OPERA REVIEW : A Wacky ‘Bluebeard’ at the Ford

Late last April, enterprising Long Beach pulled a wild and silly, stylish and raunchy coup d’opera with its premiere of Offenbach’s unjustly neglected “Bluebeard,” a.k.a. “Barbe-Bleue.”

After the usual slow-sales start, the updated operettic satire looked like a hit at the tiny Center Theater. “Bluebeard” suddenly was a hot ticket.

Then came the riots and the curfews. There went the third and last performance, May 2.

Now, with a little help from Los Angeles County Supervisor Ed Edelman, Bluebeard and his wacky wives have earned yet another lease on life. Their venue, this time, is the John Anson Ford Amphitheatre, across the freeway from Hollywood Bowl. Something has been lost in transplantation, but--thank goodness and Michael Milenski--not too much.

Christopher Alden’s delirious staging scheme for this mellifluous comedy of eros has been kept intact. So, contrary to some fears, has Peter Harrison’s witty set.

The evil--well, let’s say quirky --titular duke still stalks the boards in the guise of a song-and-dance man in white tie and white tails. The playing area still consists of a raked platform and a vast wall, both decorated with a zillion grinning skulls and both outfitted with a convenient, symmetrical network of cutout doors, windows and traps.

A brilliant, hard-working ensemble--spiffily outfitted in drop-dead unicolors by the couturiere Eugenie Krager--still pays its slickly irreverent respects to a nifty collection of rocky horrors, to such aesthetic giants as Jean Genet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Mel Brooks and Charles Addams, to some elegant antiquarians of the fragile Comique tradition and at least one porn-again cartoonist.

Anne Militello’s clever lighting works just fine in the great outdoors, where, just for incongruous fun, it occasionally picks out a preposterous palm towering high above the mythic stage.

Offenbach’s endless inspirations (some tunes are reconstituted for this edition from “lost” Parisian sources) still bubble and bounce, gurgle and waltz with reasonably crisp verve under the baton of Laurence Gilgore.

So what has been lost on the road from Long Beach to Hollywood? A certain degree of intimacy, a soupcon of subtlety, and the joy of natural sound.

Although it seats only-- only ?--1,200, the Ford Amphitheatre is narrow and long. Here, the singing-actors have to punch their lines long distance. They sometimes blow up the rhetoric beyond the comfort zone in the effortful process. The body microphones that adorn the cast prove gratefully inoffensive--when they function without sonic glitch. But the tinny mini-orchestra, stationed stage left, sounds as if it were piped in from Glimmerglass.

The duties of Bluebeard are now entrusted to James Schwisow. He looks sweetly dapper as the serial killer who disapproves of bigamy, and he sings with compelling finesse. This tenor lacks the sardonic edge, not to mention the heroic high notes, that James Hoback brought to the role. In his own gentle way, however, he holds his own honorably.

All the others repeat their previous triumphs. Angelina Reaux, a gratifying fusion of Annie Oakley and Hortense Schneider, bumbles heroically as Boulotte, Bluebeard’s last but hardly least wife. Perrin Allen moves with elan from beefcake narcissist to smug lounge-lizard as the shepherd Saphir, lustily seconded by Susan David Holmes as his florid Fleurette.

Michael Sokol is the perfect personification of innocent decadence as Bluebeard’s sane-scientist henchman. Zale Kessler blusters with deadpan brio as the chief courtier. Ken Remo is properly fatuous as the befuddled King, and Michele Henderson offers blissfully sleazy counterpoint as his bored but never-blushing bride.

Additional performances are scheduled for Aug. 26 and 29. Go.