'Amistad' a disappointment

Anthony Davis' "Amistad," which opened the 2008 Spoleto Festival USA and the handsome, newly reconstructed Memminger Auditorium on Thursday night, is such an earnest, ambitious and altogether well-meaning opera that I only wish the production were more successful than it is.

Davis, in tandem with his cousin, author Thulani Davis, who provided the libretto, has chosen an eternally compelling subject, the tale of a 19th-century Spanish schooner, the Amistad, taken over in mid-voyage by African captives on their way to certain enslavement.

The ship eventually drifted to Long Island, where the Africans were taken into custody and charged with mutiny and murder. They were brought to trial in Connecticut, which in 1840 was a state where slavery was all-but-universally despised but technically not illegal.

After a series of lower court decisions (necessarily simplified here for dramatic purposes) the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Africans had been "unlawfully kidnapped, and forcibly and wrongfully carried on board," and released them to return home to their native land.

It is a great story, one that depicts the horrors of slavery and acknowledges the brave work of abolitionists a full two decades before the Civil War broke out. And it seems especially relevant right now, with an African-American man poised to win the Democratic nomination and, perhaps, the presidency. How very far America has come, even in my lifetime!

I was present for the world premiere of "Amistad" in 1997, when the Lyric Opera of Chicago gave the work a grand send-off, complete with literal depictions of ship life and, if memory serves, a detailed reconstruction of a 19th century New England courtroom.

It was as though the Lyric Opera were trying to compete with the Steven Spielberg film of this story, also named "Amistad," which was released the same year.

This new production, directed by Sam Helfrich, couldn't be more different. There is virtually no scenery at all, unless you count some overstuffed chairs and an overhanging balcony as such.

Moreover, the score has been trimmed and a much smaller orchestra engaged to play it. Finally, the opera was presented "in the round," meaning that the audience mostly surrounded the small, bare, egg-shaped platform that serves as the central stage.

There are doubtless arguments to be made for theater in the round, but I'm not going to make any of them here, for it seemed to me that the decision to stage "Amistad" in such a manner doomed what was already going to be a problematic evening.

No matter where one sat, it was impossible to see and hear everything that was happening on the stage because the players were constantly projecting in different directions. An aria sung out to one side of the house was difficult to make out through the exclamations of the chorus on the other side.

At times the experience reminded me of listening to a stereo recording with one or another of the speakers dropping out and dropping in throughout the presentation. This same spurious "fairness" ensured that everybody in the audience watched the backs of the characters much of the time.

If "Amistad" had been a familiar piece, written for a much smaller group of characters and performed by artists who were used to such fluid stage direction, sending out their best to 360 degrees of the house, this might conceivably have worked. As it happened, the results were confusing and sometimes chaotic, and any sense of dramatic impetus was severely hampered.

As for Anthony Davis' music, it strikes me as keenly intelligent, stylistically varied and curiously drab. Part of this comes from the fact that most of the score is sung by men (the same problem afflicts Benjamin Britten's "Billy Budd"), which ensures a certain sameness of timbre. To this taste, the most affecting music in the opera was allotted to the women characters, but there was too little of it.

But there is a deeper problem: Davis' very versatility defeats him. His pairing of modern jazz and modernist classical music strikes me as a learned and self-conscious statement of intent rather than a unified, spontaneous musical language.

At times I felt as though the music might have been concocted by the unlikely team of Duke Ellington and Elliott Carter with, alas, Carter allotted the jazz passages and Ellington limited to conservatory classical. I don't think the two genres need each other anyway, any more than I want to hear the Berlin Philharmonic play the Velvet Underground or a hard rock band take on Beethoven.

The artists are due much praise, although I think they would have done an even better job had they been able to project their energies in a single direction. Michael Forest proved a splendid Trickster, singing crushingly difficult music with a high, clarion tenor voice.

Gregg Baker brought a noble, somber dignity to the role of Cinque. Janinah Burnett sang Margru's music with a sweet, airy sadness. Mary Elizabeth Williams seemed nothing less than a force of nature as the Goddess of the Waters.

Stephen Morscheck imbued the role of John Quincy Adams with a mixture of presidential reserve and a passion for social justice, with Brian Frutiger's urgent Abolitionist Tappen his guiding conscience. The fine cast also included Fikile Mvinjelwa as Antonio, Raul Melo as the Navigator and Jeffrey Wells, Robert Mack, Kevin Maynor, Herbert Perry, Kendall Gladen, Norman Shankle, Dennis Petersen and Jan Opalach, among others, all of whom deserve more space than I can give them here.

Emmanuel Villaume led the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra and the Westminster Choir with the diligence and musicianship we have come to expect from him. We are lucky to have him in Charleston.

I'll have a fuller report, but let me just advise you to run to get tickets for Rossini's "La Cenerentola," a bejeweled, melodious and altogether crazy masterpiece from the most underrated of truly great composers. You'll thank me for it.