New York City isn’t lacking in live holiday entertainment. The Rockettes perform four times a day in the tourist heart of Midtown, while George Balanchine’s “The Nutcracker” enchants audiences most nights at Lincoln Center. And just try keeping track of every “Messiah” across the five boroughs.
But for holiday opera, there’s usually just one big show in town: whatever the Metropolitan Opera has on offer. In recent years, the company has presented a version of Mozart’s not-so-Christmassy “Magic Flute,” tailored to children more than adults.
This year, miraculously, there’s another opera next door at Lincoln Center Theater: Gian Carlo Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors,” in a disarmingly sweet production by Kenny Leon. Last weekend, it was possible to see both works in a single day.
“Amahl,” a 45-minute heart warmer that unfolds like a mystery play, used to be more of a holiday staple. It premiered on NBC in 1951, and live broadcasts continued every Christmas for about a dozen years. Later, it returned occasionally, branching out to other networks and eventually taking root onstage. Today, amateur productions are often within arm’s reach; professional ones, not so much.
Its running time may be short, but “Amahl” contains a lot of theater in its tale of a disabled boy and his impoverished mother being visited by the Three Kings as they pass through on their way to meet the infant Christ in Bethlehem. There are a half-dozen principal singers, each with a moment in the spotlight; a larger ensemble brought in to raise the energy halfway through the show; and even a dance number.
Lincoln Center Theater, in association with the Met, delivers on the work’s many demands with a top-shelf revival, not least in its casting of the star mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato as Amahl’s mother. On the thrust stage of the intimate Newhouse Theater, she is far more exposed than usual, and that challenge has brought something fresh and riveting out of her typically polite sensibility.
DiDonato’s light voice, amplified and engulfing, takes on transfixing power that grows the more distressed her character becomes. In her performance, the mother is a woman utterly overwhelmed: at wit’s end and exhausted, and easily pushed over the edge by her son’s fanciful lies. Sometimes, she can’t look him in the eye. In other moments, she is under the spell of his stories and their unwavering optimism. There is an uncomfortable truth to her ambivalent love for Amahl, and in this production it goes a long way to justifying behavior that has often left audience members scratching their heads.
For the most part, Leon provides a straightforward telling of the opera. As with his revival of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town” on Broadway last season, he seems less interested in reinventing a classic than in making it breezily conversational and universally resonant. There won’t be any surprises for longtime fans of “Amahl,” except for when the boy, played by Albert Rhodes Jr. with irrepressible sympathy, says of the Three Kings at his door, “one of them is white!” instead of the more wince-inducing “one of them is Black!”
Leon sets his production in the present day, best communicated through Derek McLane’s sets of familiar, mismatched objects; but he also infuses his world with fantasy, like Emilio Sosa’s eclectic costumes for the Three Kings (Phillip Boykin, Bernard Holcomb and Todd Thomas, who harmonize wonderfully), which are impossible to pin down in any time or place.
The score, reduced to two pianos directed by Steven Osgood, loses some color. But Leon retains Amahl’s shepherding sound with Jesse Barrett wandering through the aisles playing pastoral melodies on an oboe. It’s hard to resist his tuneful charm, just as it’s nearly impossible to leave this production without being moved in some way.
That is less the case at the Met, where “The Magic Flute” is mostly meant to entertain. With two casts and two conductors, this show can be presented often, if a bit clumsily; at the matinee on Saturday, for example, the soprano Rainelle Krause was out of alignment with the orchestra for much of her famous Queen of the Night aria.
Julie Taymor’s production goes big on spectacle, with puppetry and monumental sets, and this family-friendly version trims about an hour of material (even more than in previous years) with the hope that children will see it as a kind of operatic gateway drug, the way many of them are introduced to ballet through “The Nutcracker.”
The show can seem desperate in its appeal, with extravagant, base comedic gestures and a reference to “6-7” that had children howling on Saturday afternoon. But many of them were also visibly restless by the end of the opera’s 90 minutes; whole families left early, and a boy in front of me rocked vigorously out of boredom.
Strangely, the Met continues to present this “Magic Flute” with no intermission, which could give children a helpful break. Perhaps then, the production wouldn’t have to condescend to its audience so much. There’s a lesson to be learned next door at “Amahl”: Broad appeal doesn’t need to come with compromises.
Joshua Barone is an editor for The Times covering classical music and dance. He also writes criticism about classical music and opera.
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