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Director Damiano Michieletto and his team have given Offenbach’s rambling “Fantasy Opera” a postmodern makeover, with dazzling results
4/5
If you like purple tights, green glitter, algebraic equations, parrot puppets, diverting dance and smashed cellos, this is the show for you. Director Damiano Michieletto and his versatile team (Paolo Fantin sets, Carla Teti costumes, Alessandro Carletti lighting) have given Offenbach’s rambling “Fantasy Opera” a postmodern makeover, full of wit, a bit of self-parody, and a lot of sharply disciplined strutting chorus routines.
Composed at the end of his life, premiered in 1881 and since orchestrated, tinkered with and rearranged by a multitude of hands, Offenbach’s unfinished piece veers uneasily between comic opera and the loftier intentions he conceived for serious drama. Jules Barber’s libretto knits together three scenes from the love life of the (real) German romantic poet ETA Hoffmann – a figure of major importance for his writings and himself a composer—telling of his entanglements with Olympia, Antonia and Giulietta.
It needs a firm unifying hand if it is to cohere, and Michieletto goes for clear-edged sets, ever-shifting vivid lighting and endless distracting activity, certainly not remotely the sort of fantasy Offenbach envisaged, but visually compelling.
He has three dazzling ladies at different stages of Hoffmann’s obsessive and unfulfilled life: back at school with the mobile equations on the blackboard, Olga Pudova plays Olympia as a neat Lucy Worsley lookalike who turns out to be a mechanical doll, and brings the house down with her mechanically stratospheric coloratura aria. Ermonela Jaho as the tragic Antonia is a class act, and it is in this second act that Michieletto springs his biggest surprise, turning her dead mother into a dancer, who appears and peoples the stage with angelic young ballerinas (choreography Chiara Vecchi). As the courtesan Giulietta in the third act, launched by the famous Barcarolle, Marina Costa-Jackson is sensual and extrovert in shining gold, though not totally accurate.
At the centre is Juan Diego Florez as Hoffmann himself, who starts in the Prologue as a bedraggled drinker, retraces his steps to school with a satchel on his back, attains some glamour in the Venice act, and though he returns to his former dishevelled state in the Epilogue, seems to resurrect at the close. This is all against type for the elegant Florez; he is always stylish and tasteful, and lovely in his third act aria, but is just underpowered in this company – especially when the director pushes him upstage in big numbers – which creates a gap at the centre of the show. Antonio Manacorda conducts firmly, even if there’s not much substance for the orchestra here.
There is magnificent support from the multi-tasking Alex Esposito as the four villains in Hoffmann’s life, destroying a cello in the process, Christophe Mortagne as a sparkling ballet-master, Alastair Miles as Antonia’s tortured father, and Julie Boulianne as the parrot-wielding Nicklausse. Christine Rice in sparkling green, with a Mary Poppins bag big enough for the parrott, is the warm-hearted Muse of Poetry, while Maria Leon is Stella the opera star who prompts the whole show.
Until Dec 1. Tickets: 020 7304 4000; rbo.org.uk
English