Offenbach’s Les Contes d'Hoffmann is a strange work. Primarily about creativity, its trimmings are drunkenness, death, paranoia and unfulfilled love. Its music is perversely delightful, as if to underline, or undercut, its subject matter. All of the comic moments are at the disadvantage of our eponymous hero; he’s mocked, reviled and lives a life of disappointment. The events that take place in front of the audience are hallucinatory, reaching their climax in the appearance of Antonia’s dead mother, and with a courtesan who steals men’s reflections (souls) for a demonic overlord.
I reviewed this production in January of 2015 and found Bartlett Sher's production somewhat wanting. It and I are two years older and it works better for me now. Conceived on Michael Yeargen’s sets with Catherine Zuber’s costumes, it takes a Kafka-esque, surreal view of the opera; it is updated, for the most part, to the 1920s, although parts of it seem a century earlier. The effect is, by turns, dazzling and puzzling. But since the situations themselves are unreal, the puzzles are expected and we can be grateful for how dazzled the experience leaves us. Trying to figure it out can make one crazy; it makes us feel like Hoffmann, which may be Sher & Company’s point.
Hoffmann tells the story of his three loves to his friends in a tavern and he’s either embellishing them, hallucinating, or simply making them up – he’s a poet, after all (his desk and typewriter are present throughout most of the opera), and the stage floor is littered with writing paper. Nicklausse/the Muse never leaves the stage; s/he literally spurs Hoffmann to poetic, albeit drunken lunatic heights. The opera is peopled with men in Bowler Hats; circus clowns and characters straight out of Todd Browning’s 1929 film Freaks are present in the Olympia act, which takes place in a carnival. Semi-nude men and women writhe about during the famous Barcarolle but the women in the Venice act are otherwise out of the 1820s, complete with huge petticoats and poofed up hair. The characters melt from one story into another, i.e: as figments of our poet’s imagination, they keep popping up; Olympia – or five of her – turns up at the end of the Giulietta act. Antonia’s living room is a chair and a piano with hanging scrims of leafless trees; James Ingalls’ lighting – all morbid purple and blue – tells us what we have to know otherwise. I found it dreary before; now I realize that it, in fact, is purposely dreary. It reeks of death. The voluptuousness of Venice is suggested by cushions, multi-colored costumes and lanterns, and a gondola.