From around the world: Berlin.(International)(Opera Review)

Last season marked not only Andreas Homoki's first as chief director of Berlin's Komische Oper but the company's least successful in years. At most performances, fewer than half the seats were sold, and some productions reportedly attracted fewer than a hundred people a night. Homoki, who initially bragged about leading the Komische to new artistic heights, wound up having to cope with one flop after another. The company's rapid decline fueled rumors that the city's politicians would discuss shutting town the house--and the urge seemed justifiable.

Consequently, to start his second season, Homoki (who in the meantime, after rolling a couple of political strings, replaced the Intendant who had hired him) had to come up with a production that would sell--at any price. He chose Emmerich Kalman's operetta Die Csardasfurstin, from 1915, and opening night Sept. 7) registered as a shock. This shallow production might have been tolerable in a second-rate provincial house. But at a company that prides itself on being practically the birthplace of Regietheater and has long enjoyed a reputation for thorough, intelligent and profound interpretations, it was devastating.

Homoki seemed determined to confirm every wrong-headed prejudice there is against operetta: this production was indeed sugary, kitschy, silly and superficial. Hartmut Meyer designed the tasteless set--a revue staircase on a turntable, caged inside a palm-lined hothouse, lit in pink, flaming red, bright green or blue--where the cast ran busily back and forth, upstairs and down, when they ...