L’Elisir d’Amore
Gaiety Theatre, Dublin
★★★★★
Irish National Opera is closing its season with six nights – four in Dublin plus one each in Wexford and Cork – of comic opera, a genre in which the seven-year-old company already has a really good record.
Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore feels like a ball not to be dropped. Its popularity and permanent place in the repertory have their roots in the fact that for an entire decade, from 1838 to 1848, it was the world’s most performed opera.
But comedy gives a ball a unique slipperiness – think about the unfunny flops of stage and screen that we’ve all cringed through or abandoned. Therefore, to complete the slam dunk that L’Elisir d’Amore promises on paper, INO has entrusted its season finale to Cal McCrystal, a director for whom comedy is a speciality. This is his first production for INO. He had never seen L’Elisir d’Amore before.
And the audience laughs. I laugh. “A good comedy,” McCrystal remarks in the production’s programme, “is where people laugh hard and a bad comedy is when they sit quietly tittering. I like big loud laughs.” And it’s big laughs that he secures with a comic modus operandi that is unapologetically physical, visual slapstick.
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Once or twice as I’m laughing I find myself wondering, Who isn’t? Who is disappointed? Disgusted? And there are indeed moments when comic antics threaten to undermine the music and cross a line that McCrystal acknowledges but likes to approach. But those moments are seldom.
Although McCrystal’s relocation of the story to the American wild west has been done before, styling Nemorino as Woody from Disney’s Toy Story is probably a first. When he first appears I think ahead to act two and wonder how the cartoon-cowboy look might diminish the emotional impact of the opera’s most famous and non-comic aria, Una Furtiva Lagrima. But by then the agile and sweet-toned tenor Duke Kim has endeared himself as the story’s lovable, love-struck hero. We don’t care what he’s wearing, and the song hits home.
Kim is surpassed in vocal agility by the neat and thrilling coloratura of the soprano Claudia Boyle, as Adina. Crucially, Boyle also brings an excellent comic presence as she flaunts her numerous costume changes, each more Scarlett O’Hara than the last. She is perfectly OTT, as is the bass Gianluca Margheri, as the alpha-male love rival Sergeant Belcore, the unabashed display of whose gym-chiselled torso makes us all wither with despair on Nemorino’s behalf.
Funniest of all is INO’s always dependable funny man John Molloy, less than a year on from his hard-hitting depiction of the Older Man in Trade, Emma O’Halloran’s gritty two-hander. As Dulcamara, the charlatan purveyor of the titular love potion, Molloy is consistently comic in gesture and inflection.
Conducting, Erina Yashima keeps the music light-footed and lively, ably co-ordinating her large, busy chorus, where McCrystal has embedded so much funny dancing and caricature. He and the designer Sarah Bacon must have had a blast slipping in Laurel and Hardy, Abraham Lincoln, soldiers as Keystone Kops, and the grim-faced couple from American Gothic, Grant Wood’s 1930 painting.
L‘Elisir d’Amore, staged by Irish National Opera, is at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, on Tuesday, May 27th, Thursday, May 29th, and Saturday, May 31st; at the National Opera House, Wexford, on Wednesday, June 4th; and at Cork Opera House on Saturday, June 7th
