From around the world: London.(International ... Franco Zeffirelli brings an innovative production of Pagliacci)(Opera Review)

The circus came to town when Franco Zeffirelli's all-singing, all-dancing spectacular Pagliacci, first seen in Rome in 1992, arrived at the Royal Opera House (July 10). It's been more than forty years since the company staged a new production of Leoncavallo's verismo warhorse. The last one was by Zeffirelli too, bur it was a tame, traditional affair compared with the Hollywood extravaganza recently on view.

There were, in addition to the principals, 145 people onstage, including fifty actors--Canio's supposedly rundown troupe of players had twelve members beyond Leoncavallo's requirements--and thirty-six children, of whom sixteen sang, fourteen acted and six were acrobats.

The full Zeffirelli effect was felt immediately after debutant Georgian baritone Lado Ataneli delivered a nervous but vocally expansive prologue. The curtain went up on a block of Neapolitan tenements topped by a highway overpass. Each of the six tenements had a balcony. Each balcony housed a dramatic vignette of colorful Neapolitan domesticity. Each vignette was worthy of an opera in itself. Meanwhile the chorus surged on, every member a character and most of them seemingly exhibitionists: there were teenage skaters and a variety of streetwalkers, pimps and pre-op transsexuals, not to mention a donkey and a full-scale wedding party (it rained rice), together with--repeatedly scampering across the stage like swarms of swallows in the air--kids, kids, kids.

Mercifully, things quieted down somewhat fur Ataneli's scene with Angela Gheorghiu's Nedda and her subsequent tryst with Dmitri Hvorostovsky's Silvio, while the staging insistently maintained a low visual background murmur that constantly threatened to break out anew. The donkey, indeed, did break out anew--his offstage braying resounded at the start of the love duet, causing a smile to break out over Hvorostovsky's features as he launched into the first of his seductive phrases. But he held firm and continued singing, while ...