And what about the music? Oh, right—that. I must say I’m envious of the folks I’ve read and  heard tell about the singing, conducting, and playing. Their powers of concentration are well beyond mine, because although I’m the ear-led, eye-confirmed Opera Man in person, I couldn’t keep track of it. Between watching the evanescent projections, the Papageno piss-in-the-bottle show, the Visual Artist over on audience left—very eye-catching, eagerly scrawling his onscreen scene-setting notations and comments, projected for us in real time, only to erase them in a trice (when I spoke of “wiping away,” I meant it literally)—the Foley Artist over on the right, with her Dr. Miracle-like collection of aural unctions and stimulants, and the musicians of our raised orchestra alternately playing and behaving themselves right down front, it was all I could do to keep up with the visual stimuli, my ear on background more of the time than not. Just enough seeped through to allow a brief rundown of the singing:

There was one principal performance that could have served well in an actual Die Zauberflöte—the Queen of the Night of Kathryn Lewek. Her voice had the range, strength,  quality, and flexibility required, and she used the production’s mandated character concept to build a performance of great emotional commitment. Harold Robbins, as The Speaker, also had the basic goods for that short but important part. There was not the sense of spiritual authority or quite the the warmth and plangency of tone for “Sobald dich führt der Freundschaft Hand” that we would have heard from a Schöffler, a London, or a Hotter, but those would in any case have been against the reductionist sketch being shown. The Sarastro, Steven Milling, did well with his dialogue and had a serviceable bass-baritone sound for the upper octave of the role, which is to say that a key element was missing, not only from the depth and solemnity of his arias, but from the wonderful bottom line of the Act 2 trio. The role is for Tiefer Bass. Thomas Oliemans, the Papageno, was evidently a carryover from the production’s origin at the Dutch National Opera, which as a practical matter is understandable, given the shenanigans. He dashed about with great good cheer, though not much personal charm or sense that his character’s own quest mattered much beyond the jokey level, and sang in a light character baritone of no pronounced qualities, positive or negative. The Monostatos of Brenton Ryan showed a clear light tenor, too high-set to make much of an effect in this low-lying music.

Our heroic protagonists, Lawrence Brownlee and Erin Morley, wandered like waifs in the woods through the yawning spaces and tilting planes of the stage picture, singing with pleasant, light (the word recurs because its referent recurs), generic voices of their respective voice types and deferentially accepting the straight-person assignments allotted them. They suffered the most from the blurring of episodes inherent in the production’s ongoingness, and from the aural evening-out of the sound design, which miked the dialogue while (we are assured) leaving the singing unamplified. This was one of several decisions, along with the whole “sound design” concept to begin with (much ballyhooed, but not so difference-making on the night) and the raising of the orchestra, that I should have thought would have been the conductor’s final decision, but were apparently aspects of the auteur’s grand plan—take it or leave it, Mme. conductor. She took it, arguing that “it only makes sense to help the singers fill the space when speaking,” and that “the spoken parts match the volume of the sung parts . . . otherwise it feels like two different works.”