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Daring Dramatic Pairing

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TIMES DANCE CRITIC

The 19th century strolling players depicted in Ruggiero Leoncavallo’s opera “I Pagliacci” and the 13th century wandering monks who wrote the poems used by Carl Orff in his cantata “Carmina Burana” savored the freedom of the open road, the camaraderie of the tavern and the pleasures of love wherever they found them. But “Pagliacci” possesses the character focus and inevitability of tragedy while “Carmina Burana” plays as a celebratory social panorama. It takes a lot of creative reinterpretation to put them together convincingly, as Opera Pacific has done in a double bill that opened Tuesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

In a production borrowed from the Portland Opera, “Pagliacci” is sung in Italian on a spacious platform set designed by Allen Moyer that makes all the world a stage--including the Italian village where the action takes place. Canio (Antonio Barasorda) and his ill-fated wife, Nedda (Cassandra Riddle), arrive in a battered truck, wearing costumes by James Scott that make them look like refugees from an early neo-realist Fellini epic. But their story plays out conventionally, and the biggest hint of a new perspective comes in the prologue, when the chorus confronts the audience as Tonio (Gordon Hawkins) pleads for sympathy: “We are men of flesh and blood, breathing the air of this lonely world just like you.”

Both works are directed by Christopher Mattaliano, and his “Carmina Burana” begins exactly where his “Pagliacci” ends: with Nedda and her lover Silvio lying dead. But here the chorus reacts to their murder by singing Orff’s invocation to destiny, “O Fortuna,” and soon dancers of the 13-member Bodyvox company arrive to raise the slain couple and initiate them in a ritual of recollection and acceptance, leaving the earthly delights of the “Carmina Burana” Latin texts not so much experienced as remembered in an afterlife.

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This nostalgic approach borrows from “Our Town” in the same way the look of “Pagliacci” borrows from “La Strada,” but it helps deepen our involvement by supplying central figures we already care about. Singing the text for solo soprano and baritone, Riddle and Brett Polegato seem to carry over their identities from “Pagliacci.” Moreover, those figures quickly acquire dance doubles: Ashley Roland for Riddle’s Nedda, Jamey Hampton for Polegato’s Silvio. Best known for their collaboration in the experimental and irreverent ISO modern dance company, Roland and Hampton have choreographed this “Carmina Burana” in a freewheeling, multidisciplinary style that doesn’t diagram the music a la Mark Morris but, at its most persuasive, serves as a hymn to impulsive, uninhibited creative expression.

And they integrate the vocalists skillfully, though the big transitional singer-dancer passage early on comes so close to the identity-transfer that opens Agnes de Mille’s “Oklahoma!” dream ballet that you wonder for a moment if you’re watching Nedda and Silvio or Curly and Laurey.

Happily, Riddle makes Nedda’s spiritual journey after death into a complex, heartfelt experience, bringing so many new implications and so much lustrous tone to Orff’s “In trutina mentis dubia” that she easily compensates for her rather wiry vocalism in “Pagliacci.” Polegato sounds overwhelmed by Orff’s demands but makes a sweet-voiced and sympathetic Leoncavallo swain. Singing the triple role of Beppe, Harlequin and the roasted “Carmina Burana” swan, Curt Peterson capitalizes on the only voice in the cast that actually blooms in ascent and under pressure.

Left out of the Orff action, both Hawkins and Barasorda as Canio bring so much emotion to their singing that you want to overlook the thin, grainy sound of them in the familiar “Pagliacci” showpieces. Indeed, Barasorda nearly makes a virtue of his limitations, portraying Canio as a man nearly used up and hopeless, personally and professionally. But, alas, it’s the tenor and not the character who can’t explode into “No, Pagliaccio non son” with the proper scale of vocal anguish or ferocity, the tenor and not the character who loses prominence at the moment when his very soul must be in his throat.

When that soul resounds in the Opera Pacific performance, it’s either Riddle or the chorus you’re hearing--a chorus augmented for “Carmina Burana” but even in “Pagliacci” a force capable of representing mankind as a whole. To conductor John DeMain goes the credit of delivering Leoncavallo and Orff idiomatically and with enough emotion to launch the unorthodox premise of the staging: not merely two short works cobbled together for novelty’s sake but an integrated double-header in which one masterwork serves as the spiritual sequel to another.

* “Pagliacci” and “Carmina Burana,” 7:30 p.m. today and Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday. Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $28-$131. (714) 740-7878.

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