From around the world: St. Paul. (North America).(The Handmaid's Tale)(Opera Review)

Minnesota Opera's production of The Handmaid's Tale, the North American premiere of Poul Ruders's widely admired new opera, brought the horrors of Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel disconcertingly dose to home. Heard in English, the original language of Paul Bentley's libretto (given in Ruders's Danish translation at the Copenhagen premiere, in 2000), and seen in director Eric Simonson's emphatically plausible production, Ruders's jarring, musically devastating operatic nightmare comes off less as science-fiction than as an ominous example of what lies latent and simmering all around us. For an American listener, the unfamiliarity of the Danish language enhanced the threatening quality of the Royal Danish Opera production and the resulting CD recording (Dacapo 8.224165-66) but also kept it at a safe remove. Similarly, the unnaturally bright redness of the Handmaids' hooded uniforms spoke of abstract stylization. In St. Paul, designer Robert Israel put them in depressingly drab but realistic gowns, in an indoctrination center with the kind of fluorescent lighting one might find at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Offred, the protagonist, was sung by Elizabeth Bishop, a highly accomplished but unglamorous singer, whose poignant humanity and Everywoman quality contributed further to the gnawing sense that this could happen to anybody. All of this mundanity cut to the bone.

Minnesota Opera achieved very high standards on a strictly musical basis as well. Bishop's warm, heartfelt colorings of Offred's sometimes jagged, sometimes lyrical internal monologues were offset by the riveting, high-lying vocal frenzies of Helen Todd as Aunt Lydia, the chief indoctrinator of the young Handmaids. Todd, a sweet-faced ...