It's hard to believe that a year has gone by since the San Francisco
Opera's production of "The Merry Widow," so alive (and painful) is its
impact still.  How bad was it?  Everybody in the country close to a PBS
TV station can find out on Christmas Day, when the SFO "Widow" telecast
will open the - seriously!  - "Great Performances" series.

John Boland, of the originating KQED-TV, quoted in an interview today,
puts a brave face on this questionable enterprise by saying that the
production "actually looks better on television than in the Opera House."
For lame defensiveness, I think it might have been more effective to say
that in view of the reviews and a near-universal uproar about this turkey,
expectations may be so low that the TV version will be a relief. My
holiday wish to those determined to witness the program is that they may
find some redemptive features in it.  Back at the premiere, I couldn't,
however hard I tried:

Widow Defiled [11/30/01]

Janos Gereben

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 the fact that this production represents a
combination and culmination of his worst characteristics and it stands
as the crooked epitome of directorial mischief.

Mansouri took this cute, 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) can
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 of 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
characteristic 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 at 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, its just part of the
totality of wrongness.

In just a years time, well 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 WNETs
"Great Performances"

Janos Gereben/SF
www.sfcv.org
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