MUSIC REVIEW : A Mock-Chinese Opera Staged in Ambitious Santa Fe

It is business as usual in Santa Fe. Unusual business.

As one drives the highway toward the most popular mirage in the local desert, the familiar road sign still offers helpful advice: “OPERA TRAFFIC KEEP LEFT.”

Behind the open proscenium of the opera house that masquerades as an adobe, the lights of Los Alamos twinkle innocently in the distance. They provide a naturally magical cyclorama for the unnatural acts on the stage.

The Sangre de Cristo Mountains, visible from every seat in this semi-alfresco theater, serenely haunt the horizon. The lowest stars in the universe--when left undisturbed by clouds or rain--serve as an otherworldly yet emphatically dramatic ceiling.

One would cheerfully come back, and back, to a setting like this even if it meant enduring yet another automatic-pilot “Carmen” or one more “Boheme”-by-the-numbers. But Santa Fe doesn’t work that way.

John Crosby’s idealistic company concentrates, much of the time, on unhackneyed repertory. Employing essentially youthful casts and imaginative directors, Santa Fe tries to take opera, the most irrational of art forms, seriously as musical drama.

Santa Fe may not always succeed. At least it tries.

It is trying this summer with five new productions. Only two of them--Richard Strauss’ “Rosenkavalier” and Verdi’s “Traviata”--can be classified as conventional.

Celebrating the unconventional, the current agenda includes the first professional staging in America of a long-forgotten example of perfumed Gallic trivia, Massenet’s “Cherubin” (1905), not to mention an ambitious exhumation of an ultra-Baroque extravaganza, Cavalli’s “La Calisto” (1651). Even more newsworthy, however, is the U.S. premiere of Judith Weir’s “A Night at the Chinese Opera.”(1987).

A new-wave-chic entry from Britain, it was commissioned by the BBC and much praised when first performed by the Kent Opera in Cheltenham. Serving as her own librettist, Weir has concocted a fascinatingly complex musico-theatrical package that wants desperately to seem simple.

Born in 1954, raised in Scotland, trained mostly in London (briefly, in the States), influenced, to a degree, by the likes of Stravinsky, Britten and Messiaen, she has dropped an imposing calling card with this, her first full-scale grown-up opera. Los Angeles, incidentally, made her acquaintance in March, 1988, when the Monday Evening Concerts mustered the American premiere of “The Consolations of Scholarship,” a 25-minute scena for soprano and nine players predicated on 13th-Century Yuan dramas.

“A Night at the Chinese Opera,” seen here Wednesday, shares a similar inspiration. Weir has, for some time, been preoccupied with the stark rituals of Asian narrative, although she filters the ancient impulses through distinctly modern sensibilities.

In this opus, she introduces herself as a virtuoso juggler. In an hour and 40 minutes (the timing excludes two mood-shattering intermissions), she manages to juxtapose farce and tragedy, realism and stylization, symbolism and fantasy, vaudeville and political satire, always with creative strokes that are extraordinarily bold, economical, swift and deft.

The outer acts focus, with mock-Brechtian objectivity, on the plight of Chao Lin, an innocent canal builder oppressed by Mongolian rule in the era of Marco Polo. The central act, a startling opera within the opera, concentrates on the parodistic parallel of an actual Yuan play, “The Orphan of the Chao Family.”

Weir tells her multilayered tale in bleak Western tones cleverly ornamented with colorful imitation-Eastern accents. She speaks a fragile, concise, inventive musical language enhanced by subtle dynamic effects reliant on primitive harmonic constructions.

The vocal lines, craftily stressed and supported by a percussive chamber-orchestra, span formal speech, expressive parlando, expanded declamation, agitated recitative and, occasionally, poignant lyricism. The composer even interpolates a caricature Italian-tenor aria for Marco Polo, who makes an irreverently amusing cameo appearance in the third act.

For all its gutsy, extrovert trappings, the opera remains a fragile, introspective creation that seems to demand an intimate hall and a sensitive directorial touch. Unfortunately, Santa Fe couldn’t provide the former and didn’t provide the latter.

The crafty words and muted emotional climaxes tended to get blurred in the wide open spaces. The dramatic affect tended to get blunted in the heavy-handed, gag-oriented staging of Robert Carsen (remembered for his ersatz- Sellars “Marriage of Figaro” this season in Long Beach).

Ever resourceful when it comes to trendy cliches, Carsen interpolated tai-chi exercises for the cast before the music began, sent his protagonists into the auditorium in quest of false immediacy, and eventually blinded the audience with flashing searchlights, all for no apparent reason. Not content with such extra-operatic distractions, he reduced the Yuan play to a plodding burlesque that even dishonored the Marx Brothers allusion of the title.

He did elicit neatly focused performances, however, from such hard-working, versatile singing actors as John David de Haan, Drew Minter, John Kuether, Philip Zawisza, Judith Christin, Kathryn Gamberoni, Douglas Perry, James Busterud, Joyce Castle and Anthony Laciura. Michael Levine designed witty, minimalist-cartoon decors, brashly lit by Craig Miller.

Perhaps next time. . . .