Something Most Divine Arises From the Slime

The early-music movement is a police state without a complete set of laws. Its adherents, like survivors of a nuclear holocaust attempting to recapture a lost civilization, follow whatever regulations they can piece together from surviving documents.

They can be resourceful, building their own harpsichords and reconstructing the meaning of forgotten notation. They can even do an imaginative job of conjuring up the past. And they have accomplished yeoman work in discovering forgotten masterpieces, particularly operas.

But the movement has been downright hopeless when it comes to actually mounting the operas it discovers. Nothing gets dated quite as drastically as stage-production styles and techniques. Still there is no stopping the determined early musickers--who convene for a yearly festival and exhibition in either Boston or Berkeley--from yanking opera back centuries.

Not this year. Not at the Fifth Biennial Berkeley Festival & Exhibition, with its many concerts and lectures and booths at the University of California campus this week through Sunday. Not when you have choreographer Mark Morris doing the directing, and fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi, in his giddiest mood, doing the dressing. And not when you have a work as weird and fanciful as Rameau’s “Platee.”

As composer-in-residence at Versailles for Louis XV in 1745, Rameau wrote an entertainment for the wedding of the crown prince and his supposedly unattractive bride, Princess Maria Teresa of Spain. But Rameau’s farcical, mythical opera-ballet seems like a work of sheer self-destruction for the composer. In it, Jupiter woos Platee, a repulsive nymph of the slimy marsh, as a joke to mollify his wife, Junon, angered as usual at his philandering. The gods get a good laugh and make up. Platee is left heartbroken.

Taken straight, this comedy is so tasteless that it has left scholars unenthusiastic about it for years, characterful though the music may be. But that leaves the historical question as to why the court thought “Platee” a delight and rewarded Rameau generously for it.

Morris and Mizrahi have the answer in their fabulous production for the Royal Opera Covent Garden, which had its premiere at the Edinburgh Festival last summer and its American premiere Wednesday night in Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall. And that answer lies in maintaining dignity in the face of humiliation and zany chaos. That is why we love a great clown. That is why we love Buster Keaton.

And that is why we love Margaret Dumont. In a flash of great inspiration, Mizrahi sees Platee as Margaret Dumont with webbed feet. And that is exactly what we get in Jean-Paul Fouchecourt’s astonishing characterization. The tenor (Rameau asked for a male voice to make Platee all the more grotesque) has been a star of many celebrated early-music performances and recordings. But, a saxophonist and a disciple of the late-modern music specialist Cathy Berberian, he’s no blinkered specialist.

So there he is, green, fat, webbed, moist, smelly, yet courtly and refined, with pearls and lorgnette, singing with exceptional finesse and acting with hilarious grace. There has never been a creature quite like this. And the production suits him perfectly. About a quarter of the score is dance music, and the Mark Morris Dance Group populates the marsh with assorted slinky creatures, including a pair of amorous tortoises and two scene-stealing snakes (which is no easy thing in this production).

Tenor Mark Padmore, another early-music star, is a hilarious Mercure, a foppish, bespectacled twit who descends from the heavens in a balloon. Not all the singing of the assorted gods is quite on this level, but it is never less than respectable, and the acting and dance remain endlessly clever and diverting. The Philharmonia Baroque, conducted with endless enthusiasm and flair by Nicholas McGegan, makes the music work.

Rameau begins “Platee” with a prologue that features a drunken dissertation on comedy. “Without wine,” Thespis (also Padmore) sings, “tenderness is nothing but sadness.” The world needs mirth. Morris and his set designer, Adrienne Lobel, place Thespis in a New York bar at 3 in the morning. With the eyes of drunks, they see the parable of Platee taking place in a fish tank above the bar.

Morris spends a lot of time in a bar just like this, as many who have interviewed him can attest. And perhaps he has found his own tenderness there. Through all the delightful farce in this show, that thread of tenderness is what makes Platee human and sympathetic. First we laugh at her; in the end we love her as she returns to her slime and her mildewy retinue.

But that love needs a modern stage to be revealed. No document can impart it. Morris shows that such love can be readily experienced when Rameau is filtered through a contemporary sensibility. And that is his essential lesson to this early-music festival and all its emphasis on historical accuracy.

* “Platee” repeats tonight and Saturday at 8 p.m., Zellerbach Hall, UC Berkeley, $15-$85. (510) 642-0212.