CAPSULE REVIEW : Cardin Designer Premiere Fails to Make Up for Pre-Glasnost Soviet Rock Opera

The American premiere of “Junon and Avos--The Hope,” the Soviet Union’s first rock opera, is more of an ego trip for presenter Pierre Cardin than an artistic success.

Advertised as “the first hit of the decade,” this avant-garde work made its debut at Moscow’s Lenin Komsomol Theater in 1981 and was picked up two years later by Cardin, the French fashion designer and theatrical promoter, for his Espace Cardin theater in Paris, where it was something of a sensation.

“Junon and Avos” has since played Amsterdam and most of the major cities of Eastern Europe and has been filmed for British television. As a stage spectacle, it has a certain brashness in its criticism of the authoritarian Soviet regime as being not much better than repressive government by the czars.

This may have been hot stuff for Soviet audiences in 1981, but the show has lost its punch as the result of Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s perestroika and the changes in Eastern Europe. And “Junon and Avos” cannot sustain itself as a pre- glasnost curiosity because it wasn’t a very good show in the first place.

It is basically a series of vignettes telling the true story of Count Nikolai Rezanov, a chamberlain to Czar Alexander I, who came to San Francisco in 1806 with two ships, Junon and Avos, to establish trade with the Spanish rulers of California. Rezanov is searching for a new life far from the tyranny and isolation of imperial Russia.

He falls in love with Conchita, the governor’s teen-age daughter, who returns his ardor and rejects her suitor, Fernando Lopez, who dies in a duel with Rezanov. The Russian nobleman returns home to get permission from the Czar to marry Catholic Conchita outside the Orthodox faith and dies in Siberia on his way back to America.

Conchita waited for Rezanov for 35 years, then entered a convent, reputedly becoming California’s first nun. After her fate is related in an epilogue that reminds the audience that now is the time to discover a new way of thinking and a new faith in understanding one another, the cast sings a finale, “Hallelujah to Love.”

The five-week run of “Junon and Avos” at the City Center ends Feb. 4. The first night attracted a celebrity audience wined and dined by Cardin at his Maxim’s restaurant, but attendance has been dwindling since then. It’s one of those shows that loses some of its audience at intermission.

It is difficult to criticize popular poet Andrey Voznesensky’s Russian text and lyrics, based on a series of poems he wrote about Rezanov, but parts that have been translated into English for the show’s American narrator, Philip Casnoff, are pretentious and awkward.

Alexis Ribnikov’s music is a strange mix of Russian liturgical melodies gorgeously sung by a mostly female choir, folk tunes also effectively sung, and blaringly banal rock music reminiscent of the 1960s played on-stage by musicians on keyboards, guitars and drums.