opera review: The Magic Flute again

Last June, I went to the San Francisco Opera's Magic Flute, which I found so boring and dreary that I got up at intermission and never went back.

This week I decided to give Mozart's wayward opera a chance again with The Matchbox Magic Flute, adapted and directed by Mary Zimmerman and given by Berkeley Rep, which is a theater company and not an opera company, and it did sound like it.

That's part of what made it "matchbox." The word meant that it was small-scale: designed for a small theater, cut down to two hours instead of three, minor characters as well as plot distractions and lengthy dialogue disposed of, simple staging, a pit band of only five players, and singers who would have been more at home in musical theater than grand opera. But since The Magic Flute is a Singspiel and not an opera, that's appropriate.

Kosman hated it: he claimed that it retained the original's entire pointless plot (not true) and that the singers weren't up to the music. It's certainly true that Mariene Fernandez as Pamina was the only one who sounded like an opera singer, and that Emily Rohm was too weak in her high notes for such a powerhouse part as the Queen of the Night. But I attend enough musical theater, and dislike operatic grandiosity for its own sake enough, that I didn't mind that. What I really regretted was that most of the singers didn't have clear enough enunciation and it was hard to make out the words. Usually opera companies put up supertitles, but since Berkeley Rep isn't an opera company, they didn't. The Lamplighters, the local Gilbert & Sullivan group, do use supertitles even though their singers all have outstandingly clear enunciation. The only performer in this cast who sounded as clear as that was Shawn Pfautsch as Papageno, who has done G&S.

But was it fun to watch? Yes! It was clever and witty and charming and I had a good time. Zimmerman's translation, insofar as I could make it out, was naturally phrased and fit the music well. I liked the sly contemporary references, and making Papageno into a bird himself, not just a bird-catcher, meant that he could be silenced by removing the beak that he otherwise wore (and when, while wearing it, he was offered some wine, he drank it like one of those bobbing duck toys).