Director’s muddled “Poppea” staging does no favors for Northwestern singers
Perhaps all is not fair in love and war, after all.
That’s the enduring message of Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea, which concluded a four-show run at Cahn Auditorium in Evanston on Sunday afternoon. While this production, presented by the Northwestern University Opera Theater, preserved the opera’s core themes of deceit and the corrupting nature of power, its overt attempts to take a transhistorical view of those ideas yielded puzzling results.
Northwestern’s director of opera and artist-in-residence Joachim Schamberger helmed a team of credentialed talent both on and off stage in this Poppea. In addition to his directing duties, Schamberger served as scenic designer, creating the projections that greatly augmented the ambiance of the economically deployed set pieces.
The already double-casted production featured an extensive chorus and dispensed with the dual roles sometimes employed by leaner stagings. Northwestern’s 22-member Baroque Music Ensemble, rounded out by top-call period performers from the region and conducted from the harpsichord by the indefatigable Stephen Alltop, furnished colorful accompaniment to support the bevy of onstage voices.
Poppea’s stock setting of first-century Rome grounded the introduction in familiar territory, opening on the chorus of students in street clothes, as if on a school trip, as they wander amid Classical ruins. The gods of Fortune, Virtue, and Love are rendered as statues that occasionally interact with the modern-day choristers as they view the ensuing action from the edges of the stage, bridging Poppea’s diegetic mythical elements with a meta perspective on antiquity.
This production condenses three acts into two, with the first act particularly benefiting from cuts to the expository material and establishing the bona fides of its leads.
Mezzo-soprano Emily Amesquita as the Roman emperor Nerone brought flexibility and presence alike, singing beautifully opposite soprano Kylie Buckham as Poppea. As Seneca, William Scarrow’s clear, evenly controlled baritone aptly embodied the stoic philosopher’s moral fortitude.
Curiously, the personification of Poppea and Nerone, especially during the pair’s intimate scenes, is that of youthful impetuousness rather than ruthless cunning. Buckram’s line delivery in “Speranza, tu mi vai il cor accarezzando” evokes Poppea as a lovestruck schoolgirl on the wings of fate, rather than a flinty, ambitious noblewoman on a quest for power.
A slackening of narrative and conceptual focus further obfuscates this staging’s directorial choices. As the curtain rises on Seneca’s burial scene, the main cast is revealed, inexplicably, to be outfitted in Crusades-era Medieval garb against a projected backdrop of the stained-glass interior of a cathedral.
In a both heavy-handed and clumsily enacted conceptual device, it appears a different conquesting regime is evoked each time an act of violence is committed against a central character. Several scenes later and similarly without pretext, the soldiers in French Royal Army uniform storm onstage to arrest Poppea’s jilted lover Ottone and his new mate, Drusilla, after they conspire to make an attempt on Poppea’s life. Gradually, the other players don powdered wigs and Napoleonic vestments to follow suit as stained glass gives way to a Baroque palace.
The directorially muddled and ponderously paced second act was lifted by memorable musical contributions from soprano Isabella De La Torre, who sang with uncommon power and rich expression throughout as Drusilla. Claire Coven’s sumptuous contralto shone in the aria “Hoggi sarà Poppea di Roma imperatrice” from Poppea’s conspiratorial handmaiden Arnalta.
Compelling acting performances similarly prevailed, especially Rebecca Marchan’s witty reading of the wry nurse Nutrice, while countertenor Weverton Santos, as Ottavia’s pageboy Valetto, radiated charisma through his vocalism and physical comedy.
But the success of those humorous moments only exacerbated the tonal whiplash brought on by the perplexing final coronation scene. As Nero and Poppea profess their love for each other in the climactic duet “Pur ti miro,” they shed their Rococo vestments to reveal a navy blue business suit and red formal dress, respectively.
Downstage, a slow-motion bloodbath ensues, pulling focus from one of the work’s crowning musical moments. As projections of a skyscraper erupting with flames roll across the backdrop, the French soldiers first execute Ottone, Drusilla, and Ottavia; they are overtaken by a different pair of soldiers sporting modern fatigues and machine guns, who gun down the remaining supporting cast, including the plainclothes chorus. Only one escapes, fleeing into the audience with a tome of Seneca’s writings under one arm.
The messaging of this violent final moment is murky. To be sure, Poppea’s themes of moral atrophy in love and politics alike are portable across the ages. A quote attributed to psychoanalyst Carl Jung in the program booklet notes that an appetite for power displaces love in the human heart, and vice versa.
But if this is the premise, what is the takeaway from such dramaturgical choices? That individual corruption is the root of imperialism? That political executions and state-enacted mass civilian killings are tantamount? These are troubling enough thoughts on their own, but deploying such a gruesome act in the context of this staging is narratively unsubstantiated at best and tasteless at worst.
While there’s merit in plumbing the depths of a work so enduring as Poppea, other recent productions at Northwestern have demonstrated that such endeavors need not eclipse the merits of competent production design and commendable performances by its talented students. Perhaps next time, with source material as musically and thematically complex as this, they’d be better served sticking to the script.
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