MUSIC REVIEW : Opera Pacific’s New Staging of ‘Faust’: Chills and Thrills

No stage curtains at all, and only two intermissions, come between the many dramatic strengths in Ken Cazan’s rethought staging of Gounod’s “Faust,” which opened Opera Pacific’s eighth season, Saturday night.

A brand-new production (based on a concept originally tried 16 years ago, at Michigan Opera Theatre), with sets designed by Paul Steinberg and costumes designed by Constance Hoffman, this “Faust” reinstates the basic and irreducible theme of the composer’s vision: the struggle between good and evil, sensuality and spirituality, mundane and heavenly aspirations.

Consequently, the performance seen in Segerstrom Hall at the Orange County Performing Arts Center is one with surprising (to 1990s sensibilities) chills and thrills (frissons, if you will), both theatrical and musical. It is a performance that reminds us why this work, above all others, was one of the favorite operatic diversions at the turn of the last century: Gounod meant to frighten the opera-goer. Under Cazan’s probing--and, so well constructed is this genuine masterpiece, not a lot of probing is necessary--it proves scary even to our jaded generation.

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Of course, there are a few unintended laughs--cynicism has its moments. With Mephistopheles in the prelude--at first bare-chested, in his hairy satyr outerwear, subsequently in sleazy, 19th-Century snake-oil-salesman garb--in full view of the audience long before the aged Faust summons him, his first line, “ Me voici! “ has to cause mirth.

But a nervous laughter. This character, we see immediately, even when he wears 8-foot-across devil wings that might have been designed by Bob Mackie, is dangerous. Very dangerous. And even at the very end of this Marguerite-portion of the epic, when one sinner is redeemed, the danger survives.

Cazan makes relevant all the actual and indirect references to sensuality, greed, vanity and self-delusion in the libretto in telling, small ways. Step by step, both Faust and Marguerite succumb to their own humanness. Thus, dramatic viability makes every scene engaging.

The physical production, like the staging, is brilliant.

A raked disk, looking like a round pier over a lagoon, surrounds a central playing area. If realism is eschewed, symbolic details--a living statue of the Virgin Mary, a bed, flowers strewn over the disk, a nearly anatomically correct Bacchus figure--tie together the action with recognizable, worldly elements. A huge circular gold dragon--about to devour its own tail--and a blinding-white scrim at the back of the stage, visually create, and overlook, the operatic time-frame.

Perhaps the most active element here is the lighting-scheme devised by Stephen Ross, a plan ubiquitous, subtle and thoroughly dramatic in all its guises, completely successful in bringing the observer into the action.

Equally subtle but even more basic is the musical leadership of John DeMain (conducting a near-facsimile of the Pacific Symphony) in the pit, guiding, supporting, buoying and aiding an authentic and sensitive reading of the cherishable score (with a few excisions--like the “Walpurgisnacht” ballet).

For the most part, he is fortunate in his singers. Vinson Cole (alternating with Joseph Wolverton) proves vocally a model Faust, one with an even tenorial line and solid high notes, one capable of convincingly modulated dynamics as well as sweet but firm sound. The directorial decision to move the main action of the opera forward (from medieval times) to the 1830s results, in Cole’s case, in an unflattering costume resembling that of the Mayor of Munchkinland. But the singing scores.

Sheryl Woods seems to have everything one could want in an ideal Marguerite--looks, vocal ease, beauty of tone and textual sensitivity--except stamina: In the final scenes, she seemed to tire.

Eric Halfvarson’s Mephistopheles is a devil for the ‘90s: sleazy, corpulent, frankly depraved and self-absorbed. As such--and having rejected the lean and elegant models of the past half-century--this Satan is quite irresistible, despite, again, unflattering costumes. His singing is more problematic--sometimes ragged, often woolly, regularly unclear in pitch and word.

Strength there is in the unchanging part of the cast (the final performance takes place Sunday): Paula Rasmussen, in her company debut, shows many virtues as a dramatically convincing, handsomely sung Siebel; Yalun Zhang displays high promise as a very young, but admirably resonant, Valentin; Patricia McAfee makes the most of her opportunities as Marthe.