Additionally, general and artistic director Michael MacLeod employs the summer’s theme to introduce the unexpected. Instead of West Side Story, he reminds us of the musical brilliance found in Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate. Instead of a venerable warhorse like Verdi’s Otello, MacLeod is staging the North American premiere of Wagner’s early flop, Das Leibesverbot. It’s set in the leather-jacketed 1950s with visual and musical gags that are laugh-out-loud funny. Really.
Just as the music takes Shakespeare
forward to later times, so too Glimmerglass takes each production back
to the Globe Theatre. For each of the four main events set designer
John Conklin has reinvented Elizabethan space. He has constructed a
giant timber superstructure, approximating the size of a Shakespearean
theater, complete with pillars and the outline of boxed seating. The
thing is on casters and apparently can be moved backward and forward
with ease. With inventive lighting, such as that from Robert Wierzel
for Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto, we get the darkness of
exotic, forbidding Egypt, instantly transformed into the golden
doorways of Ptolemy’s palace. In each instance space is defined as it
would have been in the Globe, so that sheets stretched on a frame evoke
the backstage dressing rooms of mid-20th-century Broadway in Kiss Me Kate.
Unlike the Shaw or Stratford festivals,
Glimmerglass is not a repertory company as each leading role is
understood to be uniquely demanding. Neither are productions run
endlessly; there are only eight performances of Wagner’s Das Leibesverbot,
even though it is the rarest of the season’s offerings and the one most
likely to be talked about in coming months. Although the Cooperstown
company draws heavily from Central New York, at the 914-seat Alice
Busch Theater you’re just as likely to be sitting next to someone from
Santa Fe or Atlanta as from Camillus. Opera is a niche market, but a
passionate one.
