OPERA REVIEW : San Francisco Reheats Its Kitschy Production of ‘Aida’

The San Francisco Opera production of Verdi’s almost-indestructible “Aida” was a kitsch monstrosity when it was new in 1981. It is a kitsch monstrosity now.

The faces have changed. The silly frills and funny feathers, the ersatz Ethiopian artifacts and mock-Egyptian exotica, the traveling pillars and portable tombs, the stumbling dancers and bumbling armies have not.

This is exactly how old-fashioned grand opera always looks in New Yorker cartoons. This is exactly how valid opera should never look if modern audiences are expected to take it seriously.

The current revival, which had its first performance in the earthquake-scarred War Memorial Opera House on Thursday, was staged by Bruce Donnell. He kept the traffic moving efficiently within Douglas Schmidt’s rainbow-spectacular decors. But he could not prevent the singers from assuming unintentionally comic attitudes or from looking ridiculous in Lawrence Casey’s caricature costumes.

Verdi was better represented in the pit, where Cal Stewart Kellogg--remembered in Los Angeles from his salad days with the New York City Opera--enforced precision while allowing some lyrical expansion to counteract the instant bombast. The San Francisco orchestra and chorus, which had muddled the same composer’s “Otello” two nights earlier under Kazimierz Kord, performed nobly for Kellogg.

The central singers were, to put it gently, uneven. It is difficult to assemble a first-rate “Aida” cast these days. Still, San Francisco ought to be able to do better than this.

Making her U.S. opera debut in the title role was Sharon Sweet, an American soprano whose career has recently blossomed in Germany. She is a large woman--those New Yorker images, again--with a placid temperament and a reasonably large voice that tended on this occasion to elude control. Although her basic resources seemed imposing, she sounded husky much of the time, wobbly some of the time. She pushed her tone sharp in the great climaxes and failed to muster the wonted pianissimo in moments of introspection. Perhaps she was indisposed, or a victim of first-night nerves.

Vladimir Popov, the bright-voiced, would-be heroic Radames, found himself physically overshadowed by the “forma divina” he adored. That wasn’t his fault, of course, but he hardly enhanced illusions by constantly striking Mighty Mouse poses and stubbornly blasting his way through the role, whether the emotion of the moment happened to concern love, hate, pain, war or death.

The lower voices fared better. They usually do.

Dolora Zajick has added a k to her last name and some surface glamour to her persona since introducing her overpowering Amneris to Costa Mesa last year. She now seems to strive for a lighter, blander, more focused sound. However, she still rides the mighty crests of the Judgement Scene with gutsy ease.

Timothy Noble commanded the dignity and authority for a proper Amonasro, if not the primitive force or the expansive top notes. Kevin Langan scowled nastily and sang pleasantly as Ramfis. David Pittsinger played second bass competently as the King.

Clark Tippet, an enlightened choreographer who has brought cheer to many a dreary evening at American Ballet Theatre, created an outrageous series of rolling-jumping-spinning-slinking divertissements that resembled low-camp anachronisms. Ann Marie DeAngelo served as his straight-faced tongue-in-cheeky mini-ballerina.

A good time was had by some.