Review: ‘Tosca’ at Lyric Opera of Chicago reflects the dangers that art and lovers face today
Saturday night’s Lyric Opera of Chicago opening of “Tosca,” the Giacomo Puccini opera set as the Neapolitans abandoned Rome and the city fell to what would be years of annexation and Napoleonic domination, began with the Ukrainian national anthem.
A noir-clad ensemble stood in humanist solidarity, bunched together in front of Jean-Pierre Ponelle’s ecclesiastical Act 1 setting, a magnificently malevolent work of perspective that notes how powerful, sedentary institutions can weigh on loving humans. A pained audience stood, the artists sang from their hearts and the curtain fell, soon to rise again on the difficulty of a life, to paraphrase what Michelle Bradley’s Tosca famously sings in her gorgeous Act 2 aria, lived for art, and lived for love.
Invariably, characters like Baron Scarpia seem always to be there to destroy such idealism. At intermission of director Louisa Muller’s production, a fellow audience member asked me if I thought the palpable approval at Tosca taking her revenge on Fabián Veloz’s scuppering guttersnipe of a Scarpia was merely customary or a projection of someone else the free world would like to see stopped in his tracks. I demurred. In Act 3, we’d see Scarpia’s betraying forces of darkness emerging from the pit. At times, even a hoary melodrama like “Tosca” takes on a fresh veracity — a possibility the Vienna-based Muller clearly understood.
The highlight of this new-to-Chicago staging of one of the world’s most-produced operas is Russell Thomas, the beautiful American tenor, as Mario. Here’s why.
At its core, “Tosca” (like “West Side Story”) is a portrait of two lovers unable to find their place, done in by the battles that surround them, and used to further the agenda of others. Here, they both are artists who, even though they have their struggles and jealousies as we all do, want nothing so much as to seek out beauty. Thomas is an accessible tenor, a singer with a humanistic quality, a performer who attaches kindness to every note. He’s figured out that his painter, Mario, is as uninterested in power as anyone playing him thus should be in the bravura; he’s an idealistic seeker and that is how he sings. It’s quite magnificent, in a very contemporary, tolerant and openhearted sense of that word.
Bradley’s vocal emphasis in the famed title role is on that character’s agonized response to the ascending chaos around her. In the piece, Tosca’s journey starts with misplaced worries about her lover’s fidelity, only for her to realize that her main problems lie abroad in political matters; artists, she learns to her cost, cannot escape their surroundings. That’s a legitimate approach, but what is less clear in her singing is possibility; you will have heard Toscas who are more dedicated to aspiration, who reach further for hope in the soaring Puccini notes of what could be, the potential rewards that drive the courageous as they fight off oppression. The pain and confusion is all there; the place of peace, quiet and open air still in need of evocation.
So it’s the contrasts that Bradley still has to enhance, moving as her performance already can be.
Under the baton of Eun Sun Kim, you can hear that guiding optimism coming from the pit. And, of course, Puccini baked it into all his operas. Consider the presence here of the voices of children, first as an architecturally constrained group of choristers, played by members of the Chicago Children’s Choir, and then emergent as the lonely dawn sound of a young shepherd greeting the new day. As I listened to young Liam Brandfonbrener sing on Saturday, I kept thinking of that little Ukrainian girl in a bunker, singing “Let it Go,” as the world only hopes she eventually can. Once outside.
Humanity’s dark forces, of course, can emerge in the form of a vocally conniving Scarpia (Veloz clearly know his character’s villainy has real bite), or the more fearful manipulations of Angelloti (Rivers Hawkins), who, along with Rodell Rosel’s Spoletta, conjures the weaselly institutional enabler, constants of opera and of history.
Ponnelle’s first setting fully evokes the basilica Sant’Andrea della Valle, a place of beauty but with hidden corners and passageways, oppressive in their grandeur. It then moves through Scarpia’s macho lair, flirting with the fires of hell, and ends up at the Castel Sant’Angelo, a former mausoleum dominated by triumphalist militarism, naturally fatal for our lovers. Throughout the show’s visual progression, you’re left thinking about how we humans have always built that which overwhelms us, how we’ve always tried to dominate, how little we allow ourselves to breathe and love and appreciate.
To put all that another way, this is a very fine moment to see and hear a “Tosca” that never lets you forget the ugliness of the world beyond the lovers’ reach.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “Tosca”
When: Through April 10
Where: Lyric Opera House, 20 N. Wacker Drive
Running time: 2 hours, 45 minutes
Tickets: $49-$299 at 312-827-5600 and www.lyricopera.org
