SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress (A second look):  San Francisco Opera; Donald Runnicles, conductor; War Memorial Opera House, San Francisco. 4.12.2007  (HS)

Cast: Tom Rakewell: William Burden; Anne Trulove: Laura Aikin; Trulove: Kevin Langan; Nick Shadow: James Morris; Mother Goose: Catherine Cook; Baba the Turk: Denyce Graves; Sellem: Steven Cole; Keeper of the Madhouse: William Pickersgill

Production: Director – Robert Lepage and Sybille Wilson;  Set Designer – Carl Fillion

Denyce Graves as Baba the Turk

Resetting any opera in a different time period is always a double-edged sword. For every dash of insight the change of scenery delivers, there is the danger of running afoul of specific references in the libretto.

In San Francisco Opera's new Rake's Progress, director Robert Lepage eschews 18th century England for 1950s America (except for an incongruous scene in London), quoting images from movies and dazzling us with imaginative stagecraft. If you don't think too long about it, the update works brilliantly. In the end, the clever touches outnumber the hurdles, and the music soars with virile conducting of Stravinsky's neo-classic score by Donald Runnicles and a superbly paced and beautifully sung portrayal by William Burden in the title role.

To open the opera, instead of a bucolic English countryside scene we get west Texas. A single oil well punctuates a bare stage. A rear projection displays a cloud-strewn Texas sky. Tom Rakewell and Anne Trulove share a picnic blanket, recalling an iconic image from "Giant," remembered as James Dean's last film. The associations here are strong. Both "Giant" and Rake's Progress are products of the 1950s. Jett, Dean's character in "Giant," is a handsome rake much like Tom in the opera, and Ann is an innocent, like the girl in the image. But when the libretto goes on about Tom going to London, the tone arm scrapes across the record. London is a long way from west Texas.

In scene after scene, Lepage gives us images that make us smile at their aptness, only to bump into problems with the libretto. The biggest problem is the language itself. The florid 18th century cadences used by librettists W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman don't fall easily from the mouths of 1950s Texans.

Another nagging detail is the machine that Tom is fooled into thinking can turn stones into bread. Here it is a television, complete with rabbit ears. That's a nice tie to Lepage's theme that Tom has been seduced by Hollywood (instead of the fleshy delights of the louche side of London), but it beggars the imagination that even a lightweight mind like Tom's could believe that a television could produce a real-life loaf of Wonder Bread.

Some moments of stagecraft wizardry elicit applause from a delighted audience. Light projections, for example, make that swimming pool shimmer on its surface. Human beings actually enter the pool and appear to be in the water, thanks to a gap behind the front edge that cannot be seen from the audience. An extra does a swan dive into it at one point. In Mother Goose's brothel, as Tom is introduced to the free life by coupling with the madam, they are swallowed up by her heart-shaped bed, disappearing along with the deep red covers. That fits. Tom is sucked into a new life, and it's no mistake that the direction they go is down.

From the first scene, Burden creates a realistic portrait of a young man skating along on his looks and charm, naïve enough for Nick Shadow to seduce him into a wasted life yet somewhere, deep inside, he still has an innocent core. His pure lyric tenor seems made for this music. Laura Aikin sings sweetly and sincerely as Anne, and is especially affecting in the final scene, but lacks the cream in her voice to make as much of the music as other sopranos have.

James Morris (Nick Shadow) and William Burden (Tom)

James Morris is Nick Shadow, this opera's allusion to Faust's Mephistopheles, and he creates a particularly oily portrait. Literally. He emerges in the first scene, after Burden and Aikin's opening duet, from a trap door under the oil well, covered in shiny black. If his bass baritone has sounded purer, the nasty edge he gets with the bark developing in his voice lends credence to the character.

In Lepage's version of the story, Shadow is a movie mogul. He is seen directing the Mother Goose scene (set in a bar that tilts up from the stage) from a camera mounted on a crane. In another scene, he comes to Tom from behind his trailer, which emerges from the stage and inflates into a full-size Airstream, complete with hookup that pops out at one end, eliciting laughs and more applause.

In the original version, we meet Baba the Turk outside Tom's house in London. She remains inside a carriage while Anne confronts Tom. Lepage sets this scene against a movie theater, the marquee announcing "Tom Rakewell and Baba the Turk in a Nick Shadow film." London bobbies hold back a crowd. Mezzo soprano Denyce Graves portrays Baba, singing the music with appropriate abandon and looking fine in the next scene, lounging by the pool with Tom in a tangerine-colored bathing suit. She is dragged from the pool later in the scene where Tom's and Baba's possessions are auctioned, Tom having lost all his money in the bread/stone/TV boondoggle, and resumes the rant that was interrupted in mid-phrase. But the joke loses something because she is not present, under a cover, through the scene as she is in the original.

In the next scene, Tom follows Nick to a graveyard (here festooned with relics of gambling signage, i.e., a gambler's graveyard), where Shadow informs him that he must pay up with his soul. In a nice self-reference to Stravinsky's "Histoire du Soldat," Shadow gives Tom a chance to redeem himself in a card game, which Tom improbably wins. Shadow lets him live, but takes his sanity.

In the final scene, set in an insane asylum, an all-white room sunk into the stage, Anne comes one more time to see if she can help Tom, but he has no grasp of reality and she realizes she must let him be. Stravinsky lavishes some of his most poignant music in this scene. Burden, Aikin and the chorus sing it movingly.

In supporting roles, bass Kevin Langan makeds for a sturdy Trulove (Anne's father), tenor Steven Cole a fey auctioneer and mezzo-soprano Catherine Cook a plump and sassy, gutsy-sounding Mother Goose.

For all the clever stageplay and directorial flourishes, what makes this production worthwhile is Burden's strong portrayal and the energy Runnicles and the orchestra whip up from the pit. The rest is a pleasant diversion, too clever by a half step. Take it at face value and then set it aside for the music.