Mr Fix-it plays fast and funny

Phillip Rhodes and Graeme Broadbent in The Magic Flute. Picture / Neil MacKenzie

Stanley M. Garner, the smoothly spoken American behind NBR New Zealand Opera's The Magic Flute, is an opera fanatic.

In his student days, Rossini's L'Italiana in Algeri, with Marilyn Horne, was the first of many delights. It was "so amazing, so musical and so magical", he says.

Two decades on, pursuing a career as an actor, "wearing a lot of tights and speaking in very complex metaphors that people just don't use in conversation", he was asked to direct The Marriage of Figaro for Connecticut Opera.

"I thought if I don't screw this up, it could lead to another one and another one and I'd never have to audition again."

Now Garner is bringing Mozart's final masterpiece to Auckland, in a production developed from a Peter Hall and Gerald Scarfe collaboration first seen in Los Angeles 14 years ago.

He took on the project when he was asked by Seattle Opera's artistic director to "fix it".

Garner recreates his response. "You mean make it more what it looks like, like Gerald Scarfe, shorter, faster, funnier, more entertaining? He said 'Yes', and I said, 'I'm your man'."

For Garner, the original production was "as if two brilliant men, Peter Hall and Gerald Scarfe, had put together a show but hadn't talked to each other". Yet, when he came to work closely with Scarfe, he found the cartoonist "funny and dry, with brilliant ideas and able to answer any questions about any particular design element".

Scarfe's vision of The Magic Flute is populated by beasties like the giraffstrich and crocoguin, but Garner stresses that it "really works" like one of the great Disney classics.

"The villains are so scary and the little creatures are so sweet and furry that the dichotomy between the low comedy and the deep, dark masonic secrets makes perfect sense."

The scissors have also played their part in the success of this production, which comes to us after a sell-out season in the capital.

"This is the first time I've done the dialogue in English.

"With the original German dialogue, uncut, it sounded like it was 220 years old. I left in the funniest jokes and had Schikaneder's libretto and Mozart's music as the important storytellers."

The one directorial treatment he retained from the Hall production was for Sarastro's "Ihr, Diener der grossen Gotter".

"It's the one with the big golden palm fronds. I kept that because it was very simple, made one visual statement and ... it hid a scene change."

Garner has been working with The Magic Flute for seven years, in the company of class singers like Rodney Gilfry and Sumi Jo, but bringing Mozart Downunder has been "incredibly enjoyable". "I've never spent so much time laughing," he admits.

"Maybe I'm getting more succinct about what the show is about, but it just gelled this time."

And Aucklanders, don't be surprised if Mozart's Three Ladies seem to have wandered down the hill from K Rd. "I told them that the costumes are enormous, all purple and black and glittery," Garner explains.

"You're going to have to do the staging as if you're a drag queen, otherwise you'll disappear."

In the city that can be proud of giving birth to such diva duos as Buckwheat and Bertha and Buffy and Bimbo, I suggest that a visit to K Rd might have provided some useful background. "Oh really, oh my gosh," is Garner's astonished reply. "I'll have to get up there."

ON STAGE

* What: The Magic Flute

* Where and when: Aotea Centre, tomorrow at 7.30pm, Saturday 7.30pm, Tuesday 1pm, Thursday 7.30pm and Saturday 7.30pm