Zeffirelli’s ‘Pagliacci’ Is Reason to Smile

Ten years ago, we called it Music Center Opera.

Ten years ago, we had no way of knowing whether a new opera company, even with the institutional support of the Los Angeles Music Center, could thrive in the operatic desert where no company had ever managed to take root.

Ten years ago, we wondered whether Placido Domingo, brought in for resident star power and artistic advice, could keep up his unprecedented tenorial pace.

Ten years ago, when the curtain ominously stuck but finally jerked free on the first night of a dramatically sophisticated and courageous production of Verdi’s “Otello,” we asked whether the company could maintain artistic integrity in a town that loves its flash.

Ten years later, we have L.A. Opera (the company confusingly retains the name Los Angeles Music Center Opera on its season brochure but seems to use L.A. Opera everywhere else). And to open its 11th season Wednesday night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, L.A. Opera, established and confident, sent in the clowns.

There is some symbolic significance to L.A. Opera choosing Ruggero Leoncavallo’s ever-popular verismo tear-jerker, “Pagliacci,” the tragic story of the clown who cannot laugh through his tears, to kick off its second decade. L.A. Opera reminds us of 1986 by bringing back Domingo and conductor Lawrence Foster, both of whom have grown artistically, for an opera written a few years after “Otello” (the greatest Italian tragic opera) and much influenced by it, but also of a much more Populist bent.

But, given Franco Zeffirelli’s spectacular new production, it is probably better not to think too hard about such significance.

Zeffirelli has become our greatest decadent opera director. Once a director who encouraged modern dramatic acting at a time when operatic production was stodgier than it is today, Zeffirelli notably collaborated with some of the greatest postwar dramatic singers (including Maria Callas, Teresa Stratas and Domingo). Now he has increasingly become the star of his own productions. And those productions have grown and grown in extravagance--his Puccini productions, in particular, are now tourist attractions in their own right at the Metropolitan Opera, no matter who sings in them.

“Pagliacci” could do the same for Los Angeles. It is a “wow” event. Zeffirelli has made much of the fact that he has updated the setting to a poor, modern-day town in southern Italy, re-created with cinematic detail. His set--with its tenements, seedy bar and teeming public spaces--is awash in humanity and motor scooters. Every stereotype is available. Young girls in the shortest of shorts, kids, working-class folks, all surely causing costume designer Raimonda Gaetani to work overtime. The touring troupe of actors enters with its dilapidated trailer towed by an old Cadillac with fins. And, yes, there is livestock too.

The set, the costumes and the action are all continually absorbing. There is always something to look at. In fact, one scans the set not always sure what all the visual information means but fascinated all the same.

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But Zeffirelli’s production is also curiously old-fashioned in its updating. “Pagliacci” famously breaks the theater’s fourth wall. It opens with Tonio, the hunchback clown in the touring company of players, directly addressing the audience in front of the curtain. And it takes as its theme the struggle an actor has distinguishing reality from drama, when the two start to mirror each other, as they do for Canio, who plays the cuckolded husband-clown Pagliaccio, while enduring the same in real life.

But Zeffirelli’s hyper-realistic approach, ironically, emphasizes artificially by calling so much attention to itself. However vividly Leoncavallo’s drama may be enacted by the principals, there are dozens of other little dramas going on in the crowds. And all that competition causes the singers themselves to chew the very copious scenery in operatically conventional ways.

Still, the performance is a strong one. Domingo, wearing what may be the most hilariously tacky outfit of his career (a white suit and glittery blue shirt), at first sounded slightly underpowered but ultimately proved as commanding as any singer can be in such surroundings, bringing his Otello-sized ferocity to Canio’s murderous jealousy. Juan Pons, the baritone making his company debut, was an unusually sympathetic and convincing Tonio.

Veronica Villarroel, the Chilean soprano as Nedda, Canio’s faithless wife, was asked to show more thigh and sexuality than she was clearly comfortable doing, but she sounded strong and secure. Manuel Lanza was her ardent lover, Silvio; Greg Fedderly, Beppe, her clownish lover in the pantomime.

Foster got impressive results from the L.A. Opera orchestra and chorus, both groups sounding well-rehearsed in an opera that has only 72 minutes of music.

That last fact has been cause for some comment, since “Pagliacci” is usually paired as a double bill with Mascagni’s “Cavaliera Rusticana.” But with intermission the show is typical movie length, and given the sheer excess of the production, it hardly makes a skimpy evening.

* “Pagliacci,” L.A. Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., Saturday and Sept. 22, 2 p.m.; Wednesday, Sept. 14, 17, 20, 7:30 p.m. $23-$130. (213) 365-3500.

* ‘PAGLIACCI’ DIARY: A 6-year-old tells about his job as an extra in the opera production. F13