Faulty Falstaff

An extraordinary thing happens at the end of Falstaff, Verdi's version of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, his very last opera (he was nearly 80) and only his second comedy. After the hilarity of the trick played on the aging knight by the two attractive women he'd convinced himself he could seduce, the entire cast leaves the machinations of the plot behind, turns directly to the audience, and sings a stunning fugue: "The world's all buffoonery, and we're all born buffoons."

But Neil Peter Jampolis, director and designer of the 1994 Opera Theatre of St. Louis Falstaff, which the Boston Lyric Opera has just brought here (remaining performances at the Emerson Majestic January 19 and 21), undercuts Verdi and his great librettist Arrigo Boito's coup de théâtre by playing everything to the audience. His familiar "concept" is a play-within-a-play. Instead of the Garter Inn or magical Windsor Park, the setting -- vividly painted and unusually roomy for the small Majestic stage -- is an Elizabethan barn where a touring 16th-century company puts on a 19th-century Italian opera! Electric "candles" line the edge of the stage (though these "footlights" are turned off during the scene in the woods, where they might have been most effective). Actors enter and bow before the music begins. Costumed stagehands slide bits of Broadway-musical furniture. All this contrivance takes the audience out of the action and encourages the performers to face out front rather than relate to one another as characters. That final fugue is neatly choreographed, but its function as a sudden dramatic contrast is lost.

Verdi's score is his most mercurial and diaphanous, constantly changing tone and character. Yet some people find it unmelodic -- a complaint I overheard opening night. The real issue, however, is not a shortage of tunes but an abundance. Melodies race by so quickly, a conductor needs to define and build each one as an event, a special moment that needs to breathe. But Stephen Lord, perhaps with too few rehearsals, lets too much of the music chug away -- not with infinite variety but monotonously, going nowhere, losing the saplings in a forest of undifferentiated sound. He fails to build Ford's great monologue (magnificently sung by Robert Honeysucker) to a proper climax, let alone scenes, or entire acts. Between the insufficient musical shaping and the blurry staging that keeps on going after the music snaps shut, you can't even tell when you're supposed to applaud.

Too bad, because this is one of the strongest casts the Boston Lyric has yet assembled. David Evitts's marvelous Falstaff is the triumph of his career. He's one of the rare singers who enlivens every moment he's on a stage (remember his self-important but ultimately touching and humane Bartolo in the Peter Sellars Marriage of Figaro?). He listens. He reacts. Famous buffo baritones have gotten away with huffing and puffing through a series of comic shticks. Evitts actually sings -- every note -- and eloquently, elegantly. Sir John is, after all, an aristocrat. His lithe voice is the dancing soul under the avoirdupois. And even the smallest gesture (like leaning on Bardolph's head to help himself up from his chair) is telling. He creates a fully rounded character in every sense, someone whose inflated, inevitably injured vanity surrounds a poignant acceptance of life's realities ("I grow too portly," he admits, "and my hair is graying"). His tact and delicacy transcend even the coarsest staging (like having to sing Falstaff's quicksilver memory of being a slender pageboy on the ground, flat on his back).

Robert Honeysucker -- as the jealous Ford who thinks Falstaff is actually doing it with his wife -- is up there with Evitts. He too both takes his character seriously and humanizes him. Ford is no would-be Othello, just a misguided but loving husband and father. His big scene with Falstaff is the high point of this production.

As Mistress Quickly, veteran Met mezzo Rosalind Elias mugs amusingly and sounds good at the higher end of her voice, but she speaks rather than sings her characterful low notes. Full-voiced and lively Pamela Dillard is an appealing, good-humored Meg Page. Pamela South -- perhaps offered Mistress Ford as repayment for replacing at short notice the indisposed soprano in the Lyric's The Postman Always Rings Twice -- is loud, brash, and harsh-voiced, hardly Verdi's "lovely Alice" (imagine Laugh-In's Jo Anne Worley in a Myrna Loy part). Ana Rojas's pipsqueaky voice can hit Nannetta's high notes but she has a terminal case of the cutesies (Jeanne Ommerle's sublime Monadnock Nannetta remains my high standard for this role).

The supporting men were better: three versatile tenors -- Richard Clement (Fenton), Boston's latest romantic hero of choice; Frank Kelley (Dr. Caius), in yet another deliciously detailed comic characterization; Paul Kirby, usually a leading man, as the rambunctious, red-nosed Bardolph -- and a good bass, Andrew Funk, as the blustering Pistol.

Andrew Porter's smart English, except for one misstep in the final fugue (Verdi's ultimate moral is surely darker than "Man is born to be jolly"), underlines the problems of singing in translation. Excellent as the diction may be, you still need supertitles. In the love duet, Porter keeps two lines in Italian that Boito quotes from the Decameron (can Elizabethan teenagers really read Boccaccio in the original?). Yet Boccaccio's words are easier to make out than most of Porter's.