'Elixir' gets a shake-up

By WILLIAM DART

The poster for NBR New Zealand Opera's production of The Elixir of Love is pure time warp, its lurid purple-and-yellow barscape recalling Guy Peellaert's spooky fantasy paintings in the 1973 book Rock Dreams.

You won't find Italian villagers or Dulcamara with horse and cart in this opera; we are at Napa Valley High School in the mid-80s and the good Doctor Dulcamara roars in on a motorbike. Not since Ken Russell's production of Madam Butterfly have New Zealand audiences experienced anything quite so radical, but British director Daniel Slater has made a name for himself with some pretty invigorating concepts.

The whole California ambience is familiar; Slater's father taught at a Californian university, his ex-wife is Californian and he likes the ironies implicit in a society that's "both crazily materialistic and crazily innocent. I couldn't think of a society more likely than California to buy medicine from a Dulcamara. We all know we're going to die, but many Californians think that if we take enough pills and exercise enough, who knows ... "

It sounds like we might be in for a night of unrelenting satire, but Slater says the piece is not dark.

"There's a beautifully melancholic strain running through the character of Nemorino and a wonderful emotional turn for Adina, but essentially it's a comic piece."

Updating is a useful tool "if you want the comedy to be funny".

Take that itinerant scoundrel Dulcamara "who can end up being one of those people you never meet anywhere but in an opera house".

"He's the archetypal stranger who comes to town. A friend once said to me that you can reduce all plots to one plot - a stranger comes to town. In the case of Elixir you have two, Belcore and Dulcamara. Our hero sees them both as the one thing, we see them as something else. The comedy lies in the distance between these two points of view."

Working with New Zealander Paul Whelan has been a delight, he says. "Paul knows that Dulcamara is a total charlatan and is prepared to go to any lengths to show this, even on the basketball court. By the end, in a strange psychotic way, he ends up convinced of his own glories."

The strutting Belcore who, this time round, is a fighter pilot, has been likened to Tom Cruise. Should we read Adina as Grease's Sandy? Slater draws my attention to Michael Lehmann's 1989 film Heathers.

"Heathers is set in this school where there's a group of girls who are all called Heather. Winona Ryder is part of the group and yet is still on its edge and doesn't really want to get sucked into their stupidity. This idea was helpful in making me realise why Adina behaves the way she does to Nemo-rino. The danger of Elixir is that Adina simply becomes a bitch and the audience doesn't care whether she gets him or not."

It is films like Heathers which have inspired Slater's treatment of the chorus. It's a youngish group - "the bulk have to be in their 20s and 30s to make the concept work", Slater points out. "I went through the singers and divided them into cool girls' clique, a geeky boys' clique and jock boys' clique, studious girls clique' and so on. If you don't individualise them you're not going to get a chorus who are interested in performing."

The other half of the production team is English conductor Graeme Jenkins, who has been music director at Dallas Opera for some years, and who is an avowed Donizetti fan. "People write off Donizetti and I was the same until somebody handed me a CD of Callas singing Lucia live in 1957 with Karajan. He makes it sound as great as any piece of Verdi."

The whole updating doesn't worry Jenkins in the least - after all, he once conducted an Acis and Galatea which was criticised for its Lana Turner-style nymphs and Polyphemus appearing as a moonstruck grease monkey.

"I conducted the first performance of Baz Luhrmann's Boheme in Sydney 14 years ago," he exclaims. "Much the same noises were happening in the critical community, but at the end of that run you couldn't get a seat for love or money."

This production presents Jenkins with one first. "I've never conducted a basketball game before but then you just have to trust your colleagues and your chorus. Who wants a chorus standing still looking straight out, anyway? That's boring."

Jenkins agrees with Slater that the crucial thing is to find out what makes Elixir real for a 21st-century audience. "You've got to ask yourself what society is gullible enough to take all this from a quack doctor and the answer is obvious. "

For all the lampooning, however, the issues of Donizetti's opera are real.

"There is always that crucial line when Adina realises that the material wealth and glitz offered by Belcore is not what she wants," Jenkins affirms. "She wants sincerity, truth and honesty and that still shines through, even in this new setting."

Performance

* What: The Elixir of Love, by Donizetti

* Where and when: Aotea Centre, tomorrow night at 7.30, March 27, 29, 31