The Boston Lyric Opera long ago became the master of adapting unusual spaces to its needs, including, for a recent production of The Handmaid’s Tale, the very building on the Harvard campus Margaret Atwood had in mind for The Red Center. That harrowing production was directed by Anne Bogart, who has returned for Bartók’s no less harrowing Bluebeard’s Castle. This time the venue is a 1919 wharf shed, once part of the Army Supply Base at the now defunct South Boston Naval Annex and subsequently converted, with minimal changes, into a cruise ship terminal in the 1980s.
The interior is dark and constricted with a ceiling of wooden planks, still studded with metal fixtures from its former life, and clerestory windows. A raised platform, a large bed at its center, is surrounded on three sides by risers of folding chairs with the orchestra seated on the fourth. An ominous grey, boulder-like mass with a seam down the middle looms over the bed along with a frame with embedded light strip. The surface is such a highly polished black that the bed seems to float on a dark lake. Several small café tables and chairs, a sofa and a white baby grand dot the perimeter. Six women in bedazzled face masks and fin de siècle gowns seat themselves on the sofa and chairs or wander robotically. These are Bluebeard’s previous wives who function as a mostly silent Greek chorus, reacting to the stage with choreographed gestures and movements and the occasional collective sigh.
The opening of each door is accompanied by a change in lighting and the removal of a layer of bedding, revealing a different colored satiny material. For the Lake of Tears, Judith unspools from a crevice in the bedding a huge expanse of grayish fabric which gradually reads blue in the light and which the wives then spread to flood the entire stage. Bluebeard gradually loses layers of clothing as well until he is shirtless. At the opening of the final door, the wives mount a plinth one by one to be joined by Judith.Bogart decided to frame the opera with Judith singing Alma Mahler’s Four Songs to counterbalance what she considers, “the most male-centered opera ever written” – a daring choice which completely alters the ending. Three songs, dealing with stormy emotions and nature, preceded the opera proper, two accompanied by pianist Yukiko Oba, the third by the orchestra. Judith spoke the Prologue then mounted the stage. At the end, she immediately began Licht in der Nacht, stepping down from the plinth with the other wives, following and surrounding and enveloping the catatonic Bluebeard. At the final line, “Sleep, o heart, you shall not hear a voice again”, the wives drew back to reveal an eviscerated Bluebeard, tendrils of crimson from the Armory bedding piled like bloody entrails on his abdomen The performance concluded with a final collective sigh.
The BLO opted for Eberhard Kloke's reduction, its 29 players more suitable to the space, and the 2005 English translation by Bartók’s son, Peter. David Angus made sure the reduction in forces did not equal reduction in power while still maintaining chamber music transparency and supporting his singers. The soloists, in turn, could concentrate their efforts on character and expression without concerns about projection compromising conversational intimacy.
Ryan McKinny’s easy, oaky bass-baritone not only created sympathy for his character, it introduced a note of sad resignation, of a man who knows he’s trapped in a nightmare of his own making. He was powerful without being overpowering and warm where others seemed cold. Naomi Louisa O’Connell’s Judith began with hope and some confidence but, as the doors were opened, her doubts and demands for the truth became more insistent and anguished. O’Connell deftly calibrated this mounting tension. Her gleaming high C at the opening of the Fifth Door expressed both wonder and despair. By the final two doors, she was eager for corroboration rather than revelation.
Though some may not welcome how the addition of the Alma songs skews what Bartók and Balázs wrote – or the unavoidable Bluebeard-Judith/Gustav-Alma analogy it raises, this production was performed with commitment and conviction more than sufficient to defer any reservations.
