TURANDOT
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For all the hype surrounding Mephistofele, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Gambler, no show this season has been anticipated as eagerly as Turandot. The last show of the season at Lyric has often been used for desultory revivals with second-string casts, but this time Lyric pulled out all the stops. Last spring it announced not only a superstar stage designer (Hockney), but also an apparently strong cast and a formidable director, Lotfi Mansouri. In addition, Turandot is an immensely powerful work, in which Puccini started working in an idiom far more international than his earlier operas. The story of the ice princess, with her collection of suitors’ heads on spikes, recalled to humanity through an example of love, is reminiscent of Hofmannsthal. The music has overtones of Mussorgsky and Richard Strauss, making the opera something of an Italianate Die Frau ohne Schatten. Add the prospect of seeing a major repertory opera at Lyric for the first time since 1970, when the title role was sung by Birgit Nilsson, and you should have a surefire blockbuster.
But despite all the momentum, something went terribly wrong. Make that many things. The greatest danger to the quality of a production from a high-profile stage director or set designer is that the opera may be misinterpreted by an ego that cannot or will not be made subservient to the requirements of the original work. When the energetic Mansouri dropped out early in the game and was replaced by the presumably more pliable (from Hockney’s point of view) William Farlow, all signals pointed to this possibility. But Farlow’s direction of this rather static show proved innocuous, and Hockney did nothing shocking or horrible. Surprisingly, Turandot fell flat on its face because of a multitude of bread- and-butter musical problems.
