Last Friday I saw the Julie Taymor production of Mozart's Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute) at the Met. When I first moved to New York a half year ago, this was the first ticket I put down my money for, and all I could secure at the time was a ticket for a show six months away. I've learned by now. The world's cultural riches pour into NYC, but you'd best be dialin' or clickin' as soon as tickets are available for sale, otherwise you might as well give your bank PIN code to a ticket broker.
This one's worth the price of admission. Taymor is now more well-known to the masses for her musical The Lion King or her movies Titus and Frida, but this is her finest work to date.
The signature of a Taymor production is its visual inventiveness, and George Tsypin's sets and Taymor's costumes live up to the anticipation. Rather than attempt a realistic set, Taymor and Tsypin took inspiration from the metaphysical nature of the opera and went with a kaleidoscope of colorful symbols and forms taken from "Masonic, cabalistic, Tantric, and alchemical imagery." The centerpieces of the set are a series of tall cubes and circles built from plexiglas that is more transparent than frosted. These structures rotate, transforming to evoke, in an abstract fashion, gateways and portals to gardens and magic forests. Given that the opera is about the sexual and spiritual journeys of two youths, the nonrepresentational set and costumes feel appropriate.
The costumes and puppets draw from a multitude of cultures and mythologies. The first creature to appear on stage is a serpent that evokes Asian dragons during Chinese New Year, while Sarastro's magic beasts look like mirages of polar bears, fluttering in the wind. Some of the characters, like Tamino and Sarastro, are dressed and face-painted like Japanese opera singers, while Pamina looks like an Eastern European barmaid. Papageno, the bird-catcher, wears a green full-body suit with a beak on his mask.
As for the music, the performances were impressive all around. The Queen of the Night aria, the most well-known portion of The Magic Flute, always impresses, and upon hearing it I always feel this overwhelming urge to try to chirp like that myself. How does someone do that with their vocal chords? Maybe next time I'm in the shower I'll give it a go.
Only two things marred the show. My seats were in the second balcony level, towards the front left. An older woman in the box nearest to my seat kept waiting until the quietest parts of the opera to unwrap something in plastic wrappers. Secondly, I sat next to and in front of about seven really young children. Good for them, to have wealthy New York parents willing to drop $120 on each of them for an opera, but not good for those of us sitting nearby who had to listen to them asking their parents about every occurrence on stage. How do you explain The Magic Flute, with its Masonic rituals, to such young children, especially while the opera is playing out out on stage?
A few tickets remain for the three remaining shows (Apr 16, 20, 23). New Yorkers who appreciate opera should snap them up. I hope Taymor directs more operas at The Met in the future.
Posted by eugene at April 14, 2005 6:32 PM