Marlies’sArtbeat: Met’s “Cosi fan tutte” staged in Coney Island

By Marlies Wolf, Opera Specialist

But should this opera really be re-staged as a spectacular showpiece merely to attract a wider audience? It’s all good and well, if you have seen a “normal” Cosi fan tutte so that you know what Mozart, and the librettist Da Ponte meant to convey with this opera. As a matter of fact, this goes for all re-stagings, the world over. It goes especially for the far-out, outrageous ones, which often reflect the blatantly narcissistic ego-trips of the director. If your first exposure is to one of those, you have no way of comparing. Thus you may miss all the “clever” deviation and therefore are cheated out of it, as well as the enjoyment or impact the composer intended originally.

This new Cosi is great fun and yet manages to convey the cynical, sardonic viewpoint of the opera, which has been considered somewhat immoral ever since it premiered in Vienna’s Burgtheater on January 26th 1790. It is Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s sixteenth opera. The genius, whose short life spanned only from 1756 to 1791, was in financial trouble in 1789 when, luckily, the Emperor Joseph II offered him a commission for a new comic opera. Mozart accepted, of course, choosing Lorenzo da Ponte (1749-1838) the writer who had supplied the libretti for the earlier very successful Don Giovanni and The Marriage of Figaro, as his librettist again.

It is not fully known where da Ponte found the caustic plot for Cosi. (The colorful author, is said to have fled Europe for the United States in 1805 to escape huge gambling debts. He introduced Italian opera to the New World. His grave is in a Manhattan cemetery.)

Intricate indeed, Cosi’s plot spins out the story of two young officers, who under the pretense of a war, leave their fiancés and return – in this reincarnation disguised as “steamy” carny workers -- to try to seduce each other’s betrothed, to test their fidelity. All this is for a bet with a cynical roué who is convinced the girls will fail the tests. He enlists the aid of the clever Despina, the girls’ maid in the original; here a maid in a motel in which the girls are staying. Much hanky panky ensues with the actual “action” taking place off-stage. Eventually everything straightens out -- sort of – with the moral (or in this case “im-morral”) “Happy is the man who can accept the bad with the good.”

Certainly Mozart operas have dealt with infidelity before, but it was always the male figure’s transgression. Cosi deals with the female variety. How timely can you get!

Cosi was originally set in 18th Century Naples. The director Phelim McDermott now places the action in a 1950’s Coney Island Amusement Park, complete with 12 authentic carnival side-show people, most of whom are actual Coney Island performers. Among them we meet a fire-eater, a sword-swallower, a bearded lady, a contortionist and even a strong woman/man who fights off a giant boa constrictor.

Backed by Tom Pye’s set complete with typical amusement park paraphernalia: Ferris Wheel; Carousel; Fun House etc. – it evidently is the director McDermott’s attempt to establish a surreal setting for a “glorious collision of the seedy aesthetic of the carnival performers with the stereotype of opera as a stuffy high-art form.”

If he succeeds, it’s time to rejoice. This reincarnation of Cosi is not just a director’s wild ego trip, as quite a number of re-settings the world of opera has been exposed to in recent years. And the word “exposed” is accurate, since several productions introduced totally unnecessary nudity. McDermott’s idea is a far more honest attempt to keep this marvelous art-form alive. The spiffying up of the subtitles also helped.

With his resetting of the opera, it is surprising McDermott did not make use of the major change -- that of renaming the opera. After all, Cosi’s history makes it possibly the opera with the most frequent name changes. According to Cori Ellison’s clever program notes for the 2014 Met revival of the opera, the original title was The School for Lovers, instead of the more standard, which roughly translates as: All women act like that.

In Germany it has been staged under Mädchen sind Mädchen (Girls will be Girls) and So Sind Sie Alle (They are all like that). In various countries it has appeared as Tit for Tat, Who won the bet, Flight from the Convent, even for some inexplicable reason, as The Chinese Laborer. When it appeared as Love's Labours Lost, they discarded the entire libretto, and used the Shakespearean text with Mozart's score.

The most off-putting Cosi I remember seeing, was that by Peter Sellar. He set it in a modern-day diner, with the sex-specialist Dr. Ruth as Despina. The cast didn’t have a chance in his tasteless rendition.

Luckily, McDermott’s rendition is devoid of offensive exhibitionism despite the introduction of the side-show folk. They are not only used to give this Cosi a different life, but carry on tasks like moving the amusement park vehicles for the lovers’ rides.

The introduction of an array of young, though very experienced singers is, of course, the major reason for the success of this Cosi. The character names – hardly Coney-Island types – remain in the Italian. Thus the roué Don Alfonso, here Britain’s baritone Christopher Maltman, acquitted himself most lustily to get the whole plot going.

The sisters: the soprano from Illinois, Amanda Majeski as Fiordiligi and the Italian mezzo, Serena Malfi as Dorabella, fulfilled their infidelity with lovely well-rounded trills of the tessitura and pretty persuasive acting.

As to our disguising officer friends: Guglielmo, portrayed by Adam Plachetka, who comes from Prague, has a fine bass-baritone voice and persuasive acting ability. Ben Bliss, the American tenor who sings Ferrando, was a graduate of the Lindemann Young Artists Development Program. They obviously did a marvelous job, as evidenced by his rendition here.

As was to be expected, Kelly O’Hara, of Broadway Musical Comedy fame, was the best actor on stage. The soprano from Oklahoma (the state, not the musical) has a fine voice and charming delivery. You may recall her earlier Met appearance in The Merry Widow, which we were offered in Live-at-the-Met-in-HD in the 2013-2014 season. Then we learned that she actually was trained as an opera singer. Here, during an off-stage interview with the HD host, Joyce DiDonato, she told us that she “pinches herself” every night for being so lucky as to perform at the Met. The audience should pinch itself that she does!

All is kept together, under the able baton of David Robertson steering the mighty Met orchestra.

During the intermission of our HD transmission, we were offered an interesting conversation between Peter Gelb, the Met’s General Manager, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin who will soon become its Music Director.

Maestro Nézet-Séguin is assuming the post two years earlier than originally planned and expressed great enthusiasm for the impressive array of talented people with whom he will be working. The endeavor is to maintain the Met’s well-established excellence. And, as he gently suggested, possibly even enhance it.

But for this Cosi the last word had to come from Gelb, who at an earlier time was quoting a stagehand’s quip: “I always knew the Met was a circus – now it really is.”

By all means catch this “circus” when it encores on Wednesday, April 4, 2018.