Tosca in L.A. or Hello Dolly in Rome

I attended Tosca at the Los Angeles Opera on Sunday, June 8. Adrianne Pieczonka did a lovely job with Tosca, and Juan Pons played supremely evil Scarpia well. In this opera, I find Cavaradossi to be a bit uninteresting, and while Neil Shicoff did a nice job, I thought Scarpia and Tosca were the emotional center of the piece.

Unfortunately, the staging of the work did not live up to the fine singing. The set and costumes were distinctly American, sort of Hello Dolly meets Early Whorehouse in Rome. The costumes were early 20th century or late 19th, and the visual theme was carried by the red floor, which seemed out of place in the church and at the prison (Acts I and III). I suppose it was supposed to be highly associated with Scarpia and convey his menace, but its turn-of-the-century American flavor made it unthreatening. In addition, the failure to follow Puccini's stage direction ended up confusing the moral quality of the action. Tosca did not seek to absolve her sin by washing her hands after the murder, and her change from a white costume to the a black costume for the killing was heavy handed and blunted the emotional complexity of her character. In the final act, she did not jump off the parapet (or otherwise off herself), and the opera ended with her going out the back door of the prison yard. In the end, she came off frivolous rather than wrecked.

There was an unusual amount of furtive eating out of cellophane bags and chatting during Acts II and III. I was sitting in the gods, and this may be the norm up there on a Sunday afternoon. It's not my usual spot. This was my last Los Angeles Opera for the season, and I look forward to Wagner especially next season.