Updated version works in presenting tragic figure

By Wes Blomster, Camera Classical Music Critic
April 25, 2005

DENVER — Rigoletto is a hard guy to like. A court fool in Verdi's 1851 favorite, he's only an accessory to the power that he sees abused with such glee.

And he sets himself up for doom by evoking the curse that leads to the murder of his daughter Gilda with the inevitability of Greek tragedy. Yet you end up feeling sorry for him in the production of "Rigoletto" that opened the spring season of Opera Colorado in Boettcher Concert Hall Saturday.

Director Thaddeus Strassberger has updated the story — it began as a drama about courtly corruption by Victor Hugo — and set it in a waterfront hideout darkened by sinister mafioso figures. Happily, the approach works, for — stripped of opulent trappings — the humanity (or, in most cases, the inhumanity) of Verdi's characters is laid bare.

And to a large degree it works because of the superb cast that OC has assembled for the staging. As the title figure, Christopher Robertson is no longer the crippled hunchback of tradition, but a sadly confused underdog with a withered arm doing what he can with his meager resources. In his love for his daughter, you can't deny him your tears. It's just that in the book of family values he never got to the "do unto others" bit. Robertson, a mammoth man, sings Rigoletto with a stunning voice and refined sense of suffering.

And Jennifer Welch-Babidge plays Gilda as a waif adrift without much help in an unfeeling world, anxiously clutching her stuffed animals as others plot her downfall. Julian Gavin has the voice to belt out his convictions about the fickle nature of womankind with full force, but from close up he's a tad too much chamber of commerce in demeanor. Even on the darkest night, you'd never mistake him for Marlon Brando.

It's in supporting roles, however, that this cast is truly stellar. Eric Owens is a bass-baritone that one hears — with luck — once every decade. He steals the show with his incarnation of Sparafucile, a man who will do anything for a price.

And one hardly expects to hear a singer of Beth Clayton's rank as his sister Maddalena. Clayton is a major rising mezzo on the opera scene and — with Strassberger's help — she makes Maddalena a figure of unusual power in this staging.

Like Gilda, she loves the Duke in spite of what she knows he is, and in the final scene, as she sits silently while evil is done around her, she becomes the vehicle for the social criticism imbedded in this work. Strassberger gives the audience — Boettcher was packed — a lot to think about with several such original touches.

Just what's up, for example, with housekeeper Giovanni, usually a bit of a bimbo in admitting the Duke to Rigoletto's home — for a handsome tip, of course. Why is she such a morose presence throughout the first exchange between father and daughter? Could she be the unidentified mother of Gilda? How does one explain her embrace of Rigoletto? And seating the Duke at dinner "en familie" magnifies his hypocrisy. The Duchess' look back as she leaves the table says it all.

It's such moments that identify Strassberger as a man who has dug into Verdi and sensed the depth of the darkness that lies at the heart of this work.

Conductor Mark Morash, at home with the San Francisco Opera Center, stresses the lean economy of Verdi's well-constructed score and thus supports Strassberger's uncluttered unfolding of the drama. Morash offers a beautifully well-paced reading of the score and evokes robust and sensitive playing from the pit band drawn from the Colorado Symphony.

"Rigoletto" tells a dark and disturbing story, and even when so well staged and sung as it is in this production, it nonetheless leaves one wondering how the values in which it is rooted have survived so successfully into the modern age.

The double standard lives on, for the Duke, a cesspool of iniquity, survives unsoiled to be the undoing of other women. And Rigoletto as a rather dubious pillar of family values? Well, he might as well have sent Gilda to a singles bar as to Mass. The outcome hardly could have been worse.

Tickets to "Rigoletto" are understandably scarce; call now.