Toothless Tosca

The Boston Lyric Opera fails with Puccini's warhorse

by Lloyd Schwartz

The Boston Lyric Opera, which offers up Boston's only opera season, ended its last one with its watershed production of a rarely performed masterpiece, Handel's Xerxes, beautifully conducted and with stunning performances by the people you'd most want to hear in the leading roles (Handel superstar Lorraine Hunt and superb countertenor David Daniels). But the water level seems to have dropped again. The new season has begun with an all-too-familiar opera that has nothing special going for it. And though I agree with the person in the lobby who said, "Well, it's not the worst Tosca I've ever seen," too often it came too close. (Remaining performances are sold out.)

Tosca at the Emerson Majestic is already problematic. The orchestra has to be thinned out to fit the tiny pit. A melodrama set in Italy during the Napoleonic Wars, it asks for a heavy set not possible on the Majestic stage. When the curtain went up, I sighed with optimistic relief. The set, borrowed from the Opera Theatre of St. Louis (with smoothly running surtitles borrowed from the Washington Opera), was strikingly stylized. A huge unfinished portrait of Mary Magdalene, surrounded by gold cherubs and ornately gilded pilasters, hung lopsided behind a painter's scaffolding and over a wide, steeply raked stage platform (the third act had a monumental statue of the archangel Michael tilted the other way). Downstage, on a lower level, a little shrine for the Virgin Mary fit neatly into the left corner. These succinctly suggested both the interior of a Baroque church and the skewed nightmare vision of melodrama. They held the eye yet left room to move. They even suggested an idea about style.

But Timothy Ocel's staging had no ideas, or style. His blocking lacked, of all things, interaction. Singers mechanically circled the stage during confrontations in which you'd think they wouldn't dare take their eyes off one another. A patriot hiding from the police screamed at his co-conspirator from the opposite end of the stage. The tenor stared out into the audience while the soprano was singing about her attempted rape. There wasn't a movement that wasn't a cliché of bad opera. Singers fell to their knees so often, I began to worry whether they were wearing knee pads. And some ludicrous bits made the clichés look good. Like the rape scene, in which Scarpia, the evil head of the secret police, throws glamorous soprano Floria Tosca on top of a table running almost the entire length of the stage and tries to mount her. Or at the very end, when Tosca -- having murdered Scarpia only to find her lover, Cavaradossi, shot by a firing squad -- has to jump off the parapet of the Castel Sant'Angelo. I've heard of sopranos who bounced back up before the curtain fell; I've seen one pretend to jump into the wings only to have the train of her dress remain on stage until she yanked it off. But I've never heard of anyone leaping off a parapet backwards!

One overlooks such silliness when the singing and acting are exceptional. Sardou wrote his original play for Sarah Bernhardt. We've seen great Toscas like Maria Callas (on video), or Magda Olivero, who sang the role in Boston twice, late in her career (once -- thrillingly -- opposite Pavarotti). Maria Spacagna, two decades ago an NEC student, seemed nice. Her soft high notes were lovely, though when she forced her voice, it didn't get louder, just less steady. But I've never seen a Tosca with less character. This was her first try and the director left her hung out to dry.

As Cavaradossi, tenor Jianyi Zhang pushed his sturdy voice into a strange, wooden kind of tonelessness (one high note seemed to split in two). He mustered some vigorous defiance in the second act but otherwise seemed like some jock who'd wandered aimlessly onto the stage. Dashing bass Mark S. Doss, Mephisto in last season's BLO Faust, could have made an unusually sexy Scarpia but chose snarling melodramatic villainy instead, eschewing until far too late his character's subtler sense of irony. He had good diction and his voice had power. The best actor was Billy Saetre, who played the spy Spoletta as a weasel with pretensions to pomposity. The best singing was by baritone James Kleyla (the patriot Angelotti) and treble Jeffrey King (the off-stage shepherd boy).

Opening night, conductor Stephen Lord failed to give the musicians a strong beat to follow, leaving the singers either falling behind or waiting for him to catch up. He let Puccini's soaring melodies and crackling confrontations go flat and limp. Without these, who needs another Tosca?