The Remedy for an ‘Imaginary Invalid’

Moliere’s final play, “The Imaginary Invalid,” speaks to us across the centuries about “the malady of doctors”: physicians with “no obligation to cure people--just to treat them according to the proper form.” A bitter theme for a dying playwright, but one sweetened by lovers in distress, lightened by a servant with no inclination to serve and punctuated by an hour’s worth of musical divertissements composed by Marc Antoine Charpentier.

Indirectly reinforcing the sense of the ridiculous that dominates the play itself, these interludes require vocal soloists, chorus, dancers and orchestra--the resources of an opera company. And Long Beach Opera, in Part 1 of its annual festival, made a case for their charm and elegance in an uneven English-language production that opened Saturday at the Carpenter Center.

Moliere loved breaking the formal rules of his art: introducing major characters near the end of a work, for instance, and parodying excess by becoming excessive. Ricocheting between fulsome homage to Louis XIV and sly mockery of himself, this 1673 comedie-ballet subjects an intimate domestic farce to the operatic intrusion of Arcadian shepherds, dancing Gypsies and marching soldiers, with the final scene integrating opera and satire in a pseudo-triumphal chorus of doctors welcoming a Latin-spouting quack into their ranks.

At such moments, conductor Andreas Mitisek and the Musica Angelica Baroque Orchestra made Moliere and Charpentier sound like sumptuously aristocratic precursors of Gilbert and Sullivan, though elsewhere the interludes floundered due to the unintelligible singing of Ellen Milenski’s translations of the lyrics and the empty-headed, raggedly danced choreography of Susan Mosakowski.

For the shepherds and their sheep-on-wheels, architect-designers Craig Hodgetts and Ming Fung created a vista of rough-hewn, cutout lollipop trees backed by a flat, semicircular hillock--with the floor eventually rising and dividing to form the walls of the imaginary invalid’s sickroom. Unfortunately, their enormous cubbyholed chair for the invalid never moved as easily: Lugging it here and there became one of the great awkwardnesses of Matthew Maguire’s staging--along with forcing the actors and singers to flatten themselves periodically against the hillock to make room for the dancers.

Acted in a translation by Donald Frame, the play had the advantage of an energetic, surprisingly varied performance by Victor Talmadge in the title role, plus an explosive, scene-stealing cameo by Daniel Bryan Cartmell as his vengeful doctor. Elisa Llamido and Michael Gallager brought spirit to the roles of the lovers and, by being wildly bubbly in her greed, Linnea Pyne managed to make likable the invalid’s unfaithful young wife (another of Moliere’s bitter jokes about himself).

In two distinctive lampoons of the medical profession, Tom Fitzpatrick made Diafoirus and Fleurant equally grotesque and funny, while Joe Hernandez-Kolski expertly played both a fatuous suitor and the luckless Polichinelle. Somehow, Gregg Daniel avoided sounding preachy in Beralde’s Voice of Reason speeches, but Alyssa Lupo found only one strident tone for the role of the servant Toinette and quickly grew tiresome.

Kim DeShazo’s costumes looked rich and in period when serving the spoken word but cheap and from no time in particular when the music started. In contrast, Geoff Korf’s lighting brought imaginative color washes to the interludes but stayed prosaic in the domestic scenes. Principal singers included Kathleen Roland, Frank Martinelli, Kirsten Leslie, Ann Desler, Daniel Plaster and Joseph Mathieu.

Topical: * “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle” is given a rare fully staged production. F6