Heartbeat Opera wraps its slenderized “Faust” in light and shadow
Heartbeat Opera’s new production of Charles Gounod’s Faust,which opened Thursday night at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, is a case of Metaphor Gone Wild.
The printed program led off with a quotation from Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—no, not that quotation from Anna Karenina, but this one: “All the variety, all the charm, all the beauty of life is made up of light and shadow.”
Viewers of Heartbeat’s Faust might risk overlooking the production’s excellent singing, acting and staging while they count the myriad ways the creators found to tell the story with lights, screens and scrims.
Yes, beams from fixed stage lights highlighted everything from Faust’s books to Marguerite’s pregnant belly, but that wasn’t the half of it. Performers carried flashlights or tube lights, strangely illuminating themselves and each other. Movable scene panels covered in scrim made solid walls or viewable indoor spaces, depending on how they were lit.
A twig and a flashlight were all it took to project Marguerite’s garden onto the scenery in shadows. In a particularly striking effect, moving lights made the lovers’ silhouettes move toward each other on a screen while the singers themselves stood on opposite sides of the stage, a metaphor for the unbridgeable spiritual space between them.
For his role in all of this, lighting designer Yichen Zhou probably deserved to have her program credit moved up from the middle of the pack to rub shoulders with director Sara Holdren.
Last on the cast list, but certainly not least, were puppeteers Rowan Magee and Emma Wiseman, swathed in black like stage ninjas, who executed much of this light-and-shadow play and other special effects, such as standing behind Mephistopheles at one point and giving him four arms instead of two.
And where Gounod and original librettists Jules Barbier and Michel Carré discreetly cut away from Faust’s seduction of Marguerite, Heartbeat’s puppeteers gleefully depicted the whole thing on a miniature stage in a show that was definitely not for the kids.
But lest the gee-whiz aspects of the production derail this review as well, let us note the overall high quality of the performance and staging—beginning, inevitably, with John Taylor Ward as Mephistopheles, because the devil gets the best lines, and in this case the best costumes.
Tall, lean and a little irascible à la John Cleese, Ward cut a striking figure not only in the character’s traditional cap with one long feather, but as a cowboy dandy in red fringe and a non-country-specific World War I officer’s uniform. Physically commanding one moment and slithery the next, Ward wrapped inflections around his English dialogue (singing was in French) with impeccable timing, and his bass-baritone warmed up in time for the opera’s splendid ensembles.
History records that, while Faust was taking the opera world by storm in the 1860s, some Germans mocked it with the title Margarethe, out of resentment at its reducing Goethe’s tragic scholar-seeker to a mere besotted lover and tool of the devil. This production didn’t do much about redressing that balance, but Orson Van Gay II as Faust was convincingly besotted and emotionally engaged, mustering considerable vocal power and showing strain only on the highest of his high notes.
Rachel Kobernick as Marguerite was dressed and staged as a rather dowdy girl next door, a sort of peasant Dulcinea to Faust’s Quixote, which allowed little of the character’s spiritual goodness to show through. No fault of the singer’s—it’s just harder than it used to be to sell the proposition that pregnancy is the downfall of a saintly girl.
Kobernick’s soprano had a bit of an edge to it, which went away at moments of fine high pianissimo. Her final call to heaven for redemption from her sins (“Anges purs, anges radieux”), delivered fortissimo crescendo, was more a demand than an appeal, while Faust cowered behind a scrim. Margarethe indeed.
The stock characters of the original Faust got a bit of a spin here. As Siebel, the trouser role for a mezzo-soprano playing a lovesick youth à la Cherubino or Octavian, AddieRose Brown movingly portrayed not a boy but a faithful woman friend of Marguerite who has a secret crush on her. This had the curious effect of transferring the saintly halo from Marguerite to this secondary character, whom the libretto then finds no further use for.
Eliza Bonet played the role of Marta, the neighbor lady who’s “been around,” rather broadly but sympathetically. That’s more than one can say about the over-the-top performance of Brandon Bell as Wagner, the drunken, boastful soldier, taking full advantage of an English translation (by director Holdren) liberally contemporized with cuss words.
All three of these singers proved vocally up to their roles, especially Brown in Siebel’s “Flower Song” in Act II. (The opera’s acts were elided in a continuous, and constantly engaging, performance lasting two hours.)
The big voice of the evening belonged to Alex DeSocio as Marguerite’s brother Valentin, whose high-octane, focused baritone threatened to knock over seats in the front row of the modest-sized theater. Dressed in Vietnam-era jungle camo, he swung his knapsack around and ended up sitting on the (presumably dirty) dive-bar floor as he prayed to God to protect Marguerite while he was away—a weird directorial choice.
As music arranger Francisco Ladrón de Guevara observed in a program note, a German opera may locate “the guts of the drama” in the orchestra, but Gounod’s accompaniments lend themselves to arrangement for a smaller band, in this case eight players. Music director Jacob Ashworth ably wielded his violin and led an ensemble that was agreeably wind-heavy with Artis Wodehouse’s harmonium and especially Louis Arques’s clarinets and saxophones.
Cast members smoothly supplied the choruses of townspeople, angels, et al.
Elivia Bovenzi Blitz designed the not anachronistic but a-chronistic costumes, including old Faust’s rejuvenation in Act I via a blitz of an onstage costume change. Lighting designer Zhou understandably shared the scene design credit with Forest Entsminger. Nick Lehane designed those randy little stuffed puppets. And perhaps most crucially, production stage manager Abril Valbuena kept the action humming while the singers were singing and the players were playing.
Faust runs through May 24. heartbeatopera.org
