Opera : Unmerry ‘Widow’ in Orange County

Opera Pacific, official guardian of theatrical music at the costly, glamorous and presumably sophisticated Orange County Performing Arts Center, declared bankruptcy Friday night. Artistic bankruptcy.

The opus on display was Franz Lehar’s lovely old Viennese operetta, “The Merry Widow.” It isn’t exactly a heady or risky choice for a company that can only muster four productions in a year. Nevertheless, one can make a case for its place in the repertory if it is given a classy production--that is, a production elevated by style, wit, charm and big-league voices.

Style, wit and charm? Big-league voices? Forget it.

Opera Pacific seemed steadfastly intent on ignoring Lehar’s essential, admittedly dated elegance. The company hijacked the fragile 88-year-old vehicle and took it on a camping trip.

The creaky plot--rather loosely translated and “adapted” by Ted and Deena Puffer--became an exercise in silly banality. Dorothy Danner, listed as director as well as choreographer, encouraged her cast of has-beens and would-be’s to do little but indulge in nonstop mugging, leering and prancing.

Mitchell Krieger, the resident maestro, enforced mechanical brio without much concern for the insinuating lilt, and, when it came to three-quarter time, he trampled the hesitant beat. He proved one thing in the process: how hard it is to waltz in a straitjacket.

Subtlety went a-slumming, and this “Widow” turned out to be anything but merry. All night long, one longed for champagne. The waiters kept serving cornballs.

All of this was, to put it kindly, disappointing. Still, it need not have been offensive. We have endured leaden Lehar in better places. But David DiChiera, the genial general director of Opera Pacific, added an ultimate musical insult to idiomatic injury. He enlisted a “sound designer,” Abe Jacob, to turn on the infernal microphones.

It is bad enough that we have to endure amplified noise in place of bona-fide music these days in so-called musical comedies. But Lehar isn’t Lloyd Webber (thank goodness). One would like to think that operatic voices don’t need dishonest reinforcement.

From a good seat half-way back on the lower level of Segerstrom Hall, the score sounded as if it were being piped in from Albania on a bad shortwave radio. The volume was loud, the distortion louder.

Under the circumstances, one had a hard time assessing the singing. Certain truths, however, remained self-evident.

For the title role--the young merry-maker widowed after an 8-day marriage--DiChiera engaged Roberta Peters. She owned the only famous name in the program, and, after a career that has spanned more than four decades, she proved that she still can sing beautifully.

She brought a pretty shimmer and some startling atmospheric ascents to the long lines of the “Vilja” song. Like many a star before her, she capitalized on the third-act interpolation of “Meine Lippen sie kussen so heiss,” a finesse aria Lehar wrote 29 years later for Jarmila Novotna in “Giuditta.”

Peters continues to exude a certain pert glamour, and she musters professional aplomb for even the tawdriest of cliches. It would be less than realistic, however, to pretend that the passage of time has left no mark on her, or that she was perfectly cast as the seductive Hanna Glawari. For all her enlightened diligence, she seemed more a superannuated soubrette than ageless diva, and her relatively modern costumes clashed with the Jugendstil creations designed for the other women on stage.

The most striking features of her dapper Danilo, Ron Raines, turned out to be a good voice and a bad wig. The duties of the incipient juvenile lovers were robustly dispatched by Robin Follman (the ingenue Valencienne) and Fred Love (the tenorino Camille).

The gaggle of would-be comedians was led with shameless bravado by Marshall Borden, voiceless and fatuous beyond the norm as Baron Zeta. Tony Tanner attended knowingly to the expanded routines of his deadpan servant-for-all-reasons, Njegus.

The various chorus liners sang, bounced, kicked, posed and executed cancan splits, as needed, with diligent frenzy. Gotta dance, dance, dance. Gotta sell, sell, sell.

Zack Brown’s lavishly literal storybook sets looked nice. Unfortunately, they couldn’t sing.