The director Sara Holdren has made it pretty clear that she’s a fan of Mikhail Bulgakov.
In the biography that accompanies her new production of Gounod’s “Faust” for Heartbeat Opera, Holdren ends with a bit of Cyrillic script that translates to “Manuscripts don’t burn,” the most famous line from Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita.”
A passage from that book, a Soviet spin on the Faust story, also appears in Holdren’s note about her staging. During her work she thought often, she wrote, about one of the devil’s lines: “What would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people.”
This idea, that light and shadow, and all they represent, are intertwined and essential to life itself, guides Holdren’s take on “Faust,” which opened on Thursday at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, in a new adaptation by her and Jacob Ashworth, with a chamber arrangement by Francisco Ladrón de Guevara.
Before “Faust” was a sprawling grand opera in the 1860s, sung through across five acts and including a ballet, it was a humbler opéra comique, with spoken dialogue between its flights of musical expression. Holdren blends the two versions, trimming the length and adapting the spoken lines to sound as if they were written today.
The goal, as always with Heartbeat Opera, is to breathe urgency into a classic. And “Faust,” which isn’t performed often, was once the classic. Perhaps the most popular work of its day, it opened the Metropolitan Opera in 1883. (Martin Scorsese depicted one of those Gilded Age performances of “Faust” in his film adaptation of “The Age of Innocence.”) Now, however, it’s harder to come by. The Met hasn’t even presented it in over a decade.
Holdren, who was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize this year, is also an excellent theater critic for New York Magazine; often, I’m convinced she’s the finest in town. You can sense a real, exciting theatrical instinct in her production of “Faust,” particularly in the inventive ways she plays with light and shadow (designed by Yichen Zhou).
But she doesn’t stop there. Light and shadow, in her production, lead naturally to a vocabulary of cinematic Expressionism (in Zhou and Forest Entsminger’s scenic design) and puppetry (by Nick Lehane and nimbly performed by Rowan Magee and Emma Wiseman). Puppetry, though, gives way to a magic and artifice, an analogue of Mephistophelean manipulation and control that, winking and occasionally slapstick, undercut Holdren’s poetry elsewhere.
Either of those, light and shadow, magic and artifice, could make for an entire production. Here, they pile onto each other, saturated and impatient, with the added weight of other elements like queerness, feminism and, for just a moment, silent film. Individually, they all feel true to the opera; together, they make a mess of it.
Mostly, the result is still the story of Gounod’s opera, except the ending: Marguerite, instead of ascending to heaven, is liberated from Faust and Mephistopheles, free to have her baby and live on, idyllically, with Marthe and Siebel (here a female character rather than a trouser role). It’s a fitting victory for this production, in which the women are also the strongest performers.
As Marthe, the mezzo-soprano Eliza Bonet had a characterful presence and a warmly robust sound. Her fellow mezzo AddieRose Brown was an agile, earnest Siebel, while the soprano Rachel Kobernick’s Marguerite was equally captivating whether intimate, like singing “Il était un Roi de Thulé” to herself, or ecstatic, towering over Faust and Mephistopheles in the opera’s climax.
Ashworth, one of Heartbeat’s artistic directors, led a shape-shifting ensemble of eight from his violin (among other instruments). They heroically muscled through two straight hours of an arrangement, with quotes from Gounod’s “Ave Maria” and Mendelssohn’s incidental music for “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” that transformed the opera’s orchestra into the kind of enterprising, colorful chamber group you’d hear in the pit for a play or a silent film.
At times the players were hammy partners to Mephistopheles, sung by the bass-baritone John Taylor Ward with hearty friendliness and a jovial flamboyance. In smaller parts, Brandon Bell was a bumbling Wagner, and Alex DeSocio’s Valentin had gorgeous brawn with the occasional hard edge. As Faust, the tenor Orson Van Gay II’s tone was elegantly smooth but chewy through his imprecise French.
Enunciation was less of a problem in the English-language spoken scenes, but those moments, too, were a challenge for the cast. Few opera singers are persuasive actors, and when “Faust” was an opéra comique, dialogue was more declamatory and stylized compared with the post-Stanislavsky, realistic delivery that audiences have come to expect.
Holdren’s “Faust” had an intriguing dramaturgical tension between casual dialogue and grandly melodic arias, but that requires a level of acting that these singers were never able to reach. And, in a production already teeming with aspiration and ideas, it may have been asking too much.
Faust
Through May 25 at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, Manhattan; heartbeatopera.org.
Joshua Barone is the assistant classical music and dance editor on the Culture Desk and a contributing classical music critic.
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