Mashup in La Mancha

Surely the most perplexing advertising poster on the streets of Prague these days is the one showing Italian film icon Marcello Mastroianni with a beard and funny hat added in bright orange, as if some mischievous child had been turned loose with a box of crayons. The image is an odd mix of fantasy and realism and, in that sense, an accurate reflection of the State Opera's new production of Don Quichotte.

A hit when it premiered in Monte Carlo in 1910, Jules Massenet's reworking of the immortal character seems like a creaky period piece now, full of anachronistic musical tics and dramatic nonsequiturs. Cervantes' novel serves as only a departure point for this tragicomic story about an aging knight-errant determined to prove his love for Dulcinée, a glamorous, flesh-and-blood heartbreaker. She dispatches him on a mission that turns out to be a surprising success, though ultimately his valor is not enough to win her affections.

It's a charming but dated bit of fluff, and, to freshen it, stage director Jiří Nekvasil and set designer Daniel Dvořák decided to invoke the atmosphere of late 1950s and early '60s Italian neorealist films, particularly Fellini's. In those, Nekvasil writes in the program, they found a quality "emotionally consonant with Massenet's music: a melancholy existing in symbiosis with a dreamlike quality, reality alongside a yearning for illusion."

It's an interesting choice that adds some clever twists to the production. Instead of astride his famous horse, Don Quichotte arrives in a rusty roll-top Fiat, with Sancho Panza trailing behind on a motorbike. The set looks like the back lot of a film studio, with various backdrops arriving on wheels, just large enough to fill a camera frame. But the conceit cuts both ways. Why, for instance, if it's the mid-20th century, are people still fighting with swords?

And the atmosphere proves hard to hold. With a rousing song-and-dance number, the production opens like a European version of West Side Story, then suddenly seems more like Hello, Dolly! when Dulcinée arrives with an entourage of admirers. Soon the stage is overrun with fairies and clowns and acrobats, a nice surreal touch ? for about five minutes. Then they become more of a distraction than an enhancement, running elaborate comedy and mime routines around static singers trying desperately to build some pathos. It worked fine in 8?, but somehow doesn't hold together here.

The same might be said of the music, an odd patchwork that veers wildly from romance to realism, stopping abruptly for speaking parts or an instrumental solo then resuming just as suddenly with a big orchestral blast. To modern ears, it's a musical stew, mixing Wagnerian-style leitmotifs, grand opera choruses, opera buffa vocals and Spanish songs and dances over bombastic, overheated orchestration. Not until the final two acts does the score settle into more engaging arias and duets.

Even then, it takes a prodigious bass to pull off the title role, which the world-famous Russian singer Feodor Chaliapin did with a flourish at the 1910 premiere, essentially owning the part for years afterward. Serbian bass Ivan Tomašev did a credible job at the State Opera's March 18 premiere, but he is no Chaliapin. And without a commanding bass, the opera has no center of gravity.

Swiss-trained bass-baritone Noé Colín did his best to pick up the slack as a comically sympathetic Sancho Panza, and deservedly got the biggest hand of the night. Moravian mezzo-soprano Andrea Kalivodová looked alluring as Dulcinée, but she started flat (or was it just Massenet's vocal line?) and never completely recovered, sounding like Marlene Dietrich most of the night, sultry but slightly off-key.

Števo Capko, the go-to guy in Prague for movement, did his usual excellent job choreographing the clowning and mime sequences, performed with alacrity by the Sacra Circus acrobatic team. As always, the State Opera chorus was solid, though the orchestra sounded out of balance under the baton of German conductor Heiko Mathias Förster. Or was that just Massenet's unusual orchestration?

Don Quichotte has worked very well in other settings recently, most notably in productions featuring Denyce Graves in the United States. And there's no reason it can't here, once the rough edges of this production get smoothed out. But it's interesting mainly as a curiosity, and for aficionados, a companion piece to the other new French arrival in town, the National Theater's Tales of Hoffmann.

Either way, it would be good to watch some Fellini before you go.

Frank Kuznik can be reached at
fkuznik@praguepost.com