Gounod - Roméo et Juliette

ONP Bastille, Tuesday June 20 2023

Conductor: Carlo Rizzi. Production: Thomas Jolly. Sets: Bruno de Lavenère. Costmes: Sylvie Dequest. Lighting: Antoine Travert. Choreography: Josépha Madoki. Fights: Ran Arthur Braun. Juliette: Elsa Dreisig. Roméo: Benjamin Bernheim. Frère Laurent: Jean Teitgen. Capulet: Laurent Naouri. Stephano: Lea Desandre. Gertrude: Sylvie Brunet-Grupposo. Mercutio: Huw Montague Rendall. Mercutio: Florian Sempey. Benvolio: Thomas Ricart. Tybalt: Maciej Maciej Kwaśnikowski. Pâris: Sergio Villegas Galvain. Gregorio: Yiorgo Ioannou. Le Duc de Vérone: Jérôme Boutellier. Manuela: So-Hee Lee. Pepita: Izabella Wnorowska-Pluchart. Angelo: Vincent Morell. Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris.

Photos : Vincent Pontet/ONP

  

Roméo et Juliette is the fourth of Thomas Jolly's opera productions I've attended (the others were Eliogabalo in 2016, Fantasio in 2017, and Dusapin's Macbeth Underworld in Brussels in 2019), and a kind of 'team style' is emerging. If you click through and read what I wrote about those other productions (though I can understand it's unlikely you have the time or inclination to do it) you'll see that his aesthetic universe is 'Gothic', in the modern, Tim Burton sort of sense, with a dark stage, plenty of dry ice, bursts of icy white beams piercing through the haze, often towards the audience (which annoys some of them intensely), and 'spillikins' arrangements of neon strips adding an angular, modern touch. His set designer's architectural details are late-19th-century to Art Nouveau, with a hint of steampunk, and his costume-designer's creations are an extravagant and beautifully-made kaleidoscope of luxurious fabrics, often colourful and carnival-like, of no single period - they mix ruffs and plumage with some obviously trendy touches like neatly-tailored kilt-suits or today's ubiquitous thick-soled white tennis pumps - twinkling with lamé and trimmed with gold.

The stage is sometimes filled with fidgety action, a kind of perpetual motion, and the choreography, whether called for or not by the score, is at times epileptic. The overall stage management - the orchestration of all these bustling elements, I mean - is impressive and detailed: chorus members all have individual roles to play. And yet the soloists seem under-directed, left to fend for themselves, which may be OK if they're natural actors, or have learned to act over the years, but... Overall you'll see, if you do click through, that I haven't yet joined the sizeable ranks of his fans, as the lavish spectacle seems to me ultimately superficial poudre aux yeux, and the drama, surprisingly from someone seen in France as a contemporary Shakespeare specialist, remains equally shallow.

This isn't Regietheater. I don't know if Jolly is the harbinger of a new, more 'traditional' trend in opera directing which some would welcome (on opening night, apparently the production team was cheered to the rafters), but the only Regie-type idea here was, at the beginning, to remind us (people stalking around in long-beaked masks) the story takes place during an outbreak of the plague, and that was soon forgotten and left undeveloped*. Taking tips, perhaps, from Broadway, Baz Luhrmann and the Cirque du Soleil, with the resources of the Paris Opera at his disposal, Jolly's aim seems to be to revive the elaborate, plein-les-yeux showmanship of French romantic opera that Verdi used to look askance at. The Phantom of the Opera has sometimes been cited. I haven't seen it so I can't say. But Jolly's (or rather, Bruno de Lavenère's) single set is a gigantic, overblown-baroque double staircase bristling with bronze torchères held aloft by female bronzes, a near-replica of the stairs at Garnier, only in darker stone, so that would presumably explain it. This huge set piece, which must have cost a fortune, rotates (sometimes too much and too fast). Under its wings, propped up by, er, props, angular and highlighted with strip lighting (i.e. those 'spillikin' neons I mentioned above) are grotto-like spaces for the more intimate scenes, such as the wedding and Juliet's catafalque: a boat on a canal, recalling that, under the Palais Garnier, there's an artificial lake.

The combination, in the hazy air (all that dry ice), of rock-concert 'searchlight' spots aimed both upwards and down, pin-prick starbursts (again, sometimes into the audience's eyes), thousands of candle-flames, and the sumptuous, glittering costumes in a colour-scheme of black, red, gold and - for Juliette and her doubles in the ballet especially - white, makes for some  impressive tableaux. Busy crowd scenes, with a vast chorus as well as the extras, are properly managed, and the jerky ballets, with men as well as women in wedding dresses and veils, though verging on irritating, are actually quite effective and - unusual enough to note - applauded. The fights are exceptionally well-orchestrated. The production is shared with Madrid, but I must say I thought it might go down well at the Met (only they already have their own). In contrast, the quieter, 'smaller' moments come across as weak and uncertain, and the young couple are, when left to themselves, dwarfed by the staging.

The absolute star of the show, for me, is Benjamin Bernheim. It's a real pleasure to hear such accurate tuning, for a start, top notes included, but when he decides to let you have it his timbre is rich and complex and gorgeous, and, as everyone will tell you, his diction is perfect, so you don't need the supertitles. I get the impression he's  slimmed down a bit and gone to the gym; this makes him look younger and gaucher and suitably cute with his shirt off in bed. He isn't, though, a born actor, and Jolly could have given him more help. Elsa Dreisig's voice, sparkling and silvery, is also suitably youthful in sound, and she too has all the notes, but my cloth ears found her more competent than charismatic, short on rhapsodic abandon, and I wondered how it would have been had we seen Natalie Dessay in the role, at her prime.

The rest of the cast was strong and even (and Naouri isn't as bad as some people will insist he now is: he knows how to deal with the current state of his voice). Some of them look very young and sound very promising, though as you might expect, Lea Desandre wasn't the only one whose voice seemed small in the Bastille's cruelly vast volumes. The chorus, there in number, was on great form on Tuesday night. Carlo Rizzi's conducting was, as usual (to echo what I just wrote about Elsa Dreising), competent but more businesslike than  thrilling.

Here are a few more pictures. The production is due to be broadcast in the next few days, so I should image it will soon be floating around on the web for all to see and judge for themselves. Audiences are loving it. So, too, are most of the critics. To me, it's sometimes fantastic spectacle, but crushes the young couple under the massed effects of its sets and costumes and lighting and swirling movements, and is short on actual dramatic impact and emotion. You get an eyeful, but not of tears.

This was the end of my 2022-2023 season. If all goes well, I'll be back in October with the revival of Warlikowski's fondly-remembered production of Makropoulos, with the intriguing casting of Karita Mattila as Emilia...

*To give the lad his due, it seems he developed a concept around the notion of the oxymoron in Shakespeare: young love during a plague, Garnier et the Bastille, etc. This was taken up by the press, but if I hadn't read about it I wouldn't have noticed.