ARTS

Opera review: 'Arizona Lady' tries too hard

Kerry Lengel
The Republic | azcentral.com
Soprano Angela Fout stars in Arizona Opera's "Arizona Lady" as ranch owner Lona Farrell.

With its “Arizona Bold” initiative, Arizona Opera aims to bring “new and exciting stories” with local relevance to the stage. But the latest production in the four-year project, “Arizona Lady,” is more like Arizona kitsch.

While the show is (sort of) a U.S. premiere — the first fully staged production of composer Emmerich Kálmán’s 60-year-old operetta in this country — the story is neither new nor exciting, despite some rather desperate efforts to update it. Wearing its Rodgers and Hammerstein influence on its sleeves, the work is packed with lovely melodies, all beautifully sung by a talented cast. But this wannabe “Oklahoma!” is so cornball as to be unwatchable, though not at all unlistenable.

Kálmán was a Hungarian Jewish émigré who fled his beloved Vienna after the Nazis took over in 1938. He lived for a time in New York, where he discovered American musical theater, and in Los Angeles, where he fell in love with Southwestern landscapes and, it seems, B-movie oaters. He wrote “Arizona Lady” in 1953, the year he died.

The story concerns Viennese immigrant Lona Farrell, proprietress of the Sunshine Ranch, who’s hoping her prize racehorse — also the title character, technically — can win some bets and get her out of debt. Lona, charmingly portrayed by soprano Angela Fout, also has a trio of would-be suitors, including the local sheriff, played by veteran baritone Robert Orth.

‘Arizona Lady’: A brand-new opera (that's 60 years old)

Arizona Opera’s production is smartly directed by Matthew Ozawa with inviting vaudevillian scenic design by Mark Halpin. A painting of Monument Valley serves as backdrop, even though the action takes place a few hundred miles south, in Tucson.

It’s 1925, and we first meet our heroine as she’s chasing off her disreputable foreman, who apparently got a little fresh, with a six-gun and (far more frightening) a horseshoe brand.

She’s clearly not a woman to mess with. But Roy Dexter (tenor Joshua Dennis), a singing cowboy who shows up crooning the Mexican ballad “Cielito Lindo” (“Ay, yai yai yai!”), is intimidated as much by her beauty as by her brashness: “If you’re the one who wears the pants / I doubt I can control my glance,” he sings, explaining why he won’t work for “some woman.”

It’s pretty obvious where things are headed from here.

While a smattering of the original German remains, as well as some Spanish bits translated by Alberto Ríos, Arizona’s current poet laureate, most of the libretto has been adapted into English by the conductor, Kathleen Kelly. Filled with “yippies” and clumsy rhymed couplets (“Kiss you and basta / Kiss you at last-ah!”), the script is also studded with misguided anachronisms intended to pander to a local audience.

Arizona Opera’s bold turnaround marries art, commerce

The first of two horse races, for example, has spectators cheering on competitors named “Wildcat” and “Sparky,” and when the sheriff arrests a suspected horse thief, he quips, “I think I have a pair of pink underwear just your size.”

In addition to Joe Arpaio’s infamous jail couture, there are also references to “The Shawshank Redemption” and, head-scratchingly, Charles Barkley and Jim Morrison. Kelly’s updated libretto is a case study in trying too hard.

None of this takes away from the seductive beauty of Kálmán’s score. Though his debt to “Oklahoma!” is obvious, the music is a pleasing marriage of his Viennese and American influences, replete with lilting, hummable melodies.

Among the highlights are a Spanish-language ballad, ravishingly sung by baritone Octavio Moreno, and an oft-repeated anthem to Arizona whose catchiness derives from a tuneful kinship with both Verdi’s “La donna è mobile” and Disney’s “It’s a Small World.”

If only the story and the characters weren’t so cartoonish. And so very old hat.

Reach the reviewer at kerry.lengel@arizonarepublic.com or 602-444-4896. Follow on Twitter @KerryLengel and Facebook.com/LengelonTheater

Arizona Opera: ‘Arizona Lady’

Reviewed Friday, Oct. 16. Remaining performances: 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 17, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 18. Symphony Hall, 75 N. Second St., Phoenix. $25-$135. 602-266-7464, azopera.org.