In review: from around the world: Berlin.(International)(Die Tote Stadt)(Opera Review)

If Berlin's opera devotees were asked to name the most thrilling, most memorable productions in any of the city's three houses during the last twenty-five years, hardly anyone would hesitate to include Gotz Friedrich's 1983 Deutsche Oper staging of Erich Wolfgang Korngold's 1920 opera Die Tote Stadt on the list. That production--starring Friedrich's wife, Karan Armstrong, as Marietta and James King as Paul with breathtakingly beautiful sets by Andreas Reinhardt that captured the gloomy, morbid atmosphere of old Brugge perfectly--is justly considered a legend, a distinction that the new DOB production, which opened on January 25, will never achieve.

Two previous stagings by Philippe Arlaud (Die Frau ohne Schatten at Deutsche Oper and Tannhauser at Bayreuth) and this Tote Stadt have convinced me that the French director-designer has absolutely no talent in either capacity. The complexity of Tote Stadt's spellbinding story--a man who has lost touch with reality after the death of his adored wife tries to relive the past with a woman who resembles her--seemed to have gone unnoticed by Arlaud. Instead of simply telling the story of the opera, Arlaud buried Die Tote Stadt beneath a totally meaningless circus show, packed with acrobats, jugglers and bad dancers, wearing pig masks and dressed in neon-yellow tutus--each of which sported a long, red devil's tail.

To make matters worse, Arlaud degraded the principal characters to pathetic, one-dimensional caricatures. Paul looked like a taller, heavier version of Danny DeVito's Penguin in Barman Returns, Marietta like an inflatable rubber doll of Jayne Mansfield. The awkward, ugly set--a steep blue rake with a circular, amphitheater-like opening that served as Paul's refuge from the world, a couple of curved mirrors, a shaky purple bridge and a gallery with screens on which black-and-white photographs were projected--only confused things further. The story became unrecognizable. By the time Paul ...