DEROMANTICIZED TCHAIKOVSKY : LONG BEACH OPERA STAGES A BLEAK ‘ONEGIN’

Michael Milenski and friends have, in the past, managed to pull some marvelous rabbits out of the Long Beach Opera hat. Saturday night at the Terrace Theater, they pulled out a dog--and a rather mangy dog at that.

The object of their attentions was “Eugene Onegin,” Tchaikovsky’s idealized, impassioned, ultra-romantic setting of the Pushkin poem. It is, to be sure, a complex and elaborate challenge deeply rooted in the Russian psyche and the Russian aesthetic, an opera that tends to overwhelm on the stage of the Bolshoi and underwhelm just about everywhere else.

Pushkin’s paradoxical tale of yearning and unrequited love in and near the class-conscious St. Petersburg of the late 18th Century tends to lose something in linguistic as well as logistic translation. So does Tchaikovsky’s poignant score.

That does not mean, however, that an opera company can with impunity ignore both the letter and the spirit of the original. The ambitious--perhaps overambitious--Long Beach forces have abandoned re-creation in a misguided attempt to refocus the drama. The irreverent and often irrelevant result, staged by Christopher Alden and designed by Donald Eastman, is a callous distortion of a masterpiece.

The primary problem lies in the setting. Tchaikovsky and his collaborating librettist Shilovsky went to considerable pains to play their drama of heartbreak and noble sacrifice in real places: the idyllic rural estate of Madame Larina; the bedroom of young Tatiana; a garden where peasants pick berries; a bourgeois ballroom contrasted with a princely one; a bleak, snowy bank on a wooden stream.

These are not just picturesque locales. They are crucial frames that impose a specific mood and period. The environments actually influence the mental state of Tchaikovsky’s characters.

Alden and Eastman play the opera--the entire opera--in a network of ugly, plain, claustrophobia-producing wooden walls, nasty scenic devices that ignore such essential distinctions as exterior and interior, country and city, comfortable and luxurious. Gabriel Berry’s pastel costumes add a perplexing image of permanent economy.

Under the circumstances, Mme. Larina seems to preside over a hoedown, Tatiana seems to sleep in a hen house, Lensky and Onegin seem to duel in a gigantic orange crate, and Prince Gremin’s palace seems to be a barn adorned with one huge, ludicrous chandelier.

This is a clinical, stylized, perverse non-Russia, a place as frigid as the air-conditioned deep-freeze auditorium that housed it Saturday.

Alden reinforces the ugliness of it all by stripping most traces of warmth, sympathy and dignity from the characters. He imposes a jarring, pathetic limp on the kindly old nurse Filippyevna. He portrays the noble prince Gremin as a war casualty, an amputee in a wheel cheer. He reduces the charming sentiments of the doddering Monsieur Triquet to comic grotesquerie. Most damaging, he stresses the arrogance of Onegin without showing the counterforce of his erotic allure.

The director musters some interesting cinematic effects--intimacy-enhancing freeze frames, spotlit close-ups, moody fade-outs. He dabbles provocatively in sociological commentary. No one can say he lacks ideas. In this case, unfortunately, most of his ideas clash with those of poor, defenseless Tchaikovsky.

The composer’s interests still might have exerted some fundamental appeal if the musical values had been really loyal. Such was not the case.

David Effron and the thin-sounding Long Beach orchestra produced laudable speed, poise and clarity. What we needed most, however, was power, resonance and throbbing emotional intensity. The quirky Terrace Theater echoes, not incidentally, enhanced the sonic woes.

One person on the stage dealt in eloquent, authentic, authoritative portraiture. Kathryn Bouleyn brought remarkable sensitivity and simplicity to the agonies of the girlish Tatiana. She turned out to be somewhat less compelling in the final scenes of renunciation--the desperate pathos of youth apparently suits her better than the self-denying sophistication of maturity--but she invariably sang with luminous tone and dynamic finesse.

Richard Stilwell commands most of the right credentials for the title role: a firm and dark lyric baritone, a handsome figure and abiding dramatic intelligence. In this context, however, he lacked the requisite force, sensuality and magnetism.

Vinson Cole floated some honeyed tone in Lensky’s farewell to life. Elsewhere, he often sounded breathy and found the low tessitura vexing. Dramatically, he reduced the ardent dreamer to the nice tenor next door.

Martha Jane Howe’s solidly vocalized Filippyevna dominated a supporting cast that included Will Roy as a rough-toned Prince Gremin, Emily Golden as a pretty but raw-toned Olga, Dana Krueger as a too-giddy Mme. Larina, and Ken Remo as a buffo-disoriented Monsieur Triquet.

The full-throated chorus attended self-consciously to Alden’s cameo theatrics and stiffly to the odd hippety-hop dances concocted by Mary Jane Eisenberg.

Now, how do we get that mutt back into the hat?