'The Magic Flute' a surreal visual extravaganza

Janelle Gelfand
Cincinnati Enquirer
The magic flute –in this production, a fairy –assists Tamino (Aaron Blake) in his quest in Cincinnati Opera’s production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

Pink cocktails swimming with elephants. Mechanical monkeys and bees. A heroine who sprouts wings and flies in a Technicolor flock of butterflies. Her mother is a nightmarish spider. There are fearsome dogs and a silly black cat.

And a magic flute flits around like Tinkerbell, leaving a pixie-dust trail of musical notes.

Cincinnati Opera’s “The Magic Flute,” which opened Saturday in Procter & Gamble Theater at the Aronoff Center, has more animations than a Pixar movie.

The cinematic production of Mozart’s final opera, the pipe-dream of Komische Oper Berlin and the British theater company 1927, is vastly entertaining and a technical triumph. With one visual extravaganza after another, you couldn’t tear your eyes away.

The audience left the hall singing its praises. It’s too bad, though, that Mozart’s glorious music took a back seat.

Tamino (Aaron Blake) runs from a dragon in the opening scene of Cincinnati Opera’s production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

“The Magic Flute” has been challenging to stage ever since Mozart and his fellow Freemason Emanuel Schikaneder, the librettist, wrote it in 1791. In the story, Tamino and Pamina are tested by trials of fire and water. If they succeed, knowledge and beauty will be their reward.

But the questions are many. Is it a love story, a fairy tale, a telling of Masonic ritual? Or is it something more profound and inspirational?

The creative team has filled in the blanks for you. The set – consisting of a white wall with doors through which characters emerge – is the screen for their fantasy world of surreal projections. In the words of stage director Daniel Ellis, “We’re using the vernacular of a movie to tell an opera.”

The fresh-voiced singers, who were harnessed onto small platforms for much of the evening, were required to perfectly coordinate their stylized movements to the animations around them. That, too, was an extraordinary feat.

“The Magic Flute” is a German Singspiel – a humorous light opera with spoken dialogue. In the production conceived by Berlin’s Barrie Kosky with Suzanne Andrade and animator Paul Barritt of 1927, the opera is told through the lens of a 1920s silent film. Dialogue is discarded. Instead, silent movie-like placards with snippets of plotline are projected while a pianist plays snippets of Mozart’s piano music and characters perform in exaggerated pantomime.

The curtain rose as Prince Tamino, sung by tenor Aaron Blake, was being chased by a fantastic, larger-than-life animated dragon. Blake's lyric, expressive tenor was ideal for the “Portrait Aria,” in which he falls in love with Pamina at the sight of her picture (which was blown to him as a smoke ring).

Soprano Jeni Houser was superb as The Queen of the Night – although, in reality, we never saw more than her head. Suspended as a giant, eight-legged spider – a Freudian nightmare if there ever was one – she sent bolts of lightning to stun Tamino in her first aria. In her sensational “Revenge Aria,” the soprano hurled vocal pyrotechnics up to high F while her animated self hurled red daggers at Pamina, caught in her web. The scene, both visually and vocally, earned the evening’s biggest ovation.

Kim-Lillian Strebel was a wide-eyed Pamina in the short bob hairdo of movie legend Louise Brooks. She showed terror as she was “chased” by her spider-mother and sympathized with Papageno in their tender duet against an animated backdrop of flowers and birds. Her aria, “Ach, ich fühl’s,” when she believes Tamino doesn’t love her, was beautifully felt.

The birdcatcher Papageno, sung by the terrific baritone Rodion Pogossov, wasn’t the humorous, feather-covered bumpkin that is commonly seen, but cast as a Buster Keaton look-alike in a pork-pie hat. His magic bells were strings of tiny girls in animated configurations.

Jasmine Habersham was charming as Papagena, who appeared after a cartoonish bomb blast (“kaboom!”). The couple sang of the family they would raise against a cartoon house teeming with children.

Sarastro (Tom McNichols, top center) punishes Monostatos (John Robert Lindsey, top right) and his minions in Cincinnati Opera’s production of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s The Magic Flute.

As the high priest Sarastro, Tom McNichols wore a long coat and top hat and communicated in a mellifluous bass. Mozart’s beautiful “In diesen heil’gen Hallen” (Within these hallowed halls) was a vocal high point. John Robert Lindsey made a properly evil Monostatos (a dead ringer for the vampire Nosferatu), accompanied by terrifying dogs rather than slaves.

The Queen’s three ladies, Alexandra Schoeny, Cassandra Zoe Velasco and Amber Fasquelle, sang engagingly in flapper-era coats and hats. And the three spirits – Ashley Fabian, Abigail Hoyt and Paulina Villarreal -- charmed as flying moths.

Even the chorus prepared by Henri Venanzi, which sang magnificently, was seen as if through an old movie projector.

In the pit, resident conductor Christopher Allen propelled a performance that was lighter than air. The overture, with its scurrying strings and somber brass chords, was magical and crystal clear, and he rarely overpowered the singers. The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra sounded sublime in this music, particularly the birdcatcher’s first appearance to the magical piccolo of Joan Voorhees.

During the text plates, the fortepiano's sound was puny in the large theater. The selections chosen, although by Mozart, fit neither the mood nor the opera’s key of E-flat.

With so much to look at, from Rube Goldberg-like contraptions to a beast spewing fire and lots of gears and pendulums, the technical wizardry eventually became sensory overload. I wasn’t sure whether I was watching a movie or an opera. And I think that was the intended effect.

Cincinnati Opera’s production of Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” continues at 7:30 p.m. July 20 and 22; 3 p.m. July 23. Tickets: 513-241-2742, cincinnatiopera.org.