Faust, Opera San Jose, April 29 2012

Faust, performed so often in the 19th century that one New York critic dubbed the old Met as the “Faustspielhaus” (“the house where they play Faust,” punning on Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth), doesn’t have quite the currency that it used to—this was the first Faust since 2002, and the first in the California Theatre, The company had made a practice of omitting the Soldiers’ Chorus in the fourth act because of time constraints and the inability to put a decent-sized battalion of soldiers on the stage of the Montgomery Theater. One of the arguments for investing in the move to the California Theatre was that it would now be possible to include the Soldiers’ Chorus. I’m pleased to report that they did.

For Act 1, the curtain went up on the aged scholar Faust in his study, surrounded by piles of old books. Behind him was a gigantic painting of a blackboard on which were written various inscrutable mathematical formulae. There seemed to be a bunch of trigonometry, perhaps alluding to the fact that Goethe, on whose Faust the opera was indirectly based, had written a Theory of Colors. There were also astrological symbols, alluding to the historical Johann Georg Faust’s interest in astrology as well as in alchemy and magic. This set was an instance of the pervading theme of the production: a 6-inch-high black platform occupying most of the stage, with a large painting in front of the back wall. It looked to me like a very effective low-budget production, but Irene Dalis herself corrected me, letting me know that the cost of this production was in line with the others. Such large paintings required a lot of work, and simple sets call for complex lighting.

Act 2 continued the theme with a large painting of partying villagers that looked to be straight out of Brueghel, executed with a bit of Thomas Hart Benton’s sharply defined figures. Tables and chairs on top of the platform offered places for the partying chorus to sit and drink. In Act 3, Marguerite’s home was a large landscape painting of a pastoral landscape with couple of thatched-roof houses in the middle distance and a church steeple in the far distance. The effect reminded me of Thomas Kinkade. There was a well-disguised door in the painting, from which Marguerite could emerge. On the platform were four square boxes of flowers, behind which Faust and Mephistopheles could hide and from which Siebel could pluck his flowers. In the last part of the act, the large painting was hoisted away, to be replaced with tall and narrow floral paintings dropped behind each of the flower boxes. Marguerite’s balcony was a simple rolling steel staircase.

In Act 4, the church scene, the painting was in fact four paintings, each separated from its left-right and up-down neighbors by about a foot of space, thereby forming a cross in the negative space. If put together, the paintings looked a lot like Hieronymous Bosch’s vision of hell. The chorus of demons, which became a holy chorus when the singers turned their hymnals 180° so that the cross was right side up, had a number of wooden chairs to sit in. The Soldiers’ Chorus takes place in the street in front of Marguerite’s house, and the Kinkade-esque painting was back, as were the tables and chairs of Act 2. They did not stint on the use of the theater’s organ during the church scene—this scene gets my prize for “the most effective use of an organ in all of opera.” The opening of act 5, in Marguerite’s prison cell, was bare: just the platform and a black back wall. When Marguerite made her plea to the angels to take her soul, a radiant sunburst painting, in two sections, dropped from on high, then split to the left and right so that a metal ramp could be projected between them. The ending was not like anything I had seen before. Mephistopheles garroted Faust with the necklace that he had given him in the first act, then both Marguerite and Faust rose from the dead and ascended the ramp. History gives us a large number of variations on the story of Faust; the director seems to have taken the opportunity to impose his own ending on this one.

Our cast:
Faust: Michael Dailey
Mephistopheles: Silas Elash
Marguerite: Jouvanca Jean-Baptiste
Valentin: Evan Brummel
Marthe: Heather Clemens
Siebel: Betany Coffland
Wagner (no relation): Sepp Hammer
Conductor: Joseph Marcheso
Director: Brad Dalton

Silas Elash was outstanding as Mephistopheles, with a deep, sonorous bass voice. Although in real life he doesn’t look at all like my imagination of Mephistopheles, the makeup department did wonders. Betany Coffland made a fine Siebel. The chorus sang exceptionally well, and the orchestra played magnificently. They raised goosebumps for me on several occasions. A beta.