Gimmicks Sink Wagner’s ‘Dutchman’ : Opera review: Inventiveness gets out of hand in the staging of the masterpiece at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

The Los Angeles Music Center Opera bears an unsettling resemblance to that infamous girl with a curl. When it’s good, as it was Thursday with Verdi’s “Stiffelio,” it’s very good indeed. When it’s bad, it’s horrid.

Saturday night, the company staged “Der Fliegende Hollander”--only the second Wagner challenge ventured since Los Angeles took the operatic plunge 10 seasons ago. And, yes, alas, it was horrid.

If this “Dutchman” doesn’t fly, don’t blame the hard-working, apparently fearless singers. Don’t blame the conductor or the orchestra. Blame the director and her ever-trendy accomplices.

Blame Julie Taymor, who devised the excruciatingly silly and hopelessly gimmicky action scheme, in conjunction with set designer George Tsypin, costume designer Constance Hoffman and lighting designer Paul Pyant. And save a little blame for Daniel Ezralow, who decorated the tragic drama with incongruous show-biz choreography.

Quite a few of the usually sedate first-nighters at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion knew where to place the blame. They mustered a healthy chorus of boos when Taymor and her accomplices took their curtain calls. And one person actually threw a tomato. Critics, critics everywhere. . . .

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It would be ridiculous, and futile, at this date to protest the practice of reinterpreting ancient masterpieces. No rule insists that every t must always be crossed, every i always dotted in the manner intended by the composer. New insights can be stimulating, even illuminating.

Change for its own sake, however, is often a pain in the eyes and, by aesthetic extension, a pain in the ears. It is one thing to refocus a masterpiece, another to desecrate it. The most successful modern directors, from Wieland Wagner to Peter Sellars, have respected the spirit if not the letter of the composer’s law.

In her “Hollander,” Taymor doesn’t seem to grasp the Wagnerian spirit and, worse, doesn’t seem to understand the letter. She doesn’t seem to listen to the words, and apparently cares little about the inherent mood and the motivating music. (Leitmotif? What’s a leitmotif?) She’s too busy being inventive.

Remember Wagner’s bold tale of the heroic Dutchman doomed to eternal unrest unless redeemed by unquestioning love? Remember the early romantic music-drama about lusty sailors, eerie ghosts and folksy maidens, the epochal essay in prosaic intrigue and poetic sacrifice?

Forget all that.

Taymor has come up with a flimsy dream-play circus of her own. It happens to have some incidental music blaring in the background.

The activities take place in a never-never-workshop dominated by the rickety skeleton of an unfinished ship. The central participants do a lot of clambering on precarious planks and platforms. Their plight is reduced to counterpoint for the comings and goings of some weird strangers in this anti-Wagnerian paradise.

Senta, the obsessive heroine, is sung by a sedate soprano who happens to dabble in portrait-painting, but her inner thoughts are mimed by a dancer in a white dress. At redemption time, the girl flies (swims?) through the air with the greatest of ease on wires worthy of Peter Pan.

She isn’t the only floating creature in this escapade. Taymor adds a generous display of high-wire mermaids, demons, acrobats, creepie-crawlies and water-sprites.

We also get a parade of women wearing model ships on their heads. We get a chorus line of dancing-spook attendants for the Dutchman, who, not incidentally, makes his entrance and exit lying as if crucified on the bottom of his ship. Ship? Make that a burned-out canoe.

Oh, dear. We almost overlooked the most important subplot. Taymor, who read somewhere that Wagner equated the Dutchman in some ways with the mythical Wandering Jew, interpolates a white-bearded old guy with a suitcase who stumbles in and out of the opera in quest of an elusive park bench.

As the immortal musicologist Anna Russell once put it--in another Wagnerian context--I’m not making this up, you know.

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Amid all these evasions, Taymor employs some extras to wave paper gulls on strings, others to ripple a billowing cloth in a simulation of the ocean, still others to pretend to be invisible as they lug clumsy props around the stage. The stylistic mishmash hints at a not-so-grand Kabuki or, perhaps, an all-too delirious “Noh-Noh Nanette.” Ah, post-modernism.

Under the circumstances, the singers had to fight a losing battle with their environment. With fierce concentration, however, a serious listener could discern some vocal quality beneath the dramatic mush.

A particularly stoic, always intelligent Franz Grundheber brought fervor and dynamic intensity to the title role, even on those occasions when he had to chop long phrases into small pieces or snarl lines that dipped below his comfort zone. Ealynn Voss, possibly the most underrated dramatic soprano before the public, sailed into Senta’s ascending phrases with heroic ease and proved along the way that she savors the meaning of such forbidding words as pianissimo and legato.

Frederic Kalt, an American making his local debut as Erik, introduced a big, bright, wide-open tenor more notable for thrust than sensuality. Louis Lebherz exuded crisp Dickensian bonhommie as a reasonably imposing Daland, even though he often resorted to Sprechgesang and did strange things to the German vowels.

Authentic diction wasn’t the strongest attribute of Greg Fedderly’s Steersman either, but one had to be grateful for the tenor’s lyric finesse, not to mention his apparent freedom from acrophobia. Suzanna Guzman offered a properly stern and gutsy Mary.

Asher Fisch, an Israeli currently at the helm of the Vienna Volksoper, made his U.S. debut in the pit. He exerted a good deal of primitive force, endured some scrappy playing by the so-called L.A. Opera Orchestra and did his best, against the odds, to protect the composer from the infidels. The fine chorus, trained by William Vendice, sounded lusty or crusty, as needed.

* “Der Fliegende Hollander” plays at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion of the Music Center Tuesday, Friday, Monday and Sept. 21 and 27 at 7:30 p.m.; Sept. 24 at 1 p.m. Tickets $22-$120. (213) 972-8001.