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LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST
Review

LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST

July 15 2010

LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST, Opera Australia at the Sydney Opera House, July 14-August 6, 2010; photos Branco Gaica.

Commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and first performed in New York in 1910, La Fanciulla del West (Girl of the West) is Puccini’s excellent Wild West adventure. It’s not in the same tune-stuffed league as, say, Madama Butterfly, La Boheme, Tosca or even Turandot (although Andrew Lloyd Webber famously paid homage to its most memorable refrain in Phantom…), yet it is richly musical in an early 20th century way – still Romantic but with pushes into modernism and impressionism. It has a happy ending, however, which also sets it apart from the more famous quartet of romantic tragedies.

At the time of its first performances, La Fanciulla del West was a contemporary tale and a reasonably realistic one, the ending notwithstanding. The opera is based on a stage play, Girl of the Golden West, written by first generation immigrant and Broadway legend David Belasco; and the mis èn scene dreamed up by Nigel Jamieson and his creative team for Opera Australia is awash with the sights and scenes Belasco would have witnessed growing up in the San Francisco of the Gold Rush.

The rough types who pioneered California’s mining booms and the general development of America’s west, had yet to be gilded and rose-tinted by Hollywood; not least because the infant Hollywood was still as rough as guts itself and the flickering, silent, black and white one- and two-reelers featured actors every bit as seedy and unheroic as Belasco/Puccini’s motley mob of Jack Rance, Sid, Sonora, Handsome, Larkens and Trin.

It’s the gritty, grubby reality of the west coupled with the yearning romanticism of “the West” that are so brilliantly captured by Jamieson and his team. (Set design Michael Scott-Mitchell, costumes Zoë Atkinson, lighting Phil Lethlean and – crucially – multi-media visual design Scott Otto Anderson, implemented by digital media producer Mic Gruchy.)

The setting is a rough-hewn timber saloon – great grey planks, bare tables, a row of whiskey bottles – and is shaped like a 19th century viewfinder so that the audience is peering into a scene captured within it. The action and overture opens with grainy images of the Wild West – masked desperadoes, Champion the Wonder Horse, walrus-moustachioed cowpokes and so on; slowly, the camera of our eyes pull back to notice weary or drunken customers slumped over the tables and the focus switches to the stage.

Watching silent movies in converted storefronts in towns across America would have been a bit like this. And now, in a multi-media age, the glimmer of pictures that play on the walls sometimes mirror the action on stage and sometimes add a contrast or narrative – but never overwhelm the small actions and dreams of the humans, despite the movie-size images that occasionally surround them.

The antithetical worlds of Romance and reality are also symbolized by the bleached palette of costumes and make-up that turn the cast into living sepia images and tableaux. All except Minnie – the Golden Girl – that is; she is vivid in a bright yellow gown strewn with stenciled red roses. She is blonde, curvy and comely and gutsy too: a Calamity Jane or Annie Oakley, equally at home with a six-shooter as she is at maintaining a home from home for the miners. The rich tones signify that Minnie is the stuff of dreams: the sweetheart, mother, fantasy or forlorn hope left behind by men who risked everything for the chance of a new life and unlikely riches. This is the West of McCabe and Mrs Miller rather than How The West Was Won.

LA FANCIULLA DEL WEST

The Belasco/Puccini story goes like this: Minnie (Anke Hðppner back in bright and powerful voice) is the saloon gal who warms the cold High Sierra nights at the Polka Saloon and, through her kindness and sisterly mien, makes easier the backbreaking days of the mining camp where hundreds of men struggle just to live, never mind prosper. She is coveted by mean sheriff Jack Rance (the ever-hissable and kissable John Wegner).

Into town rides Ashby (Richard Anderson) a Wells Fargo agent who’s tracking the robber Ramirrez and his gang of dastardly Mexicans. (You have to overlook the racial stereotyping: the two “Indians” are Minnie’s maid, the weirdly named Wowkle (Dominica Matthews) and Billy Jackrabbit (Gennadi Dubinsky) who adopts the Easter Island statue style of inscrutability. Both do as well as could be expected with such minimal material.)

A smouldering hunky gent rides into town, his name is Johnson (Carlo Barricelli) and as he has a rather fine tenor and somewhat resembles Rudolph Valentino, Minnie falls for him and he for her. He tells her his name is Dick and it would be good to know whether this revelation provoked as many muffled guffaws from the audience in 1910 as it did a century later. Jack Rance is not happy when he realizes he has a rival but cheers up (from black mood to merely dark) when he works out that Johnson is actually the alleged villain, Ramirrez.

On a dark and snow-stormy night (marvelous mix of video and traditional effects) Johnson/Ramirrez turns up at Minnie’s cabin, shot by the sheriff’s posse. She conceals him but to no avail; Rance finds the wounded man and despite Minnie’s pleas, he is dragged out to be strung up by the lynch mob. For once, in the implacably vengeful world of opera, true love wins out in the end. Minnie reminds the men of how good she’s been to them and also that the evidence against her lover is at best circumstantial. Despite Rance’s thunderous protests, she wins over the mob and the lucky pair walk off into a Technicolor sunset.

Along the way, the men of the OA chorus do some very fine ensemble work as well as making a good fist of highly choreographed set-pieces (Gavin Robins, chorus master Michael Black) that fill the stage with a succession of evocative and effective images. The orchestra, under Arvo Volmer, is as accomplished and at ease with the score as we have come to expect, although the pace, in the first act, seemed somnolent to the point of catatonia. The second and third acts – with more action anyway – were a lot more lively.

La Fanciulla del West is not performed that often and to have this wonderfully well realized production doing the rounds (Opera Conference – it began in Adelaide) and in the repertoire is heartening. The casting is strong and appropriate and the work of the OA orchestra and chorus is a constant pleasure. Another winner for the Sydney winter season.

 

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