The second opera I saw at the West Edge Opera summer festival was Monteverdi's The Coronation of Poppea, conducted by Adam Pearl & directed by NJ Agwuna. with Shawnette Sulker as the bewitching, scheming Poppea, Sarah Coit as the weak & willful Nero, Sara Couden as Nero's soon-to-be-abandoned wife Octavia, Philip Skinner as the sober philosopher Seneca, Michael Skarke as Poppea's former lover Ottone, Samuel Faustine in the comic drag role of Poppea's attendant Arnalta, & Rayna Mia Campbell as Ottone's would-be lover Drusilla. All were top-notch & musically the afternoon was a delight.
With its complicated but emotionally logical plot, its richness & range of characterization, its easy alternation between comedy & tragedy, high & low, its dramatic irony & moral ambiguities, this opera is more Shakespearean than many of those directly based on his work; &, as with Shakespeare, whatever you think of as the ur-text is likely to arrive in somewhat altered form in performance. In this performance the prologue with Fortune, Virtue, & Love debating was cut, as it often is, & various other alterations are made (the only one that for me disrupted the flow – meaning it brought me out of the performance & into considerations of the text – was the absence of Seneca's acolytes during his suicide, as their cries of Non morir, Seneca have always seemed to me a key part of that scene – nonetheless, their absence did not detract much from Skinner's sober, wise, & ineffectual philosopher). The story flowed smoothly & clearly, & in this production, more than in others I've seen (live or on video) you were aware of Poppea as the puppetmaster (or, I guess, puppetmistress) manipulating the action – Sulker was, not surprisingly to those who have heard her before, fabulously seductive in the role. Octavia, portrayed with appropriately delusional dignity by Couden, didn't stand a chance with the sensuous Nero, though we in the audience were free to enjoy her more than he did (but then, few of us are decadent emperors, at least outside of our own minds).
The setting was semi-contemporary, semi-classical, which works fine. The salacious aspects of the plot were emphasized by projections at the back, with typically lurid tabloid headlines describing the goings-on of the rich & famous; all very suitable, even if the tabloid presentation is harmlessly anachronistic. I will say that many of these projections were partly blocked for me by the set, but I got the gist. I did have a problem with one part of the staging: when Ottone, spurred & blackmailed by Octavia into attempting the murder of Poppea as she sleeps unattended, disguises himself in the clothes of Drusilla & then flees when he is foiled, Poppea & the interrupting Arnalta think the attempted assassin is, in fact, Drusilla. In this production, Drusilla wore a distinctive ensemble of dull red over a green skirt, but that's not what Ottone borrows – he's in some sort of brownish cloak that we've never seen before, & doesn't much look like a woman's garment anyway, so it's unclear why everyone thinks, "Oh, Drusilla!" With this gender-fluid outfit, you also miss the sense that he is unmanning himself in obedience to the Empress Octavia's murderous orders. & then the tabloid projections start, & we see paparazzi-style photos of the fleeing killer – only we can clearly see his face, which is easily identifiable as Ottone's, & which has masculine facial hair – so, again, why is everyone convinced that Drusilla was the would-be assassin? I don't know what they were thinking there. Other than that, this was a solid, even captivating, afternoon, & the gorgeous final duet between Poppea & Nero, sung in stillness & partial darkness, sent us out floating; historically & psychologically, we know better than to be convinced by this love duet, but isn't the whole point of the opera the overwhelming appeal, despite our moral qualms & realistic assessments of a given situation, of such gloriously gorgeous sounds?
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