Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1950 Pulitzer Prize-winning opera “The Consul” may be shameless melodrama, but the subject matter is as chillingly timely today as it must have appeared to audiences in the early Cold War years.
In fact, human rights abuses, immigration restrictions, problems faced by undocumented residents and refugees trapped in hellish bureaucracy — all these things have become even more grievous in an era when politics and social issues are more entangled.
But take away the topicality of “The Consul” and what are you left with? An almost unrelievedly grim potboiler that milks the tragedy surrounding its central character, Magda Sorel, for maximum bathos. A banal score cannot rise above a simplistic and heavy-handed libretto — the composer’s own — filled with cornball dream sequences and one-dimensional characters that exist only to trigger emotions ranging from anxiety to despair to numbed resignation in the heroine.
Hard to believe Menotti’s first full-length opera ran for 269 performances on Broadway, a feat never equaled before and, in all likelihood, will never be equaled since. Like the rest of his stage works, save for his unpretentious little Christmas fable “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” “The Consul” has fallen precipitously out of fashion as far as the big companies are concerned.
Even so, this problematic melodrama still pops up from time to time at smaller troupes like Chicago Opera Theater, which presented the Chicago premiere in 1983, with Menotti himself directing. COT is mounting another valiant effort on behalf of “The Consul,” in a starkly effective new staging by Andreas Mitisek, the company’s former artistic director, who took his leave earlier this year after five impressive seasons.
The show, a coproduction with Long Beach Opera, opened COT’s 45th season on Saturday night and plays through next weekend at the Studebaker Theater in downtown Chicago.
There aren’t many reasons to catch this new “Consul” beyond the searing performance of Patricia Racette as Magda Sorel, a role new to her repertory. For fans of this always-compelling American singing actress, her presence will be incentive enough, and she carries the show on her capacious shoulders.
Magda is a hapless Everywoman battling the machinations of a “friendly” consulate in a repressive European police state. Her frantic attempts to obtain a visa so that she can join her husband, a political dissident, outside the country are frustrated at every turn by the implacable bureaucracy of the consulate, where paperwork exists to deny help to those in need rather than grant it.
“Your name is a number. Your story is a case,” declares the Secretary, a primly efficient functionary who guards the desk by the consul’s door and fends off a roomful of visa-seeking supplicants with endless forms. Significantly, the title character never appears.
Magda’s growing desperation as she finds her options narrowing is reflected in the tense parlando of her terse vocal lines. She is hounded by the secret police, and suffers the deaths of her baby and mother-in-law. The loss of her husband is the final blow. “To this we’ve come: that men withhold the world from men,” she exclaims in the opera’s climactic scena.
Racette poured out the aria with affecting intensity on Saturday night, earning herself a tumultuous ovation. Some unsteady vocalism at times was a small price to pay for such deep emotional investment in a character whose fate the singer makes us want to care about, despite the opera’s musical and dramatic shortcomings.
A chamber opera that was lost in the gargantuan Lyric Opera House, where Lyric mounted a Robert Falls production of “The Consul” in 1996, makes a comfortable fit for the refurbished, 750-seat Studebaker. Good diction and ample acoustics allow Menotti’s purplish text and fake-Puccini tunes to come through clearly. Surtitles are added insurance.
Mitisek (who also designed the 1950s-style costumes) and his design team — Alan Muraoka (set) and David Martin Jacques (lighting) — keep the action moving smoothly between the Sorels’ spare, angular flat and the dingy consulate. The choicest part of the stage design is a huge, mechanized secretary’s desk that rises almost to the ceiling: a towering ziggurat out of your worst totalitarian-state nightmare.
Of the singers, Audrey Babcock is wonderful as the automaton-like Secretary, and Justin Ryan does everything he can with the underwritten role of John Sorel. Cedric Berry is suavely sinister as the Secret Policeman. Kyle Knapp sinks his teeth into the hokey comic shtick of the magician Nika Magadoff. Victoria Livengood’s wobbly mezzo makes her hard to take in the mawkish role of the Mother. Completing the vocal ensemble are Kira Dills-DeSurra (Vera Boromel), Lani Stait (Anna Gomez), Vince Wallace (Mr. Kofner), Kimberly E. Jones (Foreign Woman) and Zacharias Niedzwiecki (Assan).
Belgian conductor Kristof van Grysperre paces the music tautly and vigorously and secures committed playing from the 26-piece orchestra.
COT used Saturday’s season opener to formally introduce its new administrative team — general director Douglas Clayton and music director Lidiya Yankovskaya. The season continues with Kevin Puts’ “Elizabeth Cree” in February, and a rare Donizetti double bill of Il Pigmalione” and “Rita” in April.
3 stars (out of 4)
John von Rhein is a Tribune critic.
jvonrhein@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @jvonrhein
