As the notion of “alternative facts” gains currency in today’s theater of politics, it is worth reminding ourselves that alternative realities have held sway in the world of opera since time immemorial, and still do.
Those realities are in fact the beating heart of “The Invention of Morel,” a brilliant music theater adaptation of the famous 1940 sci-fi novella by Adolfo Bioy Casares that received its world premiere by Chicago Opera Theater on Saturday night at the Studebaker Theater in downtown Chicago.
A sense of surreal disquiet hangs over the show, a co-production with Long Beach Opera that represents the first commissioned opera in COT’s 43-year history. It is a milestone as welcome as it is overdue.
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One experiences the new opera the way one experiences a dark if oddly beautiful dream in which nothing is quite as it purports to be. Mysteries enclose other mysteries, like layers of an onion.
As with the central character — an escaped convict identified only as the Fugitive who winds up on a remote tropical island inhabited by a singularly strange group of tourists and their host, a mad scientific genius named Morel — one is confronted by questions early on: Who are these people? Why are they here? Why does no one appear to see or hear him? Why does everyone seem to be trapped in a weird time loop?
It’s “The Tempest” perhaps crossbred with TV’s “The Twilight Zone” and “Lost,” with a touch of “Groundhog Day” thrown in. If we only had an invention like Morel’s to assure us we would live forever. A nice thought to contemplate — just don’t ask the downside.
Stewart Copeland’s pungent score and English actor-writer Jonathan Moore’s stage direction (he co-authored the libretto with Copeland) exert a cumulative hallucinatory power that haunts your thoughts well after you’ve left the theater. With this, his fifth opera, Copeland — co-founder and drummer of the defunct British rock band the Police — has come of age as a composer of music theater works.
And the Studebaker Theater once again is proving its usefulness as a comfortable, congenial downtown venue for chamber opera. The 720-seat space provides a properly intimate frame for the audience to be drawn into the absorbing piece of magical musical surrealism that is “The Invention of Morel.”
The libretto went through multiple rewrites over a period of more than three years, under the active stewardship of Andreas Mitisek, general director of COT and artistic and general director of Long Beach Opera. His incisive conducting of a 16-member pit band made up of musicians from Chicago’s Fulcrum Point New Music Project adds immeasurably to the success of the show.
Although classical in style, the twitchy rhythms, percussion-driven ostinatos and pile-driving licks of electric guitar of Copeland’s orchestral writing prove you can’t keep an old rocker down. His jabbing staccati mirror the thrumming of Morel’s sinister machines, effectively undergirding the vocal writing. It’s by far his best work in the classical genre to date. If his through-composed score never allows the singers to break into any full-fledged arias, a couple of them are given brief ariosos to match the declamatory vocal lines assigned to the Fugitive and his alter ego, the Narrator.
Dividing the troubled protagonist in two in the operatic version was an inspired touch. The Narrator and Fugitive represent the present and past halves of the same person; one watches and recalls while the other plumbs the mystery of the island and Morel’s contraption.
As the Fugitive (forcefully sung and acted by baritone Andrew Wilkowske) falls desperately in love with a mysterious beauty who’s one of Morel’s guests, the symbolically named Faustine (a character inspired by the 1920s film star Louise Brooks), we see the Narrator (the excellent baritone Lee Gregory) pouring his confusion and fears into a diary. He tries to catch her attention and persuade her to return his longing, but she remains as remote as the rest.
Soprano and COT mainstay Valerie Vinzant is wonderfully alluring as the strange object of the Fugitive’s desire. Faustine’s melismatic vocal lines and glissandos add to her otherworldly aspect. Our final, haunting image of the opera’s central figures is of them lounging alongside each other at sunset along a deserted shore, lovers forever united in spirit but forever separated in time.
With his high, ethereal tenor, Nathan Granner conveys megalomaniacal suave as the Prospero-like inventor Morel (“Immortality is a holy grail!” declares this master of his machines).
The other supporting characters are meant to be seen as ghostly figures out of a parallel temporal dimension. (The Fugitive regards the tourists as self-absorbed snobs because they take no notice of him.) These island guests aren’t meant to have much individuality and most often perform as an ensemble, and do so quite well. Hats off to Kimberly E. Jones (Dora), Barbara Landis (Duchess), Scott Brunscheen (Alec/Ombrellieri) and David Govertsen (Stoever).
Designers Alan Muraoka (set), David Martin Jacques (lighting) and Adam Flemming (video) provide an eye-filling scenic frame for the action. A tilted metal frame is all that’s needed to suggest Morel’s mystery “museum,” looming in front of scrims bearing backlit projections of forest, beach, garden, mansion and spinning gears. Jenny Mannis designed the tourists’ Jazz Age-style evening wear and the bedraggled attire worn by the Fugitive and his id, the Narrator.
4 stars
Chicago Opera Theater’s world-premiere production of Stewart Copeland’s “The Invention of Morel,” conducted by Andreas Mitisek, continues through Feb. 26 at the Studebaker Theater, 410 S. Michigan Ave.; $39-$125; 312-704-8414, www.cot.org.
John von Rhein is a Tribune critic.
jvonrhein@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @jvonrhein
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