Faust at the COC: Amy Lane has made a successful deal with the opera-devil
The triumph of this clever and subtle version of Faust is down not just to Lane but her entire creative team.
I have always secretly fantasised that God occasionally wears a white top hat. At least on formal occasions, such as appearances on earth.
In Toronto, she does.
A Jesuit education tends to turn one against God, that familiar Rococo bearded gloomy smiter of the damned. A.k.a., any pupil who failed to construe Latin verse satisfactorily. Me.
Was I surprised to discover God was a woman? Not really. Those Jesuits were wrong about most things. At least she seemed certain about her identity. Strutting it, even. Not one of those doubters who might cross or recross the Styx of sexual choice on a whim, goaded on by Scotland’s SNP.
In the dying moments of Canadian Opera Company’s Faust, (Charles Gounod), just when the tragic heroine, Marguerite, is about to be condemned to hell, but is suddenly proclaimed “saved” by a heavenly choir, in had stepped Director, Amy Lane, introducing the most significant supernumerary possible. The numero uno in the Trinity.
For clarity, in stepped a well-choreographed God. But it’s not always easy to differentiate between God and a Director. For ease in telling one from the other, God was wearing snazzy all-white tails, that gleaming topper and wielding a wand of “power”.
Amy wasn’t. She was sitting in the stalls with her production team, tensely watching opening night, infiltrated by Reaction’s opera critic, who was having a ball.
Faust is that timeless story that always goes wrong. Making a pact with the devil. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s 18th century literary giant, spent 57 years – he seldom met deadlines – creating the legend of the scholar, Faust, who trades his soul for unworldly power, in this case the elixir of youth.
The subject has spawned around 30 operas, two ballets and a host of orchestral works. Gounod’s Faust is by far the most popular operatic version, first performed at Théâtre Lyrique, Paris in 1859, and also chosen to open the spanking new 39th Street Metropolitan Opera House in New York in 1883.
As the tale is familiar, probably even to people on planets beyond the reach of Elon Musk’s super-heavy Falcon rocket, for the sake of concision, I include a full synopsis here.
How Gounod’s version is presented onstage, however, depends very much on the perception of the work by the Director of the day. For instance, Lane’s version which focuses intently on the music and libretto has a completely different feel to it alongside Des McAnuff’s 2011 Met version. He sets the opera in an atomic weapons plant, with Faust as a weary Oppenheimer figure.
McAnuff, the American Canadian director who also gave us Broadway’s Jersey Boys, – probably says it all – was an early manifestation of Met General Director, Peter Gelb’s fascination with blurring the lines between opera and musicals.
Sometimes – this Met season’s Grounded – that works. Rewatching the 2011 Faust, it was impossible to resist the notion that McAnuff was clunkily seeking “relevance”, destroying the subtlety of the Jules Barbier/Michael Carré libretto in the process.
Had he not heard that A Bomb, “We’ll all go together when we go” Tom Lehrer territory had already been occupied by John Adams’ Dr Atomic in 2005?
So, what have we in Toronto? We start with a closed curtain and the “introduction”, rather than an overture. Not sure the distinction matters. In a five-minute taster, Gounod whets the appetite and prepares the brain with a musical precis of the action to come. It is a scene setter demanding focus.
In the McAnuff production, and most others I have seen, the Director has succumbed to blank curtain syndrome. Blank spaces are intolerable. Do something!
Audiences are presented with an already open curtain. Onstage pointless action, confected by the director, breaks their concentration. The composer’s subtle musical weft and weave of the plot, preparing for the tableau to follow is rendered void.
Curtain up. A visually stunning spectacle. We find ourselves inside Faust’s ageing body. The backdrop is a slowly changing scan of his lungs, the dominating onstage feature a spiral staircase heading upwards, doubling as the old intellectual’s spine, or lack of it. The steps morph into vertebrae at the top.
I shall pluck from a cornucopia of clever, subtle and beautiful staging devices only a few gems. And where are gems to be found? In a jewel box, of course. The heroine Marguerite is traditionally tempted to favour Faust over her more lowly, honest local suitor, Siébel with a casket of sparklers. They overwhelm Siébel’s bunch of flowers.
Lane, always thinking out of the jewel box, introduced two golden dancers bedecked with jewellery instead. They wafted round Marguerite, visibly winning her over.
I have seen one “Faust in the City” version where, instead of jewels, a briefcase containing a wad of bearer bonds was plonked in front of the heroine. Misses the point. Marguerite is not avaricious, picking up unexpected moolah, or delving into a mysterious casket.
She succumbs to temptation, and what better temptation than two alluring dancers bearing gifts? Next, she will fall victim to Faust’s siren song. The scene is being set.
Now for the showstopper moment. At the opening of Act III, seduced and abandoned, Marguerite has given birth to Faust’s child. She is at her wits’ end. She has lost her mother, her sister and now her lover. Men have not treated her well. When she starts to pray, Mephistopheles tells her she is already damned.
But where are we? The curtain rose revealing a massive, down-sweeping stained-glass window, represented by a huge swathe of tumbling coloured fabric, topped with a golden crown. Surely adorning a holy figure, perhaps the Madonna? Was this Marguerite’s very own staircase to heaven?
When I later showed the still to a ballet-loving friend in New York, who knows little about opera, she reacted spontaneously, “Oh, that’s the church in Paris with the light from heaven. The Sacré-Coeur?”. And it was. Brilliant.
We were all deceived. After Mephistopheles passes on the bad news – damnation rarely goes down well – the crown turned, revealing a terrifying, dark demon. Hope and heavenly light were snuffed out, the stained-glass window tumbled in a heap of grey fabric and Marguerite recoiled in horror. This was a dramatic, “wow!” moment of breath-taking force.
Faust is a comprehensive, riveting work, tragedy tempered, as all best operas are, with humour. For example, the character Marthe’s comical, scatty relationship with Méphistophélès.
Trying to distract her from Marguerite, to give Faust a clear run, he courts her immediately after delivering the bad news her husband has been killed in battle. Not enough for Lane, who has him turn up with the husband’s head in a bloody sack, which Marthe chucks away after a shrug, then waltzes off with Satan.
The serious message the audience leaves with is, “beware of the wish”. Lottery winners look out. The consequences can be dire. Faust destroys everyone around him, even Marguerite’s brother the soldier, Valentin, who he kills in a duel. Valentin in his last breath curses his sister. How bad can things get?
This production’s Marguerite is an artist, not a simpleton, which makes Faust’s seduction of her all the more meaningful. He is attracted by her intellect, not just her looks.
The pace of the fabulous score is reflected in the action and drives on to the final scene when the focus is rightly on Marguerite’s salvation, Méphistophélès confounded by God in a topper.
The success of this Faust is down to not just Lane but her creative team, with whom she has run up substantial miles on the clock.
Emma Ryott is the set and costume designer. She conjured up a visual feast, not an iota of which was superfluous. Every detail reinforced the story, from Faust’s creaking lungs, through the stained-glass window. The eye was constantly drawn to some new marvel.
Lighting Designer, Charlie Morgan Jones, was off to the races. Seldom have I seen an opera in which lighting was so crucial in highlighting the plot and adding pointers when appropriate. A series of moving, coloured spots beamed down from above, a thin haze lending them a subtle strobe effect. The illumination of that stained glass action was nothing short of genius.
Choreographer, Tim Claydon, was entirely unfazed at being asked to concoct some neat footwork for God. In particular, the sequence of the jewel box ballerinas was beautifully executed. “Strictly Come Tempting”.
I had the pleasure of being introduced to them all and their excitement at seeing their work made real was hard-earned and justified. Glowing reviews in the Toronto press reflect that.
The voices were fabulous. Chinese tenor, Long Long as Faust; Kyle Ketelsen, American bass-baritone is Méphistophélès. He won’t mind me saying he WAS Satan. Dramatically hard when necessary, especially in his Act III sneering dismissal of Marguerite. He appears as Escamillo in Carmen and Richard in The Hours this season at the Met.
Marguerite is Chinese soprano Guanqun Yu. She portrayed the tragic heroine with reflective conviction, standing on the precipice of hysteria, but never toppling over.
My first ever outing with the Canadian Opera Company Orchestra and Chorus, conductor Johannes Debus, chorus Master Sandra Horst. Never a foot wrong and all the difficult entrances and tempo changes deftly managed. Class act.
The venue, Four Seasons Center for the Performing Arts, opened in 2006, is welcoming and spacious. Plenty of promenade room and decent acoustics. Outside, a street musician played requests on what looked like a gourd fiddle. Someone clad in Ukrainian yellow and blue coughed up for a series of patriotic folk songs.
Back at my hotel, The Broadview, I was greeted in the room with a record deck and a collection of vinyl records which I could supplement from a library on the hotel below. Canada is a welcoming spot for opera-goers.
This ambitious co-production with Sweden’s Malmö Opera should be scooped up by other houses seeking to revisit Faust or add it to the repertoire. It is an enduring version, unadorned with passing fads and fancies that will stand the test of time.
Whatever pact Amy Lane and her fantastic team made with whatever opera-devil controls such things, to pull off this coup, it worked. White top hats all round.
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