BIZARRE STAGING : ‘HOFFMANN’ --SHADES OF MARAT SADE

David Alden, the thinking-man’s director, has concocted a fascinating, provocative, daring new opera.

It is called “The Tales of Hoffmann,” and it was staged at the intimate Center Theater on Friday night in the first of five performances by the adventurous Long Beach Opera.

It is all about a crazed, handsome, young writer who, when he can keep his bleary eyes in focus, sits on the floor of his barren loft and bangs away at an archaic typewriter.

He bangs away while battling the nasty ghosts of a kinky past, the terrors of a sordid present, the threats of an empty future. He bangs away amid not-so-sweet dreams influenced by excesses of booze and drugs.

He does a lot of trembling, staggering, flailing and falling. He lounges around in his skivvies. When he gets dressed up he dons a black T-shirt and super-rumpled baggy suit.

A pretty chick hangs around his pad and smiles a lot. Sometimes, for no immediately apparent reason, she dresses like a dirty young man in a black raincoat, floppy hat and dark glasses.

She watches her buddy all the time, but he is so out of it that it doesn’t even make him nervous. Anyhow, there is another woman in his life. Some woman!

There is this leggy bleached-blond Barbie-doll zombie who keeps coming around, sometimes in her slip, sometimes in her white nightie (which becomes a mod shroud when she crawls into a convenient grave), sometimes in a kinky black minidress.

She seems to have a certain affinity for S&M;, especially M. She teeters, all the time, all over the brink of hysteria.

The guy seems to like all that.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot. A couple of sick dudes from the pad next door keep popping in, too. One is surly, oily, obviously very bad: He rents expensive tuxedoes and uses a handy hypodermic needle. The other, a dumb and round little nerd, likes to pretend to wait on people.

And so it goes. With a lot of help from his designer, Philipp Jung, Alden has placed this contemporary tale of dismally thwarted love, unfulfilled promise and hopelessly decadent indulgence in a sterile nightmare set that conveys many things.

It can be an empty attic, a hospital ward, a bordello, a cemetery, a pristine Brechtian platform. Superficially, it can hint at specific times and places. It also can represent the profound generalities of a symbolic, semi-expressionistic uni verse.

There are traces here of the cabinet of Dr. Caligari. There are suggestions of Everyman. There are accents--strong accents--of Marat Sade.

It is a lurid tale, a numbing exercise in focused squalor. But Alden does tell it brilliantly. The man has a fertile mind, a keen eye for the bizarre and a healthy disrespect for tradition.

Someday, perhaps, someone will write music to suit his drama. Music in the vein of Alban Berg, perhaps, or--anyone for an arpeggiated stupor?--music in the vein of Philip Glass.

The music for this version, unfortunately, was written by Jules Offenbach, back in 1880. It is pretty, warm, chic, clever, romantic, graceful, sentimental, sometimes funny, often lovely. It is nearly quaint. As such, it fights petulantly, if not furiously, with the sparse, cool, mod, demented, analytical, grim, updated images projected by the director.

The contradiction is, of course, no accident. Alden obviously wanted to fuse decadent sights with elegant sounds. He was striving, no doubt, for illuminating ironies.

Perhaps this tense, weird and oddly wonderful production could have worked on an operatic level. Alden’s twin brother, Christopher, brought off something of a miracle with his comparably daring, drastically updated “Coronation of Poppea.” But, despite the inherent wealth of invention, this “Hoffmann” didn’t work.

Presiding over a union of opposing stylistic forces, David Alden certainly entertained the guests. Still, this shotgun marriage was hardly made in heaven.

Don’t blame the protagonists. Michael Milenski, the general director of Long Beach Opera, once again assembled a cast of totally committed, utterly compelling singing actors--singing actors willing to sacrifice a little bel canto for a lot of theatrical impact.

James Schwisow was virtuosically, pathetically feverish as the anti-hero. His handsome lyric tenor sustained the high tessitura manfully and even mustered a clarion ring for the gutsy climaxes.

Edward Crafts was tough and nonchalant as the anti-hero’s multiple nemesis. He brought a big, dark, rough-edged baritone to the multifaceted vocal challenge, which included a slightly lowered version of the Diamond Aria.

Noelle Rogers managed the four sex-bomb incarnations with aplomb worthy of a Playboy cartoon. When not tempted to force the climaxes, she sang with throbbing power, even in the awkward (transposed) roulades of what used to be the Doll Song.

As the Muse, a.k.a. Friend Nicklausse, Constance Fee oozed sympathy and sang the expanded role with earthy mezzo-soprano bravura. Jon David Gruett magnetized attention as the anaesthetized servants.

Heinz Blankenburg offered a poignant portrait of old Crespel. Ken Remo made the most of a Spalanazani transformed first into comic-book Mad Scientist, then into “Gong Show” host. David Dunlap found pathos in the agony of Schlemil. Lisa Turetsky sounded ardent and staggered eerily as the late prima donna who vacated her grave so her daughter could move in.

Everyone articulated the hybrid, anachronistic translation with model clarity.

Nicholas McGegan propelled the music if not the action while conducting an excellent little orchestra stationed atop the set. Yes, this was opera with the maestro, tootlers, blowers and fiddlers on the roof.

McGegan opted, not incidentally, for a fusion of the traditional Choudens edition of the score, which Offenbach left incomplete at his death, and the recently reconstructed Oeser version. Long Beach included the original Coppelius aria, some but not all of Nicklausse’s arias and much of the epilogue, along with most of the standard Guiraud prettifications.