It can be hard to tell a story everyone knows well, and tell it in a way that feels fresh as well as familiar. Yet Doug Scholz-Carlson’s production of Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette pulls this off very nicely at the Lyric Opera of Kansas City. Combining traditional Renaissance trappings with a definite contemporary edge, the production, with sets by William Boles, privileges drawing out the opera’s symbolism, grounding the busy plot in the essentials which transcend time and space.
As for space, you can do a lot with a large luminous white square. Scholz-Carlson offers a meditation. Or at least, that’s the way it made me feel. Slightly downstage center is a stage within a stage, as it is, fine Carrera marble perhaps, or a Veronese piazza, around which feuding clans are arrayed, and benches and pews and tombs can be erected, and on which can be placed banqueting tables, altar, as well as marriage and death bed. The latter two, after all, are one and the same here. Dramatically, a massive white veil, conveying the marriage bed, falls in on itself as Juliet undergoes her ‘fake death’ before marriage to Paris.
Luminous squares aside, the opera was always going to depend to a great extent on the caliber of the leads. Ben Bliss and Andriana Chuchman were both convincing in their roles, his tenor sustaining the lyricism of great love, and later, great pain, while her soprano went from being a spring of effervescent joy in “Je veux vivre” to the ringing passion of her later utterances. Their voices dovetailed engagingly in their duets and their stage relationship was plausible and intense. Why not sing a duet when you are poisoned and stabbed in an unfortunate folie-a-deux? That’s Gounod’s way of improving on Shakespeare, sanctifying their admittedly pagan end by having them both sing “Dieu, pardonnez-nous” before they die.
The ‘something more’ in Scholz-Carson’s design choice was to present the young, silent lovers in modern dress in the very first scene, as they come before their opposing families during the Prologue. Then they are robed onstage for their roles in a little Brechtian manoeuvre. The last scene returns them to modernity, as the director’s way of saying these themes are perennial, there is nothing old that is not also, in its way, new and present to us today.
Suspended over the whole are massive overblown roses, increasingly drained of their colour as the action advances. Roses by any other name. And at times, there also hang an array of illuminated swords, menacing like that of Damocles. They strike the stage in the central act, where Tybalt kills Mercutio, and Roméo Tybalt, and we are reminded of how much like gravestone crosses they are, rising from the ground. One single sword is left, illuminating the fierce double death at the last.
Ben Wager’s big, booming voice as Count Capulet lent welcome gravitas; Nicolas Newton as Frère Laurent warmed the bass notes, with good intentions, if not always good advice. I found Benjamin Ruiz a wonderfully intense and well-voiced Tybalt, fiercely feudal, always intervening, bound to cause trouble to his dear female cousin of whom he is clearly so fond. It’s his tragedy too, and Mercutio’s (Johnathan McCullough), both convincing. Conductor Christopher Allen kept the orchestra pacey, and especially in Acts 4 and 5 ratcheted up the intensity.
