If timing is everything, then Odyssey Opera’s production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1963 opera The Last Savage convincingly makes the case that its time has come. Their production makes one wonder just what sort of ideological captivity blinded the critics reviewing the 1964 Met premiere.
Menotti’s opera entertainingly holds the stage. Its satire, more gentle than biting, is couched in the musical vocabulary and conventions of opera buffa. Rossini, Mozart and Gilbert and Sullivan elbow jazz and Broadway in the score. In other instances, a composer’s influence is more structural, particularly in Act 2’s calamitous cocktail party where the five Jews of Strauss’ Salome inform the four-way argument of the clergymen and the party’s descent into fractious posturing owes much to the riot in Die Meistersinger. Certain references require a footnote but others still hit, albeit differently: “Only a Republican administration can save the nation.” A-huh…
The intimate Huntington Theater greatly contributed to the production’s success. Singers and action were front and center and, thanks to universally clear diction, made the supertitles superfluous. A stone wall lit with shifting abstract projections provided the scene changes and served as a backdrop for the orchestra, seated in front of it. Despite the singers performing behind his back, Gil Rose kept the orchestra and singers in synch and the score percolating. The costumes, with their panoply of colors and exotic and period styles, became the real set decoration. Director Eve Summer kept props and furniture to a minimum and her cast in appropriately antic motion while underlining the Rossinian pastiche of the sextets and septets by lining the soloists up opera-house style across the lip of the stage.
Odyssey’s cast of stalwarts, including the chorus and choristers who took on solo parts, colorfully embodied their characters. Sharleen Joynt had the most challenging part with its sudden coloratura cadenzas and leaps to notes above the staff. Like Bernstein’s Cunegonde, Kitty Scattergood’s stratospheric outbursts are both satirical and sincere. Joynt put across the comic hyperbole of her music by singing it securely, meaningfully, and without affectation. Anya Matanovič’s program bio mentions her continuing Met role as an understudy. After hearing her Sardula, the question is, what are they waiting for? Let them listen to her moving Act 3 aria, “How shall my lips” which ran a gamut of emotions appropriately colored.
Phillip Lopez sang the title role with both power and sensitivity. His baritone was smoothly produced from its bronze top to its solid, resonant bottom and deployed most expressively in his lament, “Where will it end?”. “The Art of Love” was a comic high point, finding Kitty teaching Abdul the refinements of love except the lesson devolves into a whiskey-soaked tumble on the sofa. Kodanda’s aria presented some challenges in its higher ranges which Omar Najmi surmounted as best he could, a definite contrast to his mellifluous singing the rest of the evening.
Gabriel Preisser has to be the Kevin Kline of buffo baritones. His supple physicality and madcap line deliveries (who else could make such a meal out of just two words, “Oh brother”?) lifted Scattergood above the ugly American stereotype to the zany realm of classic screwball comedy. His Act 3 scene with Michelle Trainor’s sultry Maharani was not only a quintessential opera buffa set piece but the comic highlight of the evening as they both gradually realized that not only had they been lovers way back when, but also that Prince Kodanda, his daughter’s fiancé, is their child ! Matthew Burns’ comic mien and conversationally inflected singing elevated the humor of every scene his often befuddled and oblivious Maharajah appeared in. Finally, it would be remiss to ignore chorister Fausto Miro’s show-stopper rendition of the poet’s solipsistic verses at the cocktail party.
Odyssey Opera generally records and releases its opera productions. It would be a crying shame if The Last Savage were an exception.
