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by Charles Gounod, directed by Amy Lane

Canadian Opera Company, Four Seasons Centre, Toronto

October 11-November 2, 2024

Faust: “J’ai langui, triste et solitaire” (Act 1, Scene 1)

So, what are Liza Minelli and Marlene Dietrich doing in a production of an 1859 opera about Faust? Nothing useful, that’s for sure. They are just two of the dozens of images British director Amy Lane has thrown at Charles Gounod’s best-known opera with no care whether they make sense or not. Lane’s perverse goal seems to be to distract us as much as possible from the plot and characters with the result that we care about nothing that happens in the work’s three-hour running time. Luckily there is excellent singing from at least two of the principals and the COC Orchestra under Johannes Debus and the COC Chorus under Sandra Horst are in their usual exemplary form.

We might think that Lane has some clue what she’s doing when we first see Emma Ryott’s set. It is dominated by a spiral staircase that becomes so tightly wound as it rises there are no steps left. This makes it look like the spinal column of a headdown animal terminating in a tail. The backwall is covered with an X-ray of lungs that seem to be affected with bronchitis. Around the central spinal staircase are five odd looking trees which, related to the X-ray appear to be imitations of the lungs’ tracheobronchial tree.

The question this imagery poses is “Where are we?” The answer would seem to be “Inside Faust’s chest cavity”. This might make some sense for the first scene exploring Faust’s old age and loneliness, but it happens that Lane stages the next two acts of the opera with its villagers and soldiers all in this thoracic location. From Act 4 on, Lane truncates the spinal staircase to allow for a balcony at its top, thus negating whatever symbolism it had.

From our first view of the set, the relation between the stage imagery and anything related to the story of the opera goes rapidly downhill. When Faust summons Méphistophélès, he appears with two female assistants (spirits?) who have been lurking with him on the staircase. The notion of giving Méphistophélès any assistants is wrong for a host of reasons. The engine that drives Goethe’s original play, the source of the libretto, is the relationship between Faust and Méphistophélès. Faust soon becomes disillusioned with the bargain he has made with Mephistopheles, “the spirit of negation”, and tries to do what good he can with the rest of his life.

To give Mephistopheles assistants of any kind weakens the one-on-one battle that should take place between Faust’s striving and Méphistophélès’ cynicism. Two assistants present wherever Mephistopheles is means that Faust and the devil are never alone. If nothing else, the assistants are a constant visual distraction, dancing and making faces, when we should be focussing on the two main characters.

Worse, Lane has let the designer Ryott clothe both the assistants as Liza Minnelli in the 1972 film of Cabaret with halter vests, short-shorts and garters. What possible point does this make? Does Lane see Sally Bowles as an embodiment of evil? Or, since Méphistophélès is in a top hat and tails like an emcee, is she trying to trivialize the Faust legend to tell us that “Life is a cabaret”? Lane’s choice shows so little care for the opera’s story that it is beyond belief.

But that is not all. At the end, when Marguerite dies, driven insane by Faust’s abandonment, the death of her brother and of her child, she, contrary to Mephistopheles’ expectations, is granted entry to heaven. To signify this, Lane has a dancer enter dressed in an all-white tux like Marlene Dietrich in the 1932 film Blonde Venus and lead Marguerite off stage. So here we have another cabaret singer, but since when have Dietrich’s characters been embodiments of purity and goodness?

The impression that Lane’s direction gives is of someone who has a very superficial understanding of the opera’s subject and is merely playing with diverse types of imagery regardless of whether the images fit the story or suit each other. What does all the medical imagery of the set have to do with cabaret stars in movies as supernatural beings? And how does either set of images help us understand the story?

This emphasis in bizarre stage imagery over clear storytelling reaches a climax in the famous “Jewel Song” of Act 3. In the libretto, the young man Siebel, in love with Marguerite, leaves a bouquet of flowers for her. Méphistophélès helps Faust to outdo this gift by leaving Marguerite a casket filled with jewels. Marguerite is astonished by them and tries them on. The point, though, is that she is tempted by the sin of vanity but ultimately resists it. Instead of presenting us with a naïve young girl alone with a jewel box (after all, she sings, “me voilà /Toute seule!”), Lane decides to personify the jewel box with two ballet dancers dressed as a gold-coloured Pierrot and Pierrette, who hand out the jewels referred to in the aria. If that were not distracting enough, Lane also has the duo perform ballet choreography, including lifts and dives, while Marguerite is singing as if Lane deliberately wanted to sabotage Marguerite’s most famous aria.

In an interview published in the COC programme, Lane says she was inspired by “the slightly madcap worlds of the Tim Burton films and also Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland…. Another great inspiration for me was Kubrick’s The Shining—most notably, the maze at the end, and gothic horror—you can’t escape the pull towards a work such as Dracula”. What’s interesting about this remark is that there is no evidence of anything by Burton, Kubrick or Carroll anywhere on stage. And how to Minnelli and Dietrich fit in? The mere fact that Lane names so many disparate influences suggests that she actually has no overarching idea of her own. This is obvious in the clichéd remark Lane makes is in summarizing the action, “Be careful what you wish for” – a complete trivialization of the Faust legend which is about the meaning of life, knowledge and power.

Given such an aggressively unhelpful production, it’s surprising that any of the performers come off well. The most successful is American Kyle Ketelsen as an ideal Méphistophélès. His devil is supremely elegant and poised, and Ketelsen sings everything with his powerful, velvety bass to which he lends a sly note of irony.

Long Long, a German tenor of Chinese descent, has an heroic, Italianate voice, He seems to relish all the high, sustained notes Gounod throws he way. While Long sometimes colours his voice to covey Faust’s complex changes of mood, he could do more through both voice and gesture to involve us in Faust’s tormented character.

Chinese soprano Guanqun Yu is a major deficit in the casting. Marguerite is a fantastic role, one requiring the performer to portray a young woman who moves from childish naïveté to romantic love, despair, madness and finally joy. Yu, sadly, is unwilling or unable to act out any of these changes. She seems entirely focusses on singing the correct notes and nothing more. Even this is not sufficient since her lower register is matte and only arrives at any fullness and brightness in her upper register. It’s easy to see how she could play the ice-cold Turandot, as she has done frequently, but Marguerite requires warmth and vigour. With a director like Lane, who concentrates more on what an opera looks like than on directing the characters interpersonal relations, someone like Yu is lost.

In other roles, Canadian Alex Hetherington is a convincing, bright-voiced Siebel. Fellow Canadian Megan Latham provides some comic relief as the flirtatious Marthe even though Lane has burdened her with a ridiculously overfull trolly of tottering desserts and forces her to push it awkwardly up over stairs to reach the main acting area. Polish baritone Szymon Mechliński blusters his way through the role of Marguerite’s brother Valentin, including, depressingly enough, the glorious aria “Avant de quitter ces lieux”. Lane also stages the most absurd death scene for him that I’ve seen in a long time. She has Valentin fall dead on the ground after being stabbed by Méphistophélès, only to rise again, stand unsupported and push people away, before realizing he’s been killed and falling to the ground again.

What helps us through the bizarre visuals Lane has created is the beauty of the playing of the COC Orchestra. Johannes Debus chooses ideal tempi throughout and generates more drama and excitement in the pit than anything that happens on stage. The COC Chorus sing gloriously no matter what foolish actions Lane has it undertake, such as forcing the Soldiers’ Chorus to exit riding their wooden rifles like hobbyhorses.

The saddest part of this production is that the COC owns it. It is a co-production with Malmö Opera. Faust is standard repertory with its unending series of memorable arias and choruses. Every large opera company should have its own production to hand. This, however, is a production I found boring on first viewing, and it is not one I wish to see again. I admit I am spoiled by having seen the iconic production by Jorge Lavelli for the Opéra national de Paris twice. That was a production that cut to the core of the opera, caught you up in the action and made you fear for Marguerite’s fate when she is in prison. Lane’s production is relentlessly superficial and uninvolving. The COC did not do well with its last Faust in 2007. It does not do well now. Let’s hope that sometime in the future it will find a director who actually cares about the opera and the still-urgent issues it raises.

Christopher Hoile

Photo: Kyle Ketelsen as Méphistophélès (seated left), Long Long as Faust (in green) with ensemble; Méphistophélès and his two Liza Minnellis (Sierra Richardson and Tina Desroches); Guanqun Yu as Marguerite with her Jewels, Jack Rennie (left) and Brooklyn Marshall (right); Kyle Ketelsen as Méphistophélès with Soldiers. © 2024 Michael Cooper. 

For tickets visit: www.coc.ca.