Lavish ‘Fox’ Outsmarts Itself

As science scrutinizes the animal kingdom with an ever chillier, ever more impersonal gaze, art and imagination fight back unpersuaded. Everywhere animals are talking to us: bugs and Babe in the movies; Disney’s fabulous lions exalt on Broadway. Wednesday, the morning news told of Japanese scientists cloning cows, and the evening opera gave us sympathetic singing foxes outwitting horrible humans at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.

“Fantastic Mr. Fox,” a new opera by Tobias Picker, based on the story by Roald Dahl, is a rare bid to create a repertory children’s opera. Many opera companies, through their education departments, create new pieces for children but only for children--small shows meant to be taken around to schools. Los Angeles Opera has just such an admirable program. But Picker’s opera, which the company commissioned, has higher ambitions.

For one, it uses brand names. Though only his second opera, Picker is a rising star in the field. His first opera, “Emmeline,” based on Judith Rossner’s grim Oedipal novel, was given in Santa Fe two summers ago to much acclaim and has since been televised, recorded and produced by the New York City Opera. Picker is now working on a commission for the Metropolitan Opera for 2002.

Another brand name is, of course, Dahl, and though his stories are familiar to children and readily adapted to animation, this is the first opera based on his work. And happily operatic “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is. A parable of man and nature, it is the tale of terribly nasty farmers who exploit the environment and suffer the revenge of the animal kingdom, which, ironically, embodies higher human values. It has an edge, which Dahl’s work always does and which helps draw children in. It avoids cuteness. It is wickedly funny.

The libretto and production both are by John Sturrock, a British television arts documentarian with close ties to Dahl. The sets and costumes are by the fanciful illustrator Gerald Scarfe, who is responsible for Disney animation and some wonderfully goofy creations in L.A. Opera’s “Magic Flute” production.

With all this, and a cast of generally fine singing actors, L.A. Opera would seem to have an event of significance on its hands. But art isn’t easy. And children’s art is even harder.

Perhaps everyone has simply tried too hard in this curiously flat, self-conscious effort. Sturrock’s libretto is the first problem. In his attempt to devise an operatic structure out of a simply narrated story, he has lavishly over-embellished a tale Dahl told in elegant, direct prose. Characters suddenly take on heavy baggage. For instance, a drunken rat, no more and no less in Dahl, becomes Rita the Rat, “an aging alcoholic hippie academic.”

Or take the case of Farmer Bunce, Dahl’s potbellied dwarf who lives on doughnuts stuffed with goose liver; your imagination can fill in the disgust. “I’m a pipsqueak gourmet, I’m a gastro-gnome,” he clunkily explains in the opera. Nature has a mystical voice, in the form of a children’s chorus of trees. Mavis the Tractor sings to us and Agnes the Digger cautions, “Don’t mess with this mother of matriarchs,” as she attacks the foxhole.

Busy words, busy staging and busy music underneath. Picker’s score is no one thing. It inhabits other composers’ children, animal and nature scores. For the first couple of seconds you think you might be in a postmodern “Peter and the Wolf,” so much like Prokofiev is Mr. Fox’s theme, though it then goes its own way. Britten’s “Paul Bunyan” and Janacek’s animal opera “Cunning Little Vixen” sometimes seem to lurk around the corner.

There are a few catchy things in the opera, but the music is labor-intensive. The words are far too many and do little to inspire comfortable vocal writing. There are attempts at wit that sound forced, especially a weird, antivivisectionist klezmer aria for Rita the Rat.

The stage is full of whimsy, but it is not well-lighted. The animal costumes are more a problem. The masks are immobile and hinder just that human expressivity that these critters should display, making the libretto seem even talkier than it already is.

The singers, struggling with too much text and unnatural vocal lines, also, of course, need to impersonate animal movement. Mr. and Mrs. Fox, baritone Gerald Finley and mezzo-soprano Suzanna Guzman, do that best. Of the three farmers, Boggis (Louis Lebherz), Bunce (Doug Jones) and Bean (Jamie Offenbach), the latter is the funniest.

The cast of animals is large. Most are effective. Josepha Gayer as Rita the Rat is not. Peter Ash conducts without much pizazz, and the end feels inconclusive. No culmination, just a curtain.

* “Fantastic Mr. Fox” continues Saturday, 1 p.m.; Tuesday, 7:30 p.m.; Dec. 19, 1 p.m.; Dec. 20 and 21, 7:30 p.m.; Dec. 22, 1 p.m. Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown Los Angeles. (213) 365-3500. $20-$68.