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| A scene from Albert Herring. |
By Ed Rampell
Benjamin Britten’s comedy of manners, Albert Herring, premiered in 1947 at Glyndebourne, a grand country manor in the veddy British countryside near East Sussex. But this good fun opera about sexual repression unfortunately remains all-too-contemporary, what with Republican presidential candidates debating contraception and Rick Satan-orum running for witch-burner-in-chief and all.
When the prim and not so proper village of Loxford runs out of vestal virgins for its annual, traditional May Day Festival (no red flags, please -- this is Edwardian England, after all), they turn to the virginal and eponymous Albert Herring (tenor Alek Shrader). Like his nation’s future prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, Albert is the child of a green grocer (mezzo-soprano Jane Bunnell). Much as with today’s GOP buffoons, Loxford’s power players place a premium on chastity, as well as on greed.
The resident one percenter, Lady Billows (Scottish singer Janis Kelly alternates in the role with soprano Christine Brewer), is tended to by Florence Pike (mezzo-soprano Ronnita Nicole Miller), a domestic servant with airs, at her ladyship’s posh estate, beautifully evoked by scenic designer Kevin Knight. Lady Billows offers a handsome sum as reward for Albert’s virtue, while she presides over a retinue of comical sycophants. The festival committee includes those not so stellar pillars of the community: The Vicar Mr. Gedge (baritone Jonathan Michie); the Mayor Mr. Upfold (tenor Robert McPherson); the Superintendent of Police Budd (bass Richard Bernstein); and the teacher Miss Wordsworth, a sort of old maid, well-played by soprano Stacey Tappan.
Not all of the Loxforders pretend to be such goody two shoes. A trio of undomesticated youngsters add to levity. The drolly named Sid and Nancy may not be punk rockers like the Sex Pistols’ Sid Vicious and his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, but as the youthful lovers baritone Liam Bonner and mezzo-soprano Daniela Mack add a devil-may-care ingredient to the simmering stew of social propriety. Ultimately, boys will be boys, and predictably, as Albert is quite publicly lauded for his moral uprightness, with a little help from the mischievous Sid and Lady Billows’ bounty, all hell breaks loose. Much to the constable’s consternation amidst several, uh, red herrings, he is no longer a Prince Albert in a can. Although Albert’s coming of age is couched in hetero camouflage, Britten was reportedly gay, and his lampooning of sexual repression may have been his encoded ripostes to homophobia.
Mr. Knight’ sets, with rather large models of various homes in the background, aesthetically evoke the English countryside, while his period costumes conjure up a highly class stratified and rarefied era. Whereas Lady Billows’ home is suggestive of manorial splendor (not unlike, one suspects, Glyndebourne), the Herrings’ claustrophobic grocery shop is realistically rendered. The scenic transitions, enhanced by Rick Fisher’s lights, are gems as the Shanghaied cast, apparently impressed into service as stagehands, seamlessly, fluidly move from one time and place to another. But the fact that part of the background is simply bare and black -- at least viewed from my angle -- distracted me from Samuel Coleridge’s willing suspension of disbelief.
James Conlon’s baton reigns over a 13-piece orchestra with a sprightly score and much recitative singing, although there is no breakout aria or solo number per se that shakes the rafters. Paul Curran adeptly directs his ensemble cast with a flair for the bawdy and vaudevillean. Herring’s libretto, by Eric Crozier, is based on the French writer Guy de Maupassant’s short story Le Rosier de Madame Husson. Although sung in English supertitles are projected in English throughout the performance. Rule Britannia!
Innocence -- or rather innocence lost -- is a recurring theme in Britten’s work; his operatic take on Herman Melville’s angelic but doomed sailor Billy Budd (the mariner has the same last name as Herring’s policeman) premiered in 1951. Undercurrents of angsty sexuality roiled Britten’s version of Henry James’ symbolically titled The Turn of the Screw, which debuted in 1954 and was staged by L.A. Opera last season. (The centennial of Britten’s birth is next year.) While Britten put the sex into East Sussex, the hanky-panky in Albert Herring is largely played for laughs, although beneath the surface Britten’s opera jabs the tyrannical puritanical busybody brigades of then and now. One wonders what opéras bouffes the current Republican presidential race will someday inspire?
Albert Herring runs through 17 at L.A. Opera at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, 135 N. Grand Ave. For more info: 213/972-8001; www.laopera.com.
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