I thought of, and rejected, a dozen clever leads to say that the San
Francisco Opera's new production of Franz Lehar's "The Merry Widow" is an
incongruously depressing miscalculation, a total disaster.  However, it is
too easy and somewhat inappropriate to have fun with something this awful,
although those long hostile to Lotfi Mansouri are having a blast.  I have
a much more balanced perspective of Mansouri's long career here, but there
is no escaping of the fact that this production represents a combination
and culmination of his worst characteristics and it stands as crooked
epitome of directorial mischief.

Mansouri took this small, fluffy Viennese operetta and pounded it into
the ground in a grueling 3 "-hour marathon, a light piece of dessert
fried in a vat of smelly fat.  What makes this deed all the more difficult
to understand or swallow is that Mansouri had a cast capable of delivering
a first-class performance:  Yvonne Kenny in the title role, Angelika
Kirchschlager (Valencienne), Bo Skovhus (Danilo), Gregory Turay (Camille).
Neither they nor Erich Kunzel (in his SF Opera conducting debut) could
manage under the constraints of Mansouri's direction.  Michael Yeargan's
sets and Thierry Bosquet's costumes could, perhaps, work in a different
setting; here, they look cheesy.

What possessed the producers to "bulk up" the work? They expanded the music
slightly and added major new chunks of dialogue, specially commissioned
from Wendy Wasserstein.  The "Widow Chronicles" will not stand the test of
time - not even its (unending) duration.  It is a leaden, unfunny dialogue,
unrelated to the spirit or letter of Lehar's work (or Meilhac's comedy that
had inspired it).

It is difficult to describe the feel of the production.  The essential
characteristics is not something going wrong here or failing there - it's
everything, everywhere, at all times.  Think of one of those grotesque
high-school plays where "wrongness" rules, to the point that it's no longer
funny.  Mansouri is relentless:  he lines up people and makes them lean to
the side at improbable angles, he has the chorus in strange, difficult
formations that make no sense, divert attention.

Everybody, everywhere, is leaning, turning, tipping, slanting, trotting,
wiggling, vibrating - the New Kupfer Method in full throttle. . .  and it's
not even Wagner!  There are long pauses in the dialogue, timing is off from
the beginning and throughout.  It's painful to see an accomplished, natural
comedienne such as Kirchschlager forced to act in a mindless, unfunny way.

After decades of work, Mansouri is expected to get simple timing right, but
that doesn't happen here. Even something as simple as Anna's initial grand
entrance is ruined. The text says: "Here she comes!," the chorus is on its
way to line up, the music is cueing up - and Kenny is already on her way
down the stairs, about five long seconds early. The actress' fault? In
another production, perhaps. Here, it's just part of the totality of
wrongness.

In just a year's time, we'll get to see what the best editors of the BBC
and the US Public Broadcasting Corporation can do to fix all this up for
the fall 2002 telecast of the San Francisco "Merry Widow" for WNET's -
wait for it!  - "Great Performances"!

Janos Gereben/SF
[log in to unmask]