Review: In Rossini’s ‘Cinderella’ by Lyric Opera, a lively story without a princess in sight
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“Cinderella” is a barnstormer of a title — enough to make a dent in the age of the average operagoer — but there is no fairy godmother, glass slipper, pumpkin, nor midnight rush for home in Rossini’s emotionally potent “La Cenerentola.” Cinderella doesn’t talk to the animals as in the Rodgers and Hammerstein version, but she does sing some of Rossini’s most beautiful music, including “Non piu mesta,” an intoxicatingly gorgeous aria that explores the oft-forgotten relationship between happiness and forgiveness.
No wonder the opera, penned when its composer was just 25 years old, has been a Lyric favorite since 1959. This current staging, originally directed and designed by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, uses a sepia-toned set that looks like an overgrown version of a Victorian Pollock’s toy theater, drawn with clever perspective and other such handmade visual trickery. The production has its roots in a 1969 commission for the San Francisco Opera. Ponnelle, an aesthetician and craftsman of the highest order and a rare director who designed his own sets, died in 1988 at just 56 years old. Watching his work now, more than 50 years on, the rich color of the humans still pops out with striking panache.
Cinderella, or Cenerentola, is a role for mezzo-soprano, of course, and when the fine, Russian-born singer Vasilisa Berzhanskaya first opened her mouth at Sunday’s opening performance, you could see some of the younger audience members lean in curiously, struck by unexpected gravitas where they were expecting princess-ification. Aside from delighting the Lyric audience with her singing, Berzhanskaya is also a live actor, fully capable of presenting the very kind of moral superiority that drives her stepsisters nuts, but also vulnerable and warm as the role demands.
The Rossini opera, which features a libretto by Jacopo Ferretti, is far more focused on family than other versions of a European folk tale that was already more than 100 years old when this opera premiered in Rome in 1817. Notwithstanding her romance with her tenor prince, Ramiro (Jack Swanson), Angelina (called Cenerentola) doesn’t so much waltz off to opulent Disney transformation as worry about the impact of her departure, even on people who have treated her with disdain. Of course, Ramiro already has proved his righteous bona fides in that he wants to marry for love not money. He gets to sing “Sì, ritrovarla io giuro,” as rendered here with aspirational force throughout by Swanson, who nails the role’s central challenge of being both a quiet watcher and a man capable of the highest level of passionate love. He cements in the audience’s mind that Cenerentola will be just fine with this dude.
Set against maid, prince and supportive tutor are the supercilious and self-serving Don Magnifico (Alessandro Corbelli), the Pantalone of the proceedings, and the baritone Dandini (the droll and suave Joshua Hopkins) the swashbuckling servant who looks throughout like a viable option for the spurned stepsisters, amusingly played and ticklingly sung by Teresa Castillo and Sophia Maekawa. In the Rossini version, an all-male ensemble of courtiers, all parading into Cenerentola’s kitchen with their mutton chops, provide the choral component.
On a cold January afternoon, “Cinderella” certainly was a welcome experience. I was struck by the palpable connection between the conductor, Yi-Chen Lin, and the lead of Berzhanskaya: The two locked eyes continually as Lin threw her body into her work. They seemed not just to pull the best out of each other but to broaden the opera’s insistence that Cenerentola is not so blinded by her own magical love affair as to forget the real world in which she long has lived, and survived.
Just like the rest of us.
Chris Jones is a Tribune critic.
Review: “Cinderella” (3.5 stars)
When: Through Feb. 10
Where: Lyric Opera House, 20 N. Wacker Drive
Running time: 3 hours, 10 minutes
Tickets: $49-$319 at 312-827-5600 and lyricopera.org
