“Is one ever tired of laughing?” The Muse of Comedy asks in Jean-Joseph Mouret’s “Les Fêtes de Thalie.” It’s not a question one hears very often in the context of opera.
“Les Fêtes de Thalie” wraps up “The Era of Madame de Maintenon,” the last in Opera Lafayette’s trio of deeply researched seasonal festivals devoted to music surrounding prominent women of 18th-century France. (Earlier performances this season have dug deep into rarely heard music by Couperin, Handel and Moreau.)
For this all-hands-on-deck extravaganza, founder and artistic director Ryan Brown assembles the 23-piece Opera Lafayette Orchestra (under the direction of conductor Christophe Rousset), stage director Catherine Turocy and a revived/revised edition by harpsichordist Korneel Bernolet. Each of the opéra-ballet’s vivacious three main acts has its own choreographers, leaping fearlessly between ballet and hip-hop to bhangra and flamenco (complete with unexpected castanets clacking from the orchestra pit).
Rousset authorized laughs from the get-go, popping up like a gopher from the pit with a grin and a wave. From there, and for the next two hours, he lit up the place with bright colors, sprightly rhythms and fun flourishes of personality.
Mouret’s tale opens onstage at the Paris Opera, where Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy (soprano Angel Azzarra) and Thalie, the Muse of Comedy (soprano Paulina Francisco) beautifully bicker over the merits of their respective forms. The quarrel requires an intervention by Apollo (bass-baritone Jonathan Woody), who cedes the stage to comedy for the evening, much to Melpomene’s foot-stomping chagrin. (Two centuries down the road, Richard Strauss would imagine a similar opera about its own absurd backstage negotiations with “Ariadne auf Naxos.”)
As Thalie — punked out in a rainbow wig and pink leather — Francisco was delightfully insouciant, but brought the same sweet, enveloping voice that I’ve enjoyed so much in the comparably austere context of the Washington Bach Consort. Throughout the night, she reaffirmed her subtly deployed star power, a center of not-too-grave gravity for this melee between muses — especially in her charming aria championing “entertainments without sadness.”
Woody made a sturdy, stentorian Apollo, striding onstage in a gold suit and shades, and Azzarra’s Melpomene channeled her indignity through wide, honeyed warbles — with just enough “too much.”
Thalie seeks the triumph of comedy through a trio of tales: “La Fille (The Girl),” a goofy seaside romance that was rendered equal parts “Querelle” and “On the Town”; “La Veuve Coquette (The Coquettish Widow),” which extols “the sweet liberty of widowhood”; and “La Femme (The Wife),” a fidelity-testing masquerade. In its final act, “La Critique (The Criticism),” the opéra-ballet reviews itself — a trend that, as a critic who likes his job, I hope does not catch on.
The cast was stocked with fine singers. In “La Fille” Francisco returned as Leonore, the love interest of a handsome captain, baritone Jean Bernard Cerin, who here and there strained to be heard against gaps of intonation with the orchestra, but delivered one of the evening’s most arresting performances.
The warm and expressive tenor Patrick Kilbride perfectly embodied Leonore’s mother Belise, a desperate housewife of a certain age teeming with unsubtle intentions concerning the captain. (He also earns extra credit for effortlessly gliding around the stage in kitten heels.) And Woody made a strong second appearance as the freshly betrayed hero-come-home, Cleon.
Soprano Pascale Beaudin made an arresting widow in Act 2, alongside Azzara, who returned as Isabel’s BFF Doris. Beaudin’s instrument glows with a radiant, room-filling warmth — I’ll be keeping an ear out. Tenor Scott Brunscheen made an endearing and softly seductive Leandre, rival to bass-baritone John Taylor Ward’s Chrisogon, sung with steely machismo and precision.
Beaudin appeared again in “La Femme” as Caliste, the scheming spouse of Cerin’s philandering Dorante. But soprano Ariana Wehr was the standout of the act — bright, clear and evocative as Dorine, wife of Brunscheen’s big-mouthed Zerbin.
This being a work of pure fantasy, the arguments over artistic merit are settled once and for all by Momus — i.e. the critic — in the show’s self-aware final act.
Slipping out of one drag and into another, Kilbride reappeared as an unexpectedly sweet-voiced music critic, donning thick black glasses, a little mustache, a suit and bow tie and — hey, wait a minute! (Are we good, Opera Lafayette?!) What remained of the fourth wall was merrily demolished by the muses, as Mouret’s magically meta-celebration regales itself with rave reviews.
Korneel Bernolet’s ever-present harpsichord, often in conversation with smart playing by cellist Serafim Smigelskiy, viola de gamba player Joshua Keller and concertmaster Jacob Ashworth, added a bright, satisfying fizz to the ensemble’s sound, which at times strained to properly burst from the pit. No fault of Rousset’s, who made lively work of Mouret’s effervescent score, which sparkles with alluring details. Nina Stern and Margaret Owens were superb on their paired recorders throughout the evening, lilting and sweet reinforcement to the night’s genial tone; Anna Marsh also had several lovely moments on bassoon.
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This colorful gem wasn’t without its flaws. Some of the orchestra’s tuning issues strayed past the roughly marked bounds of charming. Translated surtitles that occasionally lagged behind the action (or sometimes vanished) forced a routine of back-and-forth glancing that one normally expects in a tennis match.
But giggles turn quibbles to trifles, and “Les Fêtes de Thalie” is precisely what it declares itself to be: “A triumph of games and pleasures”
Les Fêtes de Thalie repeats at the Kennedy Center Terrace Theater May 4, and at El Museo del Barrio in New York City on May 7. operalafayette.org
