Unenchanted Evening

Monday January 30, 2012 – The Met’s Baroque pastiche ENCHANTED ISLAND made for a dismal night at the opera. Placido Domingo as Neptune, in a Ken Howard production photo above, gave the performance one of its few perk-up moments. His voice, though aged, remains a distinctive instrument and he brought a real personality to his relatively brief appearance, something no other singer in the cast was able to do.

The Playbill featured a two-page synopsis. Drawing on two complex and brilliant Shakespeare masterpieces, THE TEMPEST and MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, the plot is a mishmash of characters and situations that do not engage us emotionally, and rarely even theatrically. The libretto is cheesy and stilted; avoiding Shakesperian style, it has a contemporary feel at odds with the setting and the music. Forced humour abounds, and the characters are made to sing uncomfortably-structured sentences. Unable to understand much of the diction, I flipped on my Met Titles and regretted it because reading the script added to a sense of deflation as the first act progressed.

The opera is much too long. The 90-minute first act seemed to have reached a pleasant climax with the Neptune scene, but then there was another prolonged slow aria for Prospero. Oddly, the house lights suddenly came on at full brightness during the postlude of this aria, then were dimmed and turned off again.

Slow arias in fact abound; but that proved as well since none of the singers had the needed vocal facility to astonish us with their coloratura. The annoying voice of Danielle DeNiese as Ariel went in one ear and out the other; she made no vocal impression at all. Anthony Roth Costanzo, replacing David Daniels as Prospero, seemed over-parted in the big house; pushing for volume, his sustained notes sometimes took on a steady beat. At other times the voice vanished behind the orchestra. Joyce Di Donato was announced as indisposed but she had “graciously consented…blah, blah, blah.” Please singers: if you are unwell enough to need an announcement, don’t sing. We don’t pay Met prices to hear sick singers. At any rate, Di Donato only had one bad low note, but her voice – even in full health – lacks a distinctive colour, the sort of personal timbre that made singers like Teresa Berganza, Dame Janet Baker and Frederica von Stade so instantly identifiable. Luca Pisaroni tended to be over-emphatic in his fiorature which verged on barking at times. Lisette Oropesa sang attractively as Miranda as did Paul Appleby as as Demetrius. The libretto did them no favors, but they – and in fact everyone onstage – went at the words gamely enough, even if they felt foolish doing so.

The idea of doing a Baroque pastische is not a bad one but it seemed to me that between the tedious libretto, too many ‘laments’, and the too-busy plot, ENCHANTED ISLAND was going nowhere. Two 45-minute acts with a 20-minute intermission should have sufficed; instead there were expendable arias, unnecessary da capos, and overdrawn recits as the first act stretched onward. We left at half-time and so, it seems, did lots of other people.