Washington, D.C.(North America)(review of Andrea Chenier performed by Salvatore Licitra)(Opera Review)

Anyone inclined to dismiss Andrea Chenier as the equivalent of a B picture would probably undergo a rapid attitude adjustment if confronted with Mariusz Trelinski's illuminating, provocative treatment of the piece. The Polish director, known initially for his moviemaking and theater work, ventured into opera in 1999, with a staging of Madama Butterfly in Warsaw that also served as his introduction to American audiences in 2001, courtesy of Washington National Opera. If anything, Trelinski's concept for Chenier (seen Sept. 11), a coproduction of Washington National and the Teatr Wielki of Poznan in Poland, proved even more daring and brilliant than his Butterfly, right from the opening scene, with the family at Chateau Coigny emerging from huge cocoons to welcome guests who wore gauzy clothes that revealed bloated bodies, mundane undergarments and weak hoops holding up skirts (and their honor). Wigs, like absurd masses of petrified cotton candy, tectered on their heads at precarious angles. These horrid people pranced and danced, but their gavotte steps were halting.

Black and white were the dominant colors of Boris Kudlicka's set for Act I, applied in ghostly and ghastly touches to the upper-crusties, cheekily to the liveried servants (one of whom scurried about with a vacuum cleaner over his shoulder). Red, white and blue took over in the next act, celebrating the Revolution as a perverse Broadway revue, with bright lights and high-stepping showgirls in cowboy boots. A festooned guillotine, looking like a grotesque Maypole, loomed upstage. All the while, the costumes by Magdalena Teslawska and Pawel Grabarczyk juggled eras so that the plot was never confined to its original setting. Timelessness, not ordinarily attributed to this opera, was steadily intensified to give added weight to the last two acts, where blood-red periodically penetrated the overall blackness and bleakness of the color scheme.

All of this underlined Trelinski's point (expressed in a note in the program book) that there is a "universal, almost mythical" aspect to the opera's story, one that "focuses upon the mechanism of terror that history repeats in different varieties to ...