It’s a Mad World for This Remarkable ‘Peter Grimes’

“Peter Grimes”--Benjamin Britten’s tragic opera about a tormented, cruel fisherman rooted in a harsh land and bleak climate, and subject to an intolerant society--suggests a theme and place far distant from sunny, friendly Southern California. Even “Aida” feels closer to home. There will never be a Disney “Grimes.”

And yet this haunting 1945 study of the torments of being an outsider, a work credited as the dawning of a new day in British opera, has surprisingly close and meaningful local associations. Britten and his partner, tenor Peter Pears, who created the title role, discovered the 19th century poem by George Crabbe, on which the opera is based, in San Diego while they were living in Escondido during the summer of 1941. Crabbe’s evocation of Britten’s native Suffolk coast provoked profound homesickness as the composer breathed the unaccustomed soft air and read in the unaccustomed soft light. The opera even came unusually quickly to Los Angeles, produced here only three years after its triumphant London premiere. A later production, by the visiting Royal Opera as part of the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival, had a role in convincing Los Angeles to build a permanent opera company.

Wednesday night, Los Angeles Opera finally produced its own “Peter Grimes” and offered an additional strong connection between Los Angeles and Britten. The new production at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion was entrusted to film director John Schlesinger, most noted for his Hollywood successes (particularly “Midnight Cowboy”) and whose most recent film, “The Next Best Thing,” stars Madonna as an airhead L.A. yoga instructor. Yet the British director began his career with a 1957 documentary for the BBC on Britten.

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Schlesinger’s production, however, is entirely faithful to the Suffolk period setting. Unremarkably designed by another emigre from the film world, Luciana Arrighi, it is satisfied to get its point and its music across without much extraneous directorial revelation or explanation.

Schlesinger honors realism and suggests many small, lifelike quirks in the mannerisms of the town folk, giving the production a rich human character. He solves the blocking problems of chorus-as-mob with simple, pointed elegance. And he stays out of the singers’ ways, particularly allowing Philip Langridge, a veteran and complexly compelling Grimes, room to explore the deep ambiguities of a terrible but touching man with the ability to dream.

Grimes is a child abuser, but Britten’s music makes him more. We see Grimes from many sides. The orchestra, bold and brilliant and ostentatiously prominent, is the weather and atmosphere (oppressive yet also mystical) of the fishing village, expressing its moods and its roiling sea. We never know exactly the extent of Grimes’ crimes (he is rough on his boys, but their deaths are accidental). We witness his irrationalities, but we are also invited into his poetic visions. And we glimpse yet another Grimes through the caring eyes of Ellen, the village teacher.

A modern and inescapable interpretation of Grimes suggests the plight of the homosexual as outsider, but Britten casts a wide net of sympathies with room for everyone’s insecurities and paranoia. Schlesinger, in his one questionable strategy, adds a gratuitous recurring vision of a young apprentice who died at sea, a bare-chested boy haunting Grimes.

Otherwise, there is not much to look at. The stone village and period costumes look best on the few occasions when they are interestingly lit. A painted drop curtain with swirling shapes drained into a central vortex provides the banal visual backdrop for the opera’s famous and striking instrumental interludes.

Still, none of this interferes with Langridge’s remarkable performance. The British tenor was forced to miss the dress rehearsal, recovering from laryngitis, but he asked for no consideration from the audience and needed none. Now and then, there may be have been a touch of roughness in his voice, but even that added to the depth of his performance, which captured the essential strangeness of this man we never really understand. Most striking about Langridge’s Grimes is that he is an almost ordinary man with extraordinary demons, we just about grasp him, but not quite.

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The rest of the cast provides an unusually convincing world that drives Grimes mad. Nancy Gustafson sings Ellen’s beautiful music very beautifully, although with more emphasis on tone than word. “Grimes” is populated by a wonderful collection of English types, and they are colorfully realized. Richard Stilwell is the salty old Capt. Balstrode; Suzanna Guzman makes an amusingly Miss Marple-like Mrs. Sedley; Greg Fedderly provides a vibrantly corrupt Methodist preacher, Bob Boles; Jonathan Mack is the unctuous Reverend Horace Adams; John Atkins is about as sympathetic as the sleazy pharmacist, Ned Keene, can be; Judith Christin is the amusing madame, Auntie.

Other small parts include Michael Li-Paz as Hobson; Louis Lebherz as Swallow; Zale Kessler as Dr. Crabbe; and Shana Blake Hill and Jordan Gumucio as Aunties’ Nieces, the prostitutes. All are convincing. The silent role of John, the apprentice, was powerfully acted by Aidan Schultz-Meyer.

Convincing and strong, too, was the all-important chorus. Richard Armstrong conducted with more straightforward drama than poetry on his mind. I would have liked a larger sound from the orchestra, but those who sat upstairs may have gotten just that. A special (and unpublicized) addition to the performances is the pre-performance lecture, which happens to be by perhaps the greatest authority on the opera, Philip Brett, and will greatly enhance the evening for anyone arriving an hour early.

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* “Peter Grimes” continues Saturday, 1 p.m.; Tuesday, next Friday, Oct. 29 and Nov. 1, 7:30 p.m.; Nov. 4, 1 p.m.; Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. $28-$148. (213) 972-8001.