A Lovely Shade of Swamp Green

It’s not easy being green. And two centuries before Kermit the Frog dramatized that underreported existential predicament, a Baroque swamp thing named Platee made it indelible by waddling across the stages of Versailles and Paris in a satiric opera named after her.

And what an opera. Composed by Jean-Philippe Rameau in 1745, it teems with sumptuous choruses, deft and often daring uses of the orchestra to characterize the animal kingdom, and the majestic harmonies for which Rameau became legendary. It also revels in narrative conspiracies, making Jupiter and the other gods insufferably mean-spirited and leaving Platee’s self-infatuation looking comparatively harmless.

Indeed, director-choreographer Mark Morris and tenor Jean-Paul Fouchecourt managed to make Platee not only laughable but endearing in the much-traveled 1997 Royal Opera production of “Platee” that opened the Eclectic Orange Festival at the Orange County Performing Arts Center over the weekend.

But a sense of dramatic structure was never one of Rameau’s virtues, so not only does his amphibian heroine suffer the indignity of being used and then mocked, but for much of the last half of the opera she remains sidetracked by the composer’s obsession with a peripheral character, La Folie. Jupiter goes back to his wife, La Folie gets the best arias: If Platee wasn’t green already, she would have turned that color as the opera neared its third hour.

Enlisting the members of his modern dance company, Morris’ choreography for the swamp creatures adroitly physicalized the lightness and freshness of the score, with the bird movement especially magical. However, apart from his and Fouchecourt’s enrichment of the title role, the staging stayed superficial and sometimes even plodding--especially in the prologue, which never found a sense of directorial focus until the dancers stopped lip-synching the choruses coming from the pit and began a series of character divertissements.

Scenic designer Adrianne Lobel set that prologue in a realistic contemporary bar with a decorative aquarium tank on its back wall--a tank that became enlarged into Platee’s swamp for the rest of the opera. Its varied levels, hiding places and descending panels served the plot and dances well enough, but in beauty and a distinctive sense of style it never matched the contributions by the two heroes of the “Platee” production team: costume designer Isaac Mizrahi and conductor Nicholas McGegan.

Witty and whimsical, Mizrahi’s fashion statements ranged from mock-raunchy (leather over simulated bare skin for the satyrs) through supernaturally glamorous (La Folie as a Mae West-style platinum blond with enormous wings behind her white gown).

Connoisseurs of the grotesque might consider Platee’s lumpen bodysuit the masterpiece of the collection, but the swamp-dancers’ intricately dyed and splotched unitards created such a force field of glowing color that they came to embody the glories of nature in contrast to her comic ugliness.

Conducting the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra and the Pacific Chorale’s John Alexander Singers, the authoritative McGegan turned even the dramatically static sections of the opera into treasurable demonstrations of Rameau’s fabled mastery of mood, orchestral detail and burnished tone.

Besides Fouchecourt’s tour de force--which included dancing along with the comically graceless Three Graces--singing honors on Saturday belonged to Amy Burton as La Folie. Her first aria seemed to lie too high for her, but afterward the power, stamina, precision and vivacity of her singing sustained interest through the opera’s longest longueurs.

Looking like playing-card royals, Bernard Deletre gave a spirited if vocally dry performance as Jupiter, and Mary Phillips sounded squally as Junon. Philip Salmon exuded condescension and bright tone as Mercure.

Lisa Saffer brought vocal sheen to the role of Clarine and wore her green-haired lizard costume as if born in it. In contrast, Marcos Pujol needed more vocal weight as Citheron. John McVeigh neatly attended to the limited swamp duties of Momus while Deletre sang the role in the prologue.

Many of the other singers appeared as different prologue characters and the dancers switched identities all evening.

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The Eclectic Orange Festival continues through Nov. 11 in a number of Orange County venues. Information: (949) 553-2422.