GAY PEOPLE'S Chronicle CHRONICLE

SECTION B

JULY 8, 1994

Evenings Out

The atypical is typical for Lyric Opera Cleveland

by Charlton Harper

Michael McConnell would like you to forget those ubiquitous Three TenorsDomingo, Pavarotti, and Carreras—and their splashy year-long assault on the Billboard charts. McConnell, artistic director of Lyric Opera Cleveland, wants you to know that there's more to the opera experience than "theme park theater," where extravagant production values and glossy names carry the show.

"I love all three of those guys and all the great opera stars," he says. "They have so much to offer and are wonderful talents. But it's not that kind of opera-mania-spectacle that we do here."

For McConnell, the off-beat is a regular ingredient in a well-planned season at Lyric Opera. The company specializes in works that lend themselves to small, intimate settings, while also treating audiences to operas not usually found in larger theaters. "I hate to use the word typical, but this season is pretty typical of the kind of mix one gets at Lyric Opera Cleveland. And at the same time it's pretty a-typical of the kind of season you'll get at most opera companies.'

Lyric Opera's "typical" 1994 season is the usual balanced mix that audiences have come to expect from the summer festival company. There's the not-as-overdone-asAnnie musical (Frank Loesser's The Most Happy Fella, opening July 6); a contemporary, but not scary, work (Dominick Argento's Postcard From Morocco, opening July 13); and a familiar war-horse, refiltered through McConnell's revisionist hands (Bizet's Carmen, opening July 20).

David Small as Tony and Sharon Wheatley as Rosabella in Loesser's The Most Happy Fella.

This year the company will try something a little atypical, even by Lyric Opera standards. Rather than the run of one show followed by the run of another, once all three shows have opened they will rotate in alternating nights. Also new at Lyric Opera

There's more to the opera experience than 'theme park theater,' where extravagant production values and glossy names carry the show.

this season is a lecture series that illuminates key issues raised by each work. Mirroring real-life with an uncanny sense of timing, the July 23 lecture by Dr. Michael B. Leach, entitled "Fatal Attractions," will

examine obsessive love, a major theme that resonates throughout Carmen as well as prime-time TV.

The decision to set a large-scale popular favorite like Carmen on an intimate company specializing in the unusual may raise a few skeptical eyebrows as well as whet those appetites hungry for the classics. But McConnell promises this won't be the sort of Carmen found at the Met. His approach is to scrape away the baggage that classics tend to collect in order to get to the essential core. "We've called this an intimately-scaled Carmen. It's really a production that focuses on the relationships of the people in the piece. It's about what it is that motivates and drives people to be so attracted to [title character] Carmen. And it has to do with this odd double triangle that she's involved in. Of course the big risk is that when you say you're going to do Carmen, audiences come thinking they're going to see a big

opera house version, the sort of Carmen they've seen on TV or in New York."

Given a choice, the average person is probably more likely to choose a movie over a night at the opera. Where then is the attraction for today's audience? "I think you have to find a way to connect it to their hearts and minds, or it does become 'why bother?' If you don't, then it just means that they're going to the opera to fulfill the little cultural checklist of things they feel they ought to do, without really giving them a reason to go."

The crime of passion that lies at the heart of Carmen, McConnell acknowledges, is an obvious attraction for an audience fed a daily diet of blood and gore on the six o'clock news. "Don Jose is a stalker, after all," he says. "And especially with this production and the way we take it out of the traditional setting, as it progresses it becomes increasingly contemporary. I really think it sends the point home that we have stalkers, we have brutal murders. And furthermore, that we haven't really progressed so much since the opera was written."

But titillating audiences with a tawdry excess that reflects daily life is not what draws the crowds. McConnell says it's the immediacy of live theater that packs a house. "Why should people come to the opera or the theater and not watch television or film or rent a video? It's because you have one less wall between you and a real emotional experience. It's real people up there and it happens a little differently every single time."

For ticket information, call the Lyric Opera box office at 231-2910.

Fontaine Follansbee as A Lady with a Cake Box in Argento's Postcard from Morrocco.