Tiger Turns Pussycat, Burning Bright Those unfamiliar with Verdi's Il Trovatore and the story of Jeanne d'Arc, should heed this warning: the very next sentence contains a spoiler for both. Twenty years ago, the marvelous mezzo Dolora Zajick (then still "Zajic," without the "k") sang a sensational Azucena with the San Francisco Opera, burning at the stake in the end. Tonight, Zajick returned to the War Memorial, in the title role of Tchaikovsky's The Maid of Orleans, and, well, she went up in smoke again. In fact, it was smoke rather than fire that got to her, a veritable geyser, making her disappear altogether. The director, Chris Alexander, must have seen Gotz Friedrich's misguided production of "Lohengrin" in Bayreuth, with a finale of Godfrey returning as a kind of R2D2 robot; when the smoke clears at the end of Maid, Joan is gone, and instead there is a young child, walking towards the audience as the curtain falls. The two transformations make about the same sense: very little. The Tchaikovsky opera, which premiered in St. Petersburg in 1881 (after Onegin, but before Mazeppa and Pique Dame), took well over a century to make its first appearance in San Francisco tonight, and there are some good reasons for that. Musically, it's a "minor Tchaikovsky," with an sluggish mix of the 1812 Overture and Swan Lake, but the real problem is that dramatically, it - to use a technical term - sucks. Forget history, forget Schiller (on whose play the opera is allegedly based), forget Shaw's superb St. Joan, forget whatever you might have gotten out of movies, from Carl Dreyer's masterpiece to (heaven forgive him) Otto Preminger, just forget pretty much everything, and follow a story largely "compiled" by the composer himself. Tchaikovsky's Joan leaves the farm, takes up arms, defeats the English (so far so good), but then she falls in love with the Duke of Burgundy (Lionel, the bum, who betrayed his own people), she falls apart, goes to the stake. Honestly! Here, the Mother Church has absolutely nothing to do with Joan's fall, no problem with her interpreting God's will directly, there is no court intrigue, or Inquisition, or English-French conflict, just one thing: Joan is in love, so she must die. At "only" 2 1/4 hours (rather than the original of nearly four hours), Maid is lopsided, with an 80-minute first act, and it's handicapped by long scenes that stop the action cold - such as the lengthy duet between King Charles VII and his favorite mistress, Agnes. OK, so musically and dramatically, Maid is a no-go. And yet, you should. Go. Absolutely. It's a fine physical production (Robert Dahlstrom's, clean and sparse), Donald Runnicles is making the best of the score, Ian Robertson's Opera Chorus is singing sublimely (and very Russian-ly), but - most importantly - here's a brilliant, virtually flawless cast. If you like great singing with your opera, head to the War Memorial. Zajick, of course, is well worth the price of admission all by her lonesome - there are trumpets in the voice, and honey, the projection is awesome, even a half-successful messa di voce impressed. Her farewell aria to the farm (something awfully close to Lensky's aria) was especially memorable. Joan's father is sung by Philip Skinner, in his best performance recently. Young Sean Panikkar is Joan's saintly would-be fiance, with an authentic Russian tenor sound (even if the recent Merola participant is from Sri Lanka). For the very best of real Russian tenors, there is Misha Didyk (from next door, Ukraine), singing the role of the King, more effectively and powerfully than at his other appearances in the same house. Karen Slack is Agnes, doing well in the duet (which is her only bit in the opera). Burgundy is Rod Gilfry, and he too is doing better than at any time here recently. Philip Cutlip's Dunois stands up to Didyk's King both dramatically and vocally. Lawrence Pech's choreography is excellent; in the many danced or mimed scenes (such as a very long one about Death doing his thing), the corps includes such major local dancers as the S.F. Ballet's Peter Brandenhoff. The director's use of the chorus as spectators in modern-dress works better than you'd suspect. Divided by the stage-on-stage, the chorus watches, participates, and does Job One: sings wonderfully. Balances, the security in singing softly or loudly, diction, and movement - all went swimmingly. As to the immolation scene, it's a techno-wonder, minus sufficient coloring to make it look like a FIRE. A combination of highly compressed steam and dry ice blows smoke like a jet engine, as a backstage crew manages individual portions of scene, a kind of cloud enveloping Joan's head, a huge column shooting up behind here, and a third effect is to cover the ground... without bothering the chorus too much. It wasn't long ago that AGMA went to bat to protect the singers from stage smoke, but no coughs or protests were heard this time, at the smokiest scene ever (even more than the final conflagration of Gotterdammerung.) Janos Gereben/SF www.sfcv.org [log in to unmask]