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Thérèse Raquin

Reviewed by Myron Meisel

Long Beach Opera at the Warner Grand Theatre

Through Feb. 1

RECOMMENDED:

Those who tend to be consistently disappointed in new musicals could profitably explore new opera as a more reliable alternative, where the creative energies appear to have been more vibrant so far in this latest century. Tobias Picker’s 2000 adaptation of Emile Zola’s 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin, with a cleverly-wrought libretto by Gene Scheer, makes its local bow in a revised version the composer says he greatly prefers over the recording of the Dallas Opera premiere. It makes for a mostly smashing evening of musical theater, intelligent and involving, and given a most alert and acute rendition by Long Beach Opera (performing in San Pedro).

While Zola’s novel may be comprised of many elements highly susceptible to theatrical emotions (it’s a clear precursor to James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice), its intent could hardly have been less congenial to identification and display. As a crusading journalist, writing fiction in a pioneering style very much both post-Darwin and pre-Freud, Zola professes no interest in psychological motivation, preferring to dissect primal drives, making the case for human beings not as an elevated species, but as instinctive as animals for all their social organization.

Abandoned by her parents as a child, Thérèse has been taken in by the Rauqin household, where she toils as caretaker both to her domineering relation Madame Lisette and her sickly, spoiled, emotionally dependent son Camille, whom Thérèse is forced to wed, cementing her fate until a family friend, the louche Laurent, draws her into an affair that culminates in their murder of Camille.

Zola himself created a stage work out of the popular book, and it has been frequently adapted in the theater and film (incarnated by Simone Signoret in an otherwise mediocre 1953 Marcel Carne’ movie, his last of consequence), with a spate of new versions since Picker and Scheer undertook this version, including another opera by Michael Finnissy, a pair of recent straight musicals, and a 2014 movie In Secret, starring Elizabeth Olson, Jessica Lange and Oscar Isaac.

Inevitably, dramatizing Zola means dropping the objectivity and underlining grand passions, even though any fidelity of intention requires that all the characters remain lamentable, appalling people. The cold and withdrawn Thérèse has endured a life of servitude and abuse, and the delicious irony for the opera is how a woman distinguished by her lack of any voice of her own must express that state through beautiful singing.

 Scheer’s libretto is a model of compression and opportunities for musical display, which Picker, as a facile and meticulous composer of grand temperament and precise control of his effects, gives a full development through a series of repeated small motifs that morph meaning throughout the progress of the drama. While nothing is heard that could not have been plausibly written for an opera fifty years ago, arguably audience ears have evolved to the point where the harmonic language no longer remains gnarly to assimilate. (Rumbling G-flats in the bass augur no good, though I could have used more of the deft rhyming couplets.)

In the particularly dynamic (and less adventurous) first act, largely devoted to narrative exposition, both Picker and Scheer build up an exciting head of steam inexorably propelling toward the climatic killing. It would be unfair to music of this caliber to be characterized a film noir music, but one could imagine that if a film noir score were still being written, it might well steal cool ideas from the strategies employed here.

Above all, the creators are splendidly well served by this crackerjack mounting, the inspired team making the most of budgetary limitations. It starts with a rather canny coup, a supertitle moving the action from the original period to 1945-46 Paris, just after the Liberation (though it ham-fistedly calls it “the Armistice”, which had been the end of the previous war). This has a subtle impact, unstressed save for the costumes, themselves survivors of fashion just before the War, wondrously cut for ripe petit bourgeois figures by designer Jacqueline Saint Anne.

However, the context lends a gravity the opera’s necessary excesses require. The palpable pall of Vichy collaboration hangs over every character as a consequence, and the moral rot and stink of selfish compromise pervades the atmosphere, providing an instructive and tonic counterpoint to the lovers’ own corruption and treachery. No hint of revisionist claims of Resistance in this company.

Director Ken Cazan approaches the action determined to stage it as a drama with music, most suitably for the score. While everyone sings admirably and gorgeously, the production above all is powerfully acted, especially by operatic standards (outstripping by discernible measure L.A. Opera’s A Streetcar Named Desire of last season.) The sex for once is convincingly carnal, though astutely devoid of passionate gesture.

Mary Ann Stewart’s Thérèse is no less down-beaten for all her dulcet vocal flourishes, and Ed Parks achieves a remarkably shaded shallowness as her callow lover, genuine in his affection yet lazy, opportunistic and pretentious. It’s a shock at first to see frequent LBO lead Suzan Hanson summarily cast in the role of the matriarch, though the white wig and intervening paralyzing stroke do not adequately disguise her charismatic star appeal. Matthew DiBattista’s craven Camille finds dimension in his archetype, and the comic relief of police officer Olivier (Zeffin Quinn Hollis) and his wife, Camille’s sister Suzanne (Ani Maldjian), avoids hackneyed caricature.

The crafty design of the reliably resourceful Alan E. Muraoka concentrates, according to his recent wont, toward suggestive vertical forms that are shattered by the sudden assertion of aggressive horizontal lines in the deadly boat on the lake. And the band sounds just great. Despite being scored for severely reduced forces (only 18 players can cram into the pit of the Warner Grand), the orchestration never feel thinned-out, and the impression is of richness and density under the able hands of conductor (and company artistic director) Andreas Mitisek, despite the challenging complexity of so much of the writing.

As the music grows more decadent, with the harmonies more adventurous and melodies more fragmented, Act 2 documents the descent into guilt and madness by the doomed lovers. As psychological fodder, this inevitably ends up somewhat schematic and unconvincing, despite the considerable invention deployed by Picker and the shattering of the action into briefer scenes with swabs of neo-Gothic expressionism. As it rambles dramatically, it loses the vicious edge along with the last embers of hope. Still, it remains fundamentally gripping, if only intermittently successful, despite a swell aria Thérèse sings in her remarriage bed, and a disturbing ghostly resurrection of the drowned Camille.

Overall, I still prefer Picker’s next opera of ruthless death of a romantic obstacle by lakeboat, his version of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, which perhaps suffered the misfortune of a premiere at the Metropolitan Opera. Still, this more compact Thérèse Raquin should provide an ear-opening experience highly accessible to more conservative operagoers blessed with mildly adventurous programmers for years to come. This LBO production will move to Mitisek’s other company, Chicago Opera Theater, and should help sustain this accomplished work in its future life.

Chicago Opera Theater and Long Beach Opera at the Warner Grand Theatre, 478 West Sixth Street, San Pedro; Sun., Feb. 1, 2:30 p.m.; https://www.longbeachopera.org