Taymor’s Tweaking of ‘Green Bird’ Clips Its Wings

Four years after it landed at the La Jolla Playhouse, the same year as its off-Broadway premiere, director Julie Taymor’s production of “The Green Bird” (now at the Cort Theatre) still offers some pretty wild sights and sounds.

The flying, apple-headed women who could have been painted by Magritte and who harmonize like the Roches, for example.

Or the talking statues, one contrasting the other. The first, an enormous Easter Island-inspired head spouting philosophical advice, resembles a refugee from a Terry Gilliam “Monty Python’s Flying Circus” animation. The second, representing the classical Euro-ideal of female beauty, is played by actress Lee Lewis in full-body makeup, strikingly marble-like.

Strangely, though, much of the wonder of “The Green Bird” has diminished since 1996.

No radical transformations have been effected--certainly nothing on the order of the transformations cooked up in playwright Carlo Gozzi’s 1765 fairy tale. But Taymor and company have revised and added and, finally, overpacked their menacing fantasy. Playwright Eric Overmyer’s credited with tweaking the Albert Bermel/Ted Emery translation. The script, deliberately, is coarser. It’s also less magical, and more strenuous.

Royal-born but abandoned at birth, Renzo (Sebastian Roche) and his sister Barbarina (Katie MacNichol) have been raised by a sausage seller (Ned Eisenberg) and his wife (Didi Conn). Under the influence of cynical French philosophy, Renzo and Barbarina reject all kindnesses as expressions of self-love. They must pay for their folly, and Gozzi makes ‘em, sending them through a maze of discovery.

That maze leads to the callow siblings’ birth father, the king (Derek Smith, still the best thing in the show). His attraction to the newly wealthy Barbarina, his unbeknownst daughter, has “Oedipus Rex” and trouble written all over it. (At Wednesday’s performance, several parents of preteens seemed rattled by the show’s sexual undertone.)

The green bird of the title guides the siblings throughout. It is manipulated and voiced by Bruce Turk. When the bird turns into a handsome prince at the end, Taymor achieves the presto-chango via the most elemental means possible: Bird flies up and out of sight; dozens of green feathers float down; prince descends from above the stage.

Gozzi’s universe isn’t all sweetness and light; it’s rife with incestuous overtones, cruelty and heartbreak. But the transformations leaven the story, recalling Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” now getting excellent stage representation in Mary Zimmerman’s hands at the Mark Taper Forum.

Taymor’s sensibility is more severe than Zimmerman’s. In “The Lion King,” you appreciate Taymor’s gravitas, as well as her ability to provide many different ways of imagining the same landscape, the same species of animal or bird or vista. It’s true here as well, but “The Green Bird” feels more cluttered and less selective than it did four years ago. The commedia routines grind on, rather dourly. And when the (new) finale comes, a big-band-style up-tempo number, “Oh Foolish Heart,” the merriment seems misplaced.

Despite that overbearing finale, composer Elliot Goldenthal’s music (three musicians playing live on top of the prerecorded material) is generally terrific. Taymor’s partner in life as well as in theater, his compositions and orchestrations borrow from the seaside circus strains of Nino Rota (“La Strada”) as well as the nervous deconstructo-jazz of John Zorn.

Some potent sounds and sights, to be sure. “The Green Bird” played better in a smaller venue, but this isn’t just a case of two different-sized theaters. Taymor may have noodled this one for the worse.

And yet: I’d give Smith this year’s featured actor Tony Award in a second. He’s reason enough to see this show. Behind his wondrously woebegone mask--he’s like the God of Moping, or Lord of All Whiners--Smith, more than anyone afoot, makes “The Green Bird” feel not just intermittently rapturous, but comically alive.

* “The Green Bird,” Cort Theatre, 138 W. 48th St., New York. $45-$75. (212) 239-6200.