Ringlet of fire

IT was most likely unintentional -- but in a recent interview, an enthusiastic Andreas Mitisek, artistic and general director of Long Beach Opera, coined an oddly appropriate word for most productions of Richard Wagner’s epic four-opera cycle, “The Ring of the Nibelungen”: gigantomanic.

“I personally think it was meant as a human drama, with interactions between people,” Mitisek said of the German composer’s mythic saga, considered the opera world’s most ambitious undertaking with its customary length of 16 hours. The four operas are usually spread over five days to give the singers a chance to rest between the vocally challenging installments.

“It’s usually on a huge stage, and then you have a huge orchestra between you and the stage,” Mitisek said. “And when you do it in a gigantomanic way, you take away that real intimacy that can happen when two characters stand onstage and sing to each other.”

The world of opera does not generally lend itself to puns and bad jokes -- but in this case, prepare for them in gigantomanic proportions: This month, Long Beach Opera is presenting an abridged “Ring” at the Center Theater in downtown Long Beach. The short version, conceived in the late ‘90s at England’s Birmingham Opera Company by Graham Vick and Jonathan Dove, is a co-production with Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, which presented the first two operas, “The Rhinegold” and “The Valkyrie,” last summer and will complete the cycle with “Siegfried” and “Twilight of the Gods” in July. Jonathan Eaton, artistic director of Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, came to Long Beach to direct this first West Coast production.

Yes, it’s a “Ring”-let, a pocket “Ring,” the Short Cycle, the Semi-Cycle. And the condensation -- which will be performed twice in its entirety, in English instead of German, over two weekends, next Saturday and Sunday and Jan. 21 and 22 -- is, of course, a great way to Ring in the new year.

But then, untold opera fans have deemed “The Ring” a life-enhancing experience since 1876, when it was first performed in its entirety at the theater in Bayreuth, Germany, that Wagner built specifically to showcase it.

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An exercise in eclecticism

SIMILARLY, myriad directors and designers have been inspired by the composer’s vast saga of Norse gods and goddesses and human greed and folly, which brought the world the amazonian Valkyries (chief among them Brunnhilde), the floating Rhine Maidens and the valiant hero Siegfried and which clearly inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s own “Ring” myth. There have been slavishly detailed “Ring” productions, starkly symbolic ones and scores in between. Washington National Opera announced last month that its new “Ring” would be inspired by the history and landscape of the United States. Designer Danila Korogodsky’s renderings for the Long Beach version suggest a collision between abstraction and Tolkien.

One avid Los Angeles “Ringhead” -- a term frequently used to describe those who follow stagings of the cycle around the world -- is a little confused about how to add Long Beach Opera’s mini-”Ring” to his bragging rights. “I’ve seen 74 ‘Rings’ complete. The last one was in Amsterdam,” says retired ophthalmologist Sherwin Sloan, president of the Los Angeles Wagner Society and a member of the Los Angeles Opera board of directors. “I think I’ll call this my 74th-and-a-half.”

All kidding aside, Sloan is so excited by the opportunity to see a new take on “The Ring” that he’s organized a group of about 30 L.A. Opera board members to attend the Long Beach cycle; in the spring, he plans to lead another such group to Paris to see a full-length “Ring” staged by Robert Wilson. “I’ve never seen an abbreviated ‘Ring’ -- I think it’s a good idea,” Sloan says. “And we get it done in two days.”

Speight Jenkins, general director of Seattle Opera, which presented full-length “Ring” cycles in 2001 and 2005, thinks a shortened “Ring” is a great idea.

“There are plenty of Wagner purists who are going to complain about it, but that’s neither here nor there,” Jenkins says. “The important thing is to introduce the cycle as much as possible to people who haven’t seen it before. If Long Beach Opera succeeds in doing that, it’s great for everybody, because almost anyone who sees a reduced version of something really great wants to see the whole thing.”

More by coincidence than design, Long Beach Opera also will launch what is shaping up locally as the year of “The Ring.” In early 2005, the Orange County Performing Arts Center announced that it would import the Kirov Opera’s “Ring” from St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2006. Because the Long Beach staging comes earlier, however, the company beats OCPAC in the “Ring” competition, boasting the first production ever “in the Los Angeles and Orange County areas.” It can’t claim the catchier “first ‘Ring’ in Southern California” distinction because the Seattle “Ring” was staged in San Diego in the 1970s, albeit over four years.

And not for 2006 but on the calendar for the near future is a long-awaited “Ring” from Los Angeles Opera. In 2001, that company announced a wildly ambitious “Ring” with special effects from George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic, to be presented from 2003 to 2006. Cost estimates for the extravaganza ranged as high as $60 million. Since then, L.A. Opera has delayed, changed and scaled back its plans several times. Now the company says it is finalizing an agreement with the creative team and the singers for a “Ring” to be presented over the 2008-09 and 2009-10 seasons, with details promised this year.

Sue Bienkowski, Long Beach Opera board president, says the company has been talking about doing the abbreviated “Ring” since the Austrian-born Mitisek took over from longtime general director Michael Milenski in 2003. She adds that the idea is in keeping with a commitment on the part of the company, founded in 1978, to avoid opera’s war horses in favor of more experimental or less frequently performed fare.

“You say ‘The Ring’ and you think: ‘Heavens, if L.A. Opera can’t do this, how can Long Beach Opera do this?’ ” says Bienkowski. “When Opera Theater of Pittsburgh did the first two parts, I went to see it, because I thought, ‘What’s this going to be like, and can we do it?’ My first impression from the very beginning was that this was something we could do. It was more intimate, very immediate.”

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Strictly a package deal

UNLIKE the Pittsburgh approach, however, Bienkowski and Mitisek agreed that they wanted to do the whole cycle at once. “It’s like ‘Star Wars’ or ‘Lord of the Rings’ or ‘Harry Potter’ -- if you don’t see the next part, you miss the enjoyment of the whole thing,” Mitisek says. Except for last-minute buyers of individual turn-back tickets, the four-opera cycle is being sold only as a package deal.

Even without a Lucas light show, presenting a full-length, fully staged, fullorchestra “Ring” is a pricey business. Seattle Opera’s Jenkins says his company’s “Ring” budgets averaged $10 million. In Long Beach, during a conversation just before a “Ring” rehearsal in a space at the nearby Pike at Rainbow Harbor shopping and entertainment complex, Mitisek said Long Beach Opera is spending about $500,000 to present its “Ring.” While the number seems small compared with the multimillion-dollar budgets of larger opera companies, the figure represents what the organization usually spends in a year, over three productions.

Still, the theater will be smaller. In recent years, Long Beach Opera has usually performed in the 1,074-seat Carpenter Performing Arts Center at Cal State Long Beach. The Center Theater has a capacity of 820, and the orchestra will be behind the stage rather than in a pit in front.

Mitisek reached forward and tapped the edge of a coffee table less than three feet in front of him. “If you sit in the front row, this is the edge of the stage,” he said. “You could put your feet up on the stage. I think that is something that people have never experienced with ‘The Ring’ -- it’s usually a huge stage, and you have a huge orchestra between you and the stage. So there is never the possibility of being in contact.”

Presentations of the full-length “Ring” are noted for using gargantuan 80- to 90-piece orchestras; it takes a big voice to compete. Long Beach will use only 25 players. Though part of the reason for that is budget constraints, stage director Eaton says that using a smaller orchestra, as well as a smaller theater, provides an advantage when it comes to casting. “We can open the casting pool very widely -- you don’t have to find the singer with that one voice in a million,” he says. “The result is you can start character casting -- singers who are magnificent actors as well as singers.”

One of those is Gary Lehman, the understudy for Placido Domingo in L.A. Opera’s recent presentation of Wagner’s “Parsifal.” Lehman, previously a baritone, stepped in for Domingo at the end of the run in December, making his debut as a tenor. For the singer, 41, portraying Siegmund, in a mini-”Ring” in a small house represents a great opportunity to continue to test his wings as both a tenor and a Wagnerian. “I believe this is the repertoire that best suits me; that’s the direction I want to go,” he says. And, he adds, “It’s going to introduce a whole new fan base to the ‘Ring’ cycle. Hopefully this can give smaller companies a chance they might never have had.”

Eaton is quick to say that a shortened “Ring” with a smaller orchestra should not imply similarly radical casting cuts. “We have a cast of about 15. In Pittsburgh, we used four Valkyries instead of six, and here we’re using three -- but we have a whole complement of luscious Rhine Maidens,” he jokes.

And though Eaton does not borrow Mitisek’s term “gigantomanic,” he opts for another aptly sizable word to describe what he calls opera’s biggest problem. “I’ve been involved in opera all of my life, and the art form suffers the burden of elephantiasis,” he says. “I run a small company -- there are two companies in Pittsburgh, and I run the smaller one. We can’t justify spending figures that large on operatic entertainment. The medium needs to stretch to meet the reality -- or rather, shrink to meet the reality.”

And what does Eaton have to say to Wagner lovers for whom cutting “The Ring” may be akin to condensing the Bible into CliffsNotes? “While one has to respect their purity, I’m sure some of them are secretly thinking, ‘This is a little static for my rear end,’ ” the director says crisply.

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‘The Ring of the Nibelung’

Where: Center Theater, Long Beach Performing Arts Center, 300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach

When: “The Rhinegold,” 2 p.m. Saturday and Jan. 21; “The Valkyrie,” 6 p.m. Saturday and Jan. 21; “Siegfried,” 2 p.m. Sunday and Jan. 22; “Twilight of the Gods,” 6 p.m. Sunday and Jan. 22

Price: $250 to $450

Contact: (562) 439-2580 or www.longbeachopera.org

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Contact Diane Haithman at calendar .letters@latimes.com.