Skilled Merolini Can’t Overcome Tedium

Last night Herbst Theatre provided the venue for the world premiere of Jake Heggie’s latest opera, If I Were You. Commissioned by the Merola Opera Program and performed by this summer’s Merolini, the plot was based on Julien Green’s French novel of the same title. There was a generous cast of characters, which provided many of these young singers a platform for their talents. Tenor Michael Day delivered a consistently solid account of Fabian, the “I” of the opera’s title, as did soprano Esther Tonea as Diana, the object of Fabian’s affection. The basic plot is Faustian, and mezzo Cara Collins sang the Mephistophelean role of Brittomara.

The spirit of Fabian (Michael Day) makes its first migration into the body of his tyrannical boss Putnam (Rafael Porto) in the first act of If I Were You (photograph by Kristen Loken, courtesy of Merola Opera Program)

The Faustian compact basically involves the ability of Fabian’s spirit to inhabit the bodies of others, such as his tyrannical boss at work (Putnam, sung by bass-baritone Rafael Porto) or the lecherous Paul (baritone Timothy Murray). All this could probably have been unfolded as a tale written on the scale of Edgar Allan Poe. Green’s novel, on the other hand, runs to about 210 pages, of which I read (in French) about 100 before giving in to tedium. Instead of a compact Poe tale, the reader is confronted with a sprawling text that feels more like Les Misérables (well … maybe Madame Bovary). Sadly, Gene Scheer’s libretto for the opera never fared much better than Green did.

In such an awkward setting, Director Keturah Stickann did an admirable job of playing the cards that were dealt to her. She knew how to keep things moving; and her efforts to convey the sense of a body with someone else’s soul in it tended to be effective, rather than awkward. Nevertheless, it was difficult to get past the overall structure of a plot that never went very far from its initial premise, with little support from character development or narrative technique. Things just happened, one after another, with only the barest sense of progress and almost no sense of goal.

Sadly, Heggie’s score did not provide a context to compensate for these shortcomings. Too many of his text settings involved a straightforward “by the book” technique, punctuated by occasional virtuoso melismas that rarely seemed to correspond to any of the dramatic elements. On the other hand the instrumental sonorities were rich enough to hold one’s attention, and they were executed with consistent skill by Conductor Nicole Paiement.

Ultimately, If I Were You came across as a project that probably looked pretty good on paper when it was first proposed; but turning an interesting idea into an absorbing opera experience seems to have been beyond the scope of the creative team behind this production.