A Night at the Opera-Part One-Review of L’Enfant et les Sortileges

l’Enfant et les Sortileges
Opera McGill

Even though I spend most of my Saturday afternoons with Howard Dyck not Sook-Yin; I will admit that my knowledge of opera is about equal to George Bush’s knowledge of the Middle East. Luckily I picked the perfect show to attend with Opera McGill’s staging of two one act pieces-Ravel’s l’Enfant et Les sortileges and Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. If you are an opera virgin (or if you have a classical music wary friend or relative that you want to enlighten) this is the performance for you. The pieces are short, whimsical, and modern enough to be friendly to many people’s sensibilities and ears. The only barrier to accessibility was the lack of captions (the first opera is in French, the second in Italian).

Of course, in the case of the Ravel, if I was not an anglo barbarian…

In many respects the two operas are very different, but the stage director Guillermon Silva-Marin’s program notes explain that they are united by a subtext beneath their whimsy of post WWI “moral malaise”. To further the continuity he strives to present both pieces in a “art deco environment” as they both date from the 1920s-ish. This is not a conceptual stretch at all and is a rather clever and exciting idea; particularly with l’Enfant et Les sortileges. It was originally lavishly presented in the Monaco-epicenter of the roaring 20’s lifestyle and art movements. Plus, Deco is a clusterfuck of different influences and Ravel’s score is a clusterfuck of styles (as the man himself said, “it’s a very smooth blending of all styles from all epochs from Bach up to…Ravel…with a bit of jazz band”). Unfortunately, except for the great cubism-deco set and some cocktail dresses in Gianni Schicchi, there is nothing else particularly art deco or modernist in the staging of the pieces.

To my mind, l’Enfant et Les sortileges’ plot is a thinly veiled interpretation of the librettist Collette’s time as the enfant terrible of the French art scene. It starts with a child arguing with his mother over his lessons and being punished by an afternoon of “time out”. Left alone, the child goes on a rampage of destruction tearing up his books and smashing up the room and poking all the pets. The kid chills out and finds the chairs have come to life to chastise him. Then in rapid succession everything else does, including the clock, teacups, characters from his books, the fire, even the concept of mathematics, spring to life to give him a trip worse then PCP bought on a Rave dance floor. All of a sudden the child is in the garden under moonlight and a bunch of trees and woodland creatures that he’s abused on previous outings present themselves one after another to give him a hard time. Eventually they attack him but forgive him after he hurts a squirrel then bandages the paw. The kid finally sinks into tiredness calling for his mother and the animals carry him back to the house.

It’s a wonderful piece; it’s Alice in Wonderland imaginative reach is quite affecting. One is delighted and surprised by the constant arrival of all the anthopologised figures who appear to taunt the boy. The music really grabs you with its constant mutations. Startling and sublimely beautiful moments in the score (like the scenes with a fairytale princess, shepherds from a destroyed book, the arrival in the garden, and the ending) are a pleasant surprise, set among so much orchestral chaos. Enough praise cannot be heaped upon the vocal prowess of the cast. As this is a student production I had my doubts but I was flabbergasted at the overall talent of the whole cast for both pieces (there was some double casting in the two).

There are three major flaws with the first operetta- all of them related to the limited resources of student productions. The orchestra is a disappointment. More risks should have been taken with the score and it would have been great to see a little more “swing” in much of it. The stage blocking is adequate but this show demands proper choreography- the figures just arrive and sing at and/or chase the kid around. After the third of more than a dozen arrivals this grows tired. The costumes are passable with obvious standouts (the chairs, the fire, the bat). What would have been great is if each was done in a more deco style, perhaps an emulation of Bakst.

Review of Gianni Schicchi and podcast of entire evening to come.