OPERA REVIEW : Berg’s ‘Wozzeck’ in the Urban Jungle

When the Music Center Opera introduced its misbegotten production of “Wozzeck” to Los Angeles last year, the directorial Wunderkind in residence moved the action from Germany ca. 1830 to a world of nightmare modernism.

The soldiers wore battle fatigues and green berets. Poor Marie became a sophisticated slut in a black sheath. Alban Berg’s monumental pathos got muddled in sociopolitical trendiness.

Now comes the San Francisco Opera to restore interpretive sanity. Almost.

The new production at the War Memorial Opera House does indeed take some liberties. Lotfi Mansouri’s careful action scheme teeters on the brink of histrionic hysteria from the start. Michael Levine’s marvelously inventive designs ignore the intended 19th-Century milieu and invoke urban-jungle claustrophobia, ca. 1925--the time of the premiere of the opera.

The result impels a clash of styles. The actors deal in heightened naturalism. The settings invoke stylization that stalks toward crafty Expressionism.

The characters are imprisoned in monstrous barracks, trapped in towering tenements. Facades are rigged, angles ominously distorted, proportions violently exaggerated.

Berg’s poor people live in ratty slums. The enemy, we are told, is the city.

That makes good sense on any terms except those of the composer. He concerned himself with fundamental matters of human cruelty. The metropolitan milieu is virtually irrelevant.

In the crucial murder scene, it actually becomes perverse. Marie, after all, is supposed to die in “a pond in the forest.”

Mansouri and Levine make it a vaporous non-pond in a sketchy non-forest near a geometric quasi-penal housing unit. The San Francisco solution doesn’t work well. Still, it works better than the quasi-bathtub in the mock-Vietnamese compound concocted at the Music Center.

The San Francisco “Wozzeck,” shared with Toronto, suffers from some obvious surface contradictions. Ultimately, however, these seem relatively unimportant. The director and designer respect the spirit of the work, even when they obscure the letter.

Mansouri defines the characters deftly, and motivates their behavior with telling detail. Levine uses elaborate yet flexible scenic devices to reinforce the essential moods of terror and oppression.

Sometimes he literally illustrates the text in ways that may be a bit too easy. Marie comments that the moon is red (“Wie der Mond rot aufgeht!”). Obediently, the cyclorama suddenly glows crimson. In most cases, however, the bold and bleak images create their own supportive poetry.

Friedemann Layer, who has inherited the baton from the originally scheduled Christoph Perick, provided supportive poetry of his own on Sunday afternoon. He struck a fine balance between analytical clarity and emotional propulsion. He really savored coloristic nuance and textural cohesion. If any unhappiness lingered from the recent labor dispute, it wasn’t obvious in the well-staffed pit.

Other conductors--most notably Karl Bohm--have built those two otherworldly B-natural crescendos after Marie’s murder into a more shattering outcry. Few, however, have gauged the catharsis of the great D-minor interlude so poignantly.

The delicately balanced cast was dominated by Allan Monk--urgent yet dazed, tough yet sensitive, vocally bluff yet potent in the title role. Judith Forst, replacing the originally intended Teresa Stratas, played Marie with feverish ardor and sang with luminous point.

Wozzeck’s adversaries, all picturesquely characterized, included Siegfried Vogel as the heartily demonic Doctor, Stuart Kale as the whining and preening Captain and Warren Ellsworth (a veteran of the Los Angeles war) as the handsome, agile and aggressively horny Drum Major.

John David De Haan brought boyish lyricism to the posturing of Andres. Joseph Frank coped sweetly with the prophetic utterances of the Fool. Emily Golden made the most of Margret’s lusty counterpoint. Little Darren Mayer exuded vulnerability as Marie’s child.

Everyone articulated the unexpurgated German text beautifully. The supertitles did not flinch at the translations.