‘Midsummer’ Finally Makes It to the Met

Benjamin Britten’s sensitive translation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” isn’t exactly a novelty, and staging the delicate Shakespearean opera isn’t exactly an act of daring. In the 36 years since the first performance at the Aldeburgh Festival, most of the world’s leading companies have surveyed the comedy’s subtle charms.

San Francisco offered the U.S. premiere back in 1961 (with an ensemble that included Mary Costa, Russell Oberlin, Geraint Evans and a little-known mezzo-soprano named Marilyn Horne). Even Los Angeles has mustered its own major-league representation, not once but twice. The mighty Metropolitan Opera, however, didn’t get around to Britten’s tale of spiteful fairies, romping rustics and foolish mortals until this season.

Better ridiculously late than never? Of course.

The forces at Lincoln Center have made amends for their tardiness with a sparse production buoyed by extraordinary wit and useful originality. It is lovingly conducted by David Atherton, brilliantly directed by British avant-gardist Tim Albery and tellingly designed by his frequent collaborator, Antony McDonald.

It would be good to report that their enlightened efforts have magnetized and enraptured the conservative audiences at our most prestigious opera house. But Monday night, at the third performance, the auditorium yawned with an increasing number of empty seats after each intermission, and the applause at the end seemed more dutiful than enthusiastic.

A large part of the blame must be attributed to a company that, over the decades, has conditioned its hum-along public to savor lavish, empty, old-fashioned spectacle for its own easy sake. The Met, after all, is the house that Franco Zeffirelli built. A small part of the blame may be attributed to the muted expressive impulses of a work created on a distinct and distinctively intimate scale.

Britten wrote “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for Jubilee Hall in Aldeburgh, which accommodates only 316. The capacity of the Metropolitan Opera House comes close to 4,000. Some dynamic values have to get blurred at best, lost at worst, in the vast open spaces.

Atherton minimizes the problem with some discreet orchestral doublings, not to mention exceptionally crisp articulation and careful dynamic delineation. Albery defines the action--most of it set comfortably downstage--with bold strokes of stylization, and makes clever use of a little stage within the big stage concocted by McDonald. Just about everything that can be done to focus the music and the drama has been done, and done with resourceful finesse.

Finesse, in this instance, does not imply dogged respect for traditional attitudes. As envisioned by Albery and McDonald, this is a dark, even cynical “Dream,” a “Dream” stripped of romantic sentiment, a “Dream” happily deprived of pretty-pretty cliches and cutesy clutter.

In some aspects, it actually resembles a “Midsummer Night’s Nightmare.” Tytania, Queen of the Fairies, sports a glitzy modern-matron business suit and lugs a sensible handbag. Oberon, her bourgeois waistcoated king, flaps big black wings. Young Puck looks and acts more like an Artful Dodger than an acrobatic sprite, and the boy-soprano fairies in attendance are cheekily outfitted in feathery no-nonsense tutus. The rustics, a.k.a. rude mechanicals, aren’t rustic at all, just lusty and lowly products of some quaint industrial revolution.

Albery’s interpretive liberties might create dissonance in a lazy mock-realistic environment. Britten isn’t Mendelssohn, however, and the mythical woods outside Athens aren’t sacrosanct. McDonald’s surrealist decors, reportedly inspired by British painter Howard Hodgkin, validate the universal drama in cool 20th century terms.

The cast is wonderful, and perfectly integrated. Sylvia McNair brings silvery purity and a fine edge of sensuality to the roulades of Tytania. Jochen Kowalski broods heroically and twitters in a mean, otherworldly countertenor as Oberon. Peter Rose exudes bottomless bonhomie as Bottom (replacing the late and much-lamented Donald Adams who was to have made his Met debut in the role).

The quartet of mortal lovers is deftly populated by the lyrical Nancy Gustafson, the gutsy Jane Bunnell, the incisive Kurt Streit and the ever-crafty Rodney Gilfry. Jeffrey Wells and Victoria Livengood impersonate Athenian royalty imposingly, and the restrained-buffo contingent includes such paragons as John Del Carlo, Barry Banks, Anthony Laciura, Bradley Garvin and James Courtney. Nick Stahl, best known, perhaps, as the boy in Mel Gibson’s “Man Without a Face,” introduces a steadfastly unwinsome, gratifyingly uncloying Puck.

The Met may not provide a conventional showcase for Britten’s fragile magic. As adjusted by some inspired iconoclasts, however, the magic still casts its spell.