‘Modernizing’ opera with spare sets and costuming is an attractive proposition from several angles—smaller budgets and reduced complexity, among them. It can work because set dressing should, rightly, play second fiddle to vocal prowess, but opera lovers are a passionate and volatile bunch, ever quick to express their feelings about a production. There are, for example, as many opinions about François Girard’s weirdly spacey Lohengrin as there are operaphiles to express them.
Lately, it’s the traditionally grandiloquent productions that seem to be making the biggest splash, as in the case of Robert Carsen’s revival of Falstaff or Daniel Catán and Marcela Feuntes-Berain’s Florencia en el Amazonas. Would that make Opera Queensland’s production of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s “Orpheus & Eurydice” an outlier? That depends on how you think about scenography. Taken one way, director Yaron Lifschitz’s staging of the azione teatrale opera, with its scattered hospital beds and hobby greenhouse frame, could read as sparsely embellished. However, if you’re willing to accept bodies as set pieces, it becomes as richly dressed a production as any.
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Reminder: “Orpheus & Eurydice,” by 18th-century composer Christoph Willibald Gluck with a libretto by Ranieri de’ Calzabigi, retells Ovid’s story of the Thracian bard Orpheus, who travels to the underworld in a doomed attempt to bring his wife Eurydice back from the dead. In this production, Lifschitz swaps Elysium for asylum; instead of descending into hell, Orpheus descends into madness.
Lifschitz says in his director’s notes: “I start every project with a question: what is urgent about this project, now? ‘Orpheus & Eurydice,’ for me, is a project about the viscerality of desire, about what happens when love, lust and loss all get mixed up in our psyches.”
Expressive dance and a large chorus are typical of “Orpheus & Eurydice.” Acrobatics, not so much, yet that’s what sets the stage at the Sydney Opera House. Costumed simply by Libby McDonnell, the exceptionally skilled artists of Circa Contemporary Circus perform feats of aerial and physical acrobatics above and around the small main cast (Christophe Demaux as Orpheus and Cathy Di-Zhang as both Eurydice and Amore) and relatively large chorus.
One might assume the effect would overwhelm the vocal or dramatic components of the show, but there’s general agreement among critics that the dizzying acrobatics only enhance the overall production, making “Orpheus & Eurydice” a testament to opera’s ability to evolve in the hands of a creative and courageous director.
Opera Queensland’s ‘Orpheus & Eurydice’ is on at Sydney Opera House through January 31.
