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Critic’s Pick

Review: Pulling Back the Curtain on ‘The Magic Flute’ at the Met

Unveiling the trickery only enhances the delight of this interpretation of Mozart by the director Simon McBurney.

A man in a white T-shirt looks astonished as a flute appears to levitate in front of him. On either side, women in dresses have one arm raised.
Lawrence Brownlee, center, as Tamino in the director Simon McBurney’s production of “The Magic Flute” at the Metropolitan Opera.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Die Zauberflöte
NYT Critic’s Pick

The lights were still on in the auditorium — and audience members were still milling about in the aisles — when the orchestra struck up the overture to Mozart’s “Die Zauberflöte” at the Metropolitan Opera House on Friday evening.

The director Simon McBurney wasn’t trying to chastise anyone for being inattentive. He was gently easing the audience into a realm of clever feints, a place where everything is both highly imaginative and endearingly simple — and where seeing the trick only enhances the magic.

For his production — introduced at the Dutch National Opera in 2012 — McBurney flanks the stage with special-effects artists and elevates the orchestra pit. All the players, down to the last trombone, are in full view for the entire show.

This staging represents a stark pivot away from Julie Taymor’s, which for the past 19 years has rendered the world of Emanuel Schikaneder’s libretto as a colorful, feather-light menagerie of puppets. The palette used by this new production’s set designer, Michael Levine, and costume designer, Nicky Gillibrand, hews to dark, drab neutrals. (The birdcatcher Papageno is a big exception, but more on that later.)

On the surface, their resources are humble, even plain. The women wear black slips, combat boots and mangy fur coats; the men, gray suits and conservatively wide ties. The main stage element is a large, rectangular platform that can be suspended at various angles from cables attached to its corners.

On each side of this bare setting is an artist whose effects are amplified with the use of speakers and live-video projections. At stage right, the visual artist Blake Habermann, armed primarily with a chalkboard, held the audience rapt with line drawings that were projected in real time onto the scrim. He suggested the enormity of Sarastro’s temple of wisdom with a stack of leather-bound books. The Foley artist Ruth Sullivan parked herself at stage left with a cabinet of curiosities that she used ingeniously to add sound effects to the stage action.

“Die Zauberflöte” is, at least in part, a parable of what humans are capable of — of what they can achieve when they look inside themselves. McBurney’s obvious delight in the everyday feats of the show’s sprawling assemblage of artists, singers and actors (who trailed Papageno waving paper birds) expands an idea that already exists in the piece itself. His fidelity to the show’s spirit mollified the jolt of his occasional departures, as when he spliced some dialogue into Papageno’s entrance aria.

McBurney did some rethinking too — specifically, around the opera’s battle of the sexes, wherein enlightened men shake their heads at the folly and frivolity of women. In Mozart and Schikaneder’s singspiel, women lurk in the dark, wild outskirts beyond the gates of Sarastro’s shining, orderly sanctum. Stagings often accept this binary as a truism of the piece; audiences chuckle at jokes written at women’s expense.

It’s one of the achievements of McBurney’s staging that he defanged this dichotomy — I heard no discernible laughter at the book’s misogynistic quips — by satirizing the men’s smugness. The Three Ladies (Alexandria Shiner, Olivia Vote, Tamara Mumford), with their voluptuous harmonies and gleeful immodesty — they strip Tamino of his tracksuit and take a deep, horny whiff of it — were loads of fun. Sarastro’s temple, with its unflattering overhead tube lighting, was populated by bloodless corporate shills. The Speaker, Tamino’s guide through the opera’s Masonic trials of character, morphed into a complacent, amusingly strait-laced factotum (Harold Wilson).

In this vision of two contrasting worlds, Sarastro’s people gave up something — a sense of joy, spontaneity, individuality — and were lesser for it. At the same time, though, the March of the Priests, as conducted by Nathalie Stutzmann, had real tenderness — gesturing at some sublimated feeling that they retained but couldn’t quite channel. In that sense, “Die Zauberflöte” is about the way in which our differences, when taken together, make us whole.

At the center of this universe sits Papageno, a colorful, intractably disorderly oddball in muddied outdoor gear, an everyman turned unlikely superman who, in spurning the cultural mores that would shackle him, rises above them. His dimwittedness shields him from Sarastro’s high-minded knowledge-mongering, his pure heart from the Queen of the Night’s manipulations.

Thomas Oliemans, with his cheery air, adorable stubbornness and rambunctious, somewhat unfinished baritone, was a singular Papageno. In his best bit, he tapped out a melody with celery stalks on bottles. One of them needed to be tuned, so he turned upstage, unzipped his fly and filled it up (Sullivan, of course, suggested the action in sound). Then, he casually started the aria “Ein Mädchen oder Weibchen” without orchestra — an audacious sacrilege at the Met, itself a temple of achievement in the humanities, where perfection is the expectation. I won’t spoil the rest, but it was peak Chaos Muppet energy. The audience was giddy over it.

As with Oliemans, the Met cast the show with highly individual voices instead of generically beautiful ones.

As the opera’s central lovers, Tamino and Pamina, the tenor Lawrence Brownlee and the soprano Erin Morley, relied on timbral brilliance rather than warmth. Brownlee’s fizzy, bracingly focused voice, which doesn’t hide imperfections the way a warmer sound might, could turn raucous when his vibrato was uneven. Rather than lean into the innocence latent in her beautifully airy tone, Morley played Pamina refreshingly against type, turning the princess into a worldlier foil for her new friend, Papageno. Her “Ach, ich fühl’s” was elegant, even mature, in its aching — a hard thing to do with an aria whose gorgeous solemnity exceeds its silly context (Pamina wants to kill herself because Tamino won’t talk to her).

As Sarastro, Stephen Milling sang with a gruff bass but suggested an efficacious CEO who maintains his dominion with platitudes, fear and blunt persuasion. Microphone in hand, he scored a theatrical coup by turning one of Sarastro’s leaden monologues into a winking corporate address followed by a yea-nay vote around a conference table.

The Queen of the Night, her glory reduced to a glimmer, is the white dwarf to Sarastro’s towering sun, a fabulous geriatric in a spangly dress who cannot move without assistance. She draws on reserves of finite, fantastic power, and, in this regard, the soprano Kathryn Lewek was utterly enthralling, emitting richly glowing bursts of notes like a collapsing star in “O zittre nicht.” She careered around the stage in a wheelchair during “Der Hölle Rache,” bringing thrilling drama to a coloratura showpiece so fiendish that sopranos are lucky to get through it when they’re standing stock still.

Stutzmann elicited a zesty, full-toned sound from the orchestra, despite some rigidity in her tempos, and a few musicians enjoyed cameos. Seth Morris piped shapely phrases as the living embodiment of Tamino’s magic flute. Bryan Wagorn ran onstage “late,” a cup of coffee in hand, to play a keyboard glockenspiel for Papageno. (No worries there: Oliemans filled in impressively.)

The oddly pat staging of Tamino and Pamina’s triumph after their trials, which looked like a corny pharmaceutical commercial, didn’t resolve the tensions McBurney had so deftly established. But perhaps that was another feint.

As the entire ensemble sang the closing paean, a reconciliation of beauty and wisdom (“Schönheit und Weisheit”), the evening ended as naturally as it began. Milling’s Sarastro took the hand of Lewek’s Queen and gave her a kiss on the cheek. It seemed as though the characters were transforming back into actors before our eyes — and inviting audience members to consider whether they, after all that had transpired, had changed too.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Making A ‘Flute’ More Magical. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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