“Only thing to be said in ‘the production’s’ favor: staged with principals well front. Closed sets (3 walls and ceiling piece) project the onstage sound well. (“See, I’m placing the singing first.”) Grey walls [Northern?], big empty space, red club chair down right on apron. [Gustavus’ chair, outside the playing space—he watches himself acting out his dream/fantasy, as Alden does in his productions.] Oscar with wings, Icarus motif. [Takes flights around the stage. Avatar for Gustavus, I gather.] Many desks & clerks enter with Judge. At finale of first scene [off to Ulrica’s] gay chorus boys dance [prancing waiters with trays of bubbly], Oscar with top hat & cane, phony cigarette with longest ash ever [may have been cut this time around, not sure], all movie musical references for their camp values, with the usual deniability, hypocritical and disingenuous. If at any moment the music threatens to take over, some distracting/absurd thing is created—an instant relationship, a bizarre action—to grab attention back. Everything a sign, an indication, a reification of what the actual action wd. be, torn from any context related to the actual content of the work. Characters repeatedly put into situations that are unplayable as parts of a logical development, & given goofy stuff that only the deftest cd. possibly pull off. . .”

With respect to the unities, following the discussion in Part 1: the scenes play through as they usually do, but in the set and lighting there is little to help us mark the progression of time. Perhaps this is meant as Gustavus’ dream time, but that’s really impossible to derive from the opera’s linear succession of closed structures. With no era specified, the costuming (our main indicator of that) has a vague and inconsistent Zwischenkrieg feel. Stockholm is claimed as the locale, but what we see is abstracted slices of 20th-Century urban anonymous, so practically speaking the action shown is both timeless and placeless. As so often, we are meant to ignore the running contradiction between what’s being sung (its inescapable period references and formulations) and what’s being shown. I could not detect any through line that would represent a “single action,” though Icarus seems intended to emblematically represent a theme—not the same thing.

The goofy stuff reached a forced climax at the drama’s most suspenseful moment, in Act 3, Sc. 1. You will recall: Anckarström forces his wife to draw the assassin’s name from the urn. All await its revelation, each of the conspirators with his powerful personal reason, Amelia in mortal fear of the outcome. Anckarström’s name is announced by Horn, the Count formerly known as Sam.^(I) Anckarström exults, and we are swept into the superb reprise of the “Dunque l’onta” trio, now to words triumphantly forecasting the King’s imminent demise and with the voices of the two sopranos sailing above the mens’—a hair-raising scene finale. No doubt about it, Horn/Sam is not happy over the results of this little lottery. Nor is Ribbing/Tom. Yet in most productions and in the text, they man up and join forces with the winner. In compliance with what Alden wishes to personally express, with this piece and of this moment in his own inner emotional life, however, his Count Horn, still singing of his common cause with his fellow Counts, throws a prepubescent tantrum, tearing up the winning ticket and the others too (there seem to have been many more than three) and flinging them petulantly about for most of the scene’s remaining duration—a prime example of the  “distracting/absurd things” that undercut the music. Then, as the great scene comes to its end, the schematic portrait of Gustavus that’s hung on the wall of Renato’s study is removed and lain on the floor so that we can see it, and crossed out, while Anckarström dons a party-favor death mask. All face front. Any remaining chance of our taking the characters and their fates, at least as seen, at all seriously has been quashed. Any chance left for them as heard?