SANTA FE: GODS, CATS, MORTALS AND MONSTERS

Remember “Carmen”? Remember “La Boheme”? Remember “Lucia di Lammermoor”?

They don’t seem to remember in Santa Fe. Standard repertory be damned. John Crosby’s operatic mirage in the altitudinous New Mexico desert has become a happy haven for the esoteric. Well, a reasonably happy haven. . . .

The 1985 repertory isn’t quite as adventurous as last year’s. The conservative demands of the hum-along mob are being assuaged, to a degree, by a new production of Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro.” Those attracted by a clever operettic satire embellished with homoerotic impulses must be pleased by the revival of Offenbach’s “Orphee aux enfers,” a k a “Orpheus in the Underworld.”

In most opera houses, “Figaro” and “Orpheus” are regarded as something akin to fodder for the connoisseur. In Santa Fe, they serve as the easy pieces, conventional offerings to complement premieres and exhumations.

The world premiere this season is John Eaton’s vastly ambitious setting of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest.” The American premiere is Hans Werner Henze’s “The English Cat,” a complex ode to sociopolitical whimsy and anthropomorphic pathos. The prime exhumation is a swollen, ponderous and sometimes magical exercise in what the autumnal Richard Strauss labeled “cheerful mythology”: “Die Liebe der Danae.”

Although an agenda like this can do wonders in attracting musicologists, novelty addicts, snobs and critics to the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, it doesn’t seem to do much for the masses. Eaton, Henze and even Strauss play to a lot of empty seats in the wondrous alfresco opera house on the ranch.

In town, five miles away, one can hear a lot of talk about a sag in the tourist trade. The local innkeepers, gallery owners and blue-corn restaurateurs do not smile upon John Crosby’s penchant for adventure.

In “The Tempest,” John Eaton attempts the impossible. The star of the composition faculty at Indiana University attempts to make Shakespeare sing.

Verdi, of course, made a similarly impossible attempt, twice, and succeeded emphatically. But for “Otello” and “Falstaff,” Verdi had the librettist Boito at his side, and Verdi was a genius. For “The Tempest,” Eaton has Andrew Porter at his side, and Eaton is no genius.

Nevertheless, he deserves admiration. He can muster, and master, complex and compelling ideas. He sets a conventional orchestra against a jazz combo against a renaissance band in the pit, and adds electronic maneuvers for intricate spice. He isolates separate dramatic worlds by associating each with a specific, independent sonic vocabulary. He pits one set of rhythmic patterns against another, stretches conventional concepts of tonality--and microtonality.

Porter accommodates him with blank verse reduced to rhythmic exclamation, with verbal simplification and with the deletion of huge chunks of poetry. It is all very carefully calculated. Perhaps too carefully calculated.

In the long run--at 3 hours it seems like a very long run--this “Tempest” emerges as a series of interesting effects. The potentially poignant becomes trivial, the amusing becomes crass, the subtle turns primitive. Eaton is either unwilling or unable to develop his ideas. Instead, he repeats them, or merely fuses them in various overlapping permutations and combinations.

The hard-working singers must vacillate between angular arioso, exaggerated Sprechgesang and rinky-dink lyricism. The extremes are well defined, awkwardly bridged.

Some of the problems in the score, as presently constituted, might be solved with judicious cutting. Others demand fundamental reconsideration.

At best, one hopes Eaton will return “The Tempest” to his drawing board. At worst, one hopes he will content himself with the satisfactions of a noble failure and resolve next time to think small. Or at least smaller.

The Santa Fe production made the most of the formidable challenge. Richard Bradshaw controlled the sprawling musical apparatus cannily. Bliss Hebert balanced fantasy and pathos deftly within the resourceful, semi-abstract designs of Allen Charles Klein.

The huge, obviously dedicated cast enlisted Timothy Noble as the sympathetic, all-powerful Prospero; Sally Wolf as a Miranda who could conquer the vocal stratosphere with elan, and Susan Quittmeyer as a mercurial Ariel defined by flashing lights on her body and electronic echoes on her mezzo-soprano. The scene-stealing favorite, however, was Ann Howard, who sported a Maurice Sendakesque monkey suit as a wild and wooly Caliban-in-reverse-drag who had to scat-sing the blues.

In “The English Cat,” Hans Werner Henze attempts a return to Gemuetlichkeit. The gentlemanly revolutionary has forsworn the turgid diatribe in favor of a relatively old-fashioned operatic tragicomedy in which the protagonists just happen to be animals.

Inspired by a Balzac story and Grandville drawings, Henze manages to veil his customary social-criticism with whimsy. He also manages to simplify his musical textures, settling for transparency within conventional structures where he used to strive for the opaque and the diffuse.

Unfortunately, “The English Cat” conveys more artifice than art. It tries to be charming and ends up being maudlin. It tries to be touching and ends up being ponderous. It tries to be wise and ends up being simply long-winded.

It treads an uncertain line between parody and pathos. With a network of fussy musical and dramatic detours and unnecessary convolutions, it frustrates the potentially sympathetic observer who would trace that line.

Theatrically, this “Cat” was not helped by Charles Ludlam, an outrageous Off-Broadway director-writer-actor who didn’t seem to know how to focus the characters or propel the action. One waited in vain for the inspired lunacy that illuminated his infamous Maria Callas impersonation.

Matters were helped, however, by George Manahan’s poised conducting and by Steven Rubin’s storybook sets. The cast, hampered by what may have been laissez-faire direction and masks that obscured facial expression, performed nobly against the odds.

Inga Nielsen capitalized on the coloratura flights of the sweet young feline from the country who marries the pompous tenorial president of the Royal Society for the Protection of Rats (Michael Myers), and ends up condemned to drowning--and to singing a farewell aria in a sack. Scott Reeve brought nice point to the roving-rascal duties of her myopic would-be lover, a bewhiskered baritone whose name, of course, had to be Tom.

Cute. And not so cute.

In “Die Liebe der Danae,” Strauss attempted to exorcise the harsh reality of a Germany consumed by the Third Reich. He wanted to return to romance and fantasy, to happier times, to creative fertility and to the fruits of a collaboration with Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He didn’t quite make it.

At 76, he confronted a twilight career marred by political chaos. With Hofmannsthal long dead, he could find little stimulation in the prosaic texts of Joseph Gregor. “Danae,” which turned out to be his penultimate opera, required him to juggle gentle humor with profound, heroic emotion. He met the multifaceted challenge with cranked-out authority some of the time, with tedious padding some of the time, with unfocused energy much of the time, and with brilliant effect--some of the time.

“Danae” may be flawed, but it is eminently worth producing if the conditions are right. They weren’t right in the revival of the 1982 Santa Fe production. John Crosby, his own worst enemy on the podium, reduced the score to an essay in blaring vulgarity. Bruce Donnell, inheriting Colin Graham’s half-campy staging scheme and Rouben Ter-Arutunian’s glitzy decors, could do little but serve as conscientious traffic cop in the land of the misbegotten.

The integrity of the piece was further strained by the casting of essentially lightweight singers in roles that require heavyweight voices. Ashley Putnam commanded sweetness and radiance for the intimate revelations of the mythological maiden torn between love and greed but could not rise to the massive climaxes. Dennis Bailey all but strangled on the daunting Heldentenor hectoring of Midas. Victor Braun conveyed the wit and wisdom of Jupiter crisply, but brought a Wolfram voice to music designed for a Wotan. Ragnar Ulfung blustered his way through the too-comic routines of Pollux.

The new “Figaro” production, briskly conducted by Scott Bergeson and crudely directed by Goeran Jaervefelt, wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t very good.

This was an Americanized Ruth and Thomas Martin “Figaro” in which one couldn’t tell nobleman from peasant, a broad “Figaro” in which every character spent some time sprawled on the floor, a loud “Figaro” that kissed finesse and wit a not-so-fond farewell.

It also was a “Figaro” that found the protagonists trapped in anachronistic semi-modern costumes and in dull, ugly sets by Carl Friedrich Oberle that pretended--for no obvious reason--to evoke the Baroque theater at Drottningholm Castle in Sweden.

The cast could boast a fine, dark-toned, crusty Bartolo in Kevin Langan. But a “Figaro” in which the strongest performance comes from the Bartolo is a “Figaro” seriously out of focus.

Faith Esham was the tough-cookie Susanna; Brent Ellis the solid, bland, high-voiced Figaro; Susan Quittmeyer the surprisingly garish Cherubino; Mary Jane Johnson the strident, insensitive Countess; Edward Crafts the dashing Count who nearly muffed the climactic flourishes of his aria, Ragnar Ulfung the seedy Basilio who stooped unnecessarily to lower-than-low comedy.

“Orpheus in the Underworld,” back after a year’s absence, served as an intermittently amusing showcase for Judy Kaye, a refugee from Broadway who introduced an irresistibly zany, blithely uninhibited, anachronistically unglamorous Eurydice.

It also benefited considerably from the suave, wide-eyed and crafty Orpheus of Peter Kazaras, not to mention Ann Howard’s erudite impersonation of Public Opinion. In this production, not incidentally, Public Opinion provides a convenient English narration to explain the French singing and the drastically reduced French dialogue.

In general, one could find pleasure in Crosby’s propulsive conducting, in the naughty designs of Nancy Thun, in the elegant ensemble work of all concerned and in the inventive staging of Bliss Hebert.

One also could have reservations about a theatrical scheme that made most of the boys look pretty and the girls ugly, in Leitmotivic routines that made the women predators and the men sex objects, in costumes by Steven B. Feldman that exposed a lot of male flesh but kept the females covered, in amateurish choreography by Rodney Griffin that focused upon a mock-Trock ballerina in a sea of ineptitude.

This was a great operetta performance for those who like prancing and smirking in outlandish portions. It was a great operetta performance for those who like outlandish portions, period, for Crosby treated every expendable hemidemisemiquaver as if the score were holy.

For some “Orpheus” fanciers, alas, Offenbach is not Wagner. Less would be more, especially when it comes to ballet. For some Offenbach fanciers, moreover, high spirits cannot be confused with high style.

Still, it was easy to find abiding comfort in Kaye, Kazaras and that infernal cancan.

Meanwhile in Los Angeles. . . .