From around the world: New York City.(North America--Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival)(Opera Review)

For the first fully staged opera in its thirty-seven-year history, Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival made a judicious choice. Though Mozart's early Il Re Pastore seemed an unlikely work for the occasion--the silly little opera seria, after all, is rarely heard in these parts--there was relative safety in the production itself, a revival of Mark Lamos's admired staging, from the 1991 Glimmerglass Festival. Lamos is one of those directors who can discover dramatic truth in the most glaring artifice. Just as he did a few years ago in his all-male version of Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew, the director contrived a non-realist prism to reveal a work that can seem almost irretrievably removed from our time and consciousness.

Metastasio's libretto, an exercise in concealed identity and royalist piety, combines the stereotypical with the implausible. Lamos's solution: treat it as "an entertainment for royal children," staged in a nursery, with eleven rambunctious kids in modern clothing intervening at every opportunity, installing set pieces, writing comments and serving as an audience for some of the most exhibitionistic arias.

The conceit--a child's view of adults, authority and antiquity, reinforced by naive sets and fantastical costumes--offers plenty of amusement (seen Aug. 16). On reflection, Lamos's approach (and John Conklin's jaunty sets and costumes, imaginatively lighted by ...