OPERA REVIEW : Sellars’ ‘Figaro’ Gets Married on the 52nd Floor of Trump Tower

Here, in Cheever country, in polite surroundings where the State University of New York at Purchase is nestled in the lush greenery of Westchester County, something not very genteel is happening. Peter Sellars is having his way with Mozart’s operas.

Two seasons ago the iconoclastic director staged “Cosi fan Tutte” in a Westchester diner. Last season he moved Don Giovanni to Spanish Harlem.

Wednesday night, as part of the festival called Pepsico Summerfare, Sellars displayed his most audacious updating of all when he unveiled his “Le Nozze di Figaro,” set in an apartment in the Trump Tower in Manhattan, 52 floors above 5th Avenue. For Sellars, the pompous nobility that Mozart and Da Ponte parodied were the equivalents of today’s beautiful people.

“People,” Sellars describes in his program synopsis, “for whom perjury, loss of happiness and absence of consciousness can be compensated for by the feel of money, the sense of being on top and the sweet certainty that their own barren lives will be enriched by the amusement and consolation offered by the collapse of the hopes and plans of others.”

As with all Sellars productions, the updating is dazzling, an outrageously entertaining spectacle, and one could fill pages detailing the director’s seemingly limitless bag of titillating tricks. (Indeed, Sellars offers nine, closely typed pages of his own version of the synopsis.)

So here in a flamboyantly modern apartment, with its two-story view, its prominent Frank Stella painting and avant-garde designer chairs, we have the Count as a business tycoon.

Cherubino is a wonderfully gangly, sex-crazed teen-ager, who makes his entrance into Figaro’s and Susanna’s room (the laundry room, with a convertible sofa), noisily throwing down his hockey gear and heading straight for the fridge. Antonio, Mozart’s and Da Ponte’s gardener, is the surly, impossible building superintendent that all New York apartment dwellers know.

Dr. Bartolo teaches at Columbia; Marcellina runs a chic shop; Don Curzio is a sleazy lawyer always reaching for his portable cellular phone; Basilio is a greasy hipster.

All of this remains highly amusing throughout the nearly four-hour performance. But, as with all of Sellars productions, it is also profoundly unsettling.

While the madcap gag level may often be high--there is that fandango choreographed by Mark Morris at the wedding that must be seen to be believed, and there are those chorus-line finales that seem to come straight out of Pina Bausch--Sellars also tends to bring his characters to the brink of real madness.

As had also been Sellars “Cosi” and “Don Giovanni,” this is a ferociously angry “Figaro.”

Figaro, who sets his plots into motion with grim determination, and Susanna, who has developed a hard edge putting up with the Count’s abuse, exhibit little gaiety. There is not a character who does not express violent rage. The Count, for instance, loses control and confronts the Countess with a gun in the trio “Susanna or via sortite.”

Sellars can overdo it, and there is sometimes more wall banging and falling to the floor than absolutely necessary. But he makes up for that in his astonishing catharsis, which is staged on the dark scary ledge of the building, amid its lighted trees. Here is no pantomime, but a cast of characters on the brink, nearly all not far from a suicidal leap.

And, unsurprisingly, Sellars does not buy’s Mozart’s happy ending fully. These are modern times, and there is only the inkling of self-enlightenment at the end rather than happy contentment.

If all of this sounds more Sellars than Mozart and Da Ponte, it really isn’t. Actually, Mozart’s score, given uncut, along with an added aria for Cherubino, is more than respected. It is sung in convincing Italian; a fortepiano is used for recitatives rather than an unhistoric harpsichord, and attention is paid to period performance practice, including embellishments for da capo arias.

But most of all the production boasts a cast unlike one to be found anywhere.

That does not mean these are the finest voices in the world. But most are singers who have reguarly worked with Sellars, with the conductor Craig Smith, and with each other, and they are such fine actors and form such a sophisticated ensemble that it almost seems strange to mention them individually. (They don’t, by the way, take individual curtain calls).

Still, Sanford Sylvan was a commanding Figaro, and James Maddalena was so convincing as the Count that one could almost believe that a Donald Trump-like character might possess a rudimentary soul.

Jeanne Ommerle offered a tough but smoldering Susanna; Jayne West was an uncommonly warm (at least for this production) Countess, and Susan Larson stole the show with her flamboyant Cherubino. As for the many other parts, there was not a weak voice or characterization.

One might have enjoyed more breadth from Smith’s conducting and perhaps better synchronization between this fine pit band and the stage. But still, the musical direction--like Adrianne Lobel’s inspired sets, Dunya Ramicova’s telling costumes and James Ingalls’ magnificent lighting--was utterly true in the way it rarely is in opera these days.