Word: offenbacher
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...Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann returns the Met to top form...
...phantasmagorical spirit of E.T.A. Hoffmann lurks everywhere in the Metropolitan Opera's brilliant new production of Jacques Offenbach's Les Contes d'Hoffmann (The Tales of Hoffmann), which opened last week. Vividly directed by Otto Schenk and imaginatively designed by Günther Schneider-Siemssen, Hoffmann is the Met's most successful, satisfying effort in months. It is all the more welcome because the season, still somewhat colored by 1980's labor disputes, began in a lackluster fashion. Soprano Renata Scotto was booed in her opening-night performance of Norma, and a Ring semicycle...
...formality is present even though this year's production, Offenbach's La Perrichole, is a comic opera. The seriousness is probably there because so many of the directors and singers hope to turn professional. A large percentage of the cast, including three of the five leads, come from area music schools like the New England Conservatory and have been performing in Boston operas and other musical productions for years...
...woman, as in the legend of Pygmalion. The most entertaining example is the life-size doll Olympia, a luscious soprano in Offenbach's Tales of Hoffmann. At the end of every verse in her main aria, however, she droops and swoons until revived by several noisy turns of a crank in her back...
...long-stemmed can-can dancers kick, whirl and cartwheel, split, shimmy and pirouette to Offenbach's rollicking La Vie Parisienne. In a reverse striptease, a comely Victorian lass in black stockings and garter belt dresses up in corset and crinoline for a grand occasion orchestrated by Strauss. The star of the show, callipygian Linda Bardot, clad mostly in a pearly headdress, twirls around under a filigreed umbrella, mouthing in puffick Cockney Oi'm Aownly aye Bird in aye Gilded Cayge. Between and after the twice-nightly shows, the place becomes a disco where the windows vibrate past midnight...