical on both California stages -- filled the eye with a pastiche of art-nouveau Paris, including the swirls and squiggles of Hector Guimard's subway entrances; Thierry Bosquet's fin-de-siecle costumes seemed to float free of gravity's constraints. At the Widow's first entrance -- she was sheathed in blazing red atop a staircase engulfed by white-tied admirers -- one had to wonder if another Dolly had been cloned. One might think that the presence of Erich Kunzel on the podium, in his San Francisco Opera debut, should guarantee the proper accents for congenial musical theater. But no, not in this lumbering, joyless pageant of merriment betrayed. ...