Opera News: Janáček's Cunning Little Vixen in Detroit

In March, Opera News asked me to review Yuval Sharon’s production of Cunning Little Vixen in Detroit. The printed version underwent severe and unapproved edits that jettisoned much of my original sentiment. So in lieu of a link, the complete review is reproduced in its original form below.

The Cunning Little Vixen is opera’s exercise in hiding bodies. There have historically been two solutions to its staging: submit faithfully to Janáček’s woodland parable and incur the inevitable embarrassment of ungainly adults leaping about in furry bodysuits, or jettison the setting in favor of a humanist relocation that also does away with Vixen’s allegorical thrust. Either way you treat it, the inadequacy of anthropomorphic illusion is that opera’s stumbling block: what to do with bodies that are always too human to be animal?

For Janáček’s first (overdue) outing in Detroit, Yuval Sharon opted for a third route. Marketed as the family-friendly offering of the season, this Vixen returned to its cartoon-strip origins with a hybrid video production that relegated animals to a three-screen backdrop while keeping human characters out front and in the flesh. For their part, Bill Barminsky and Christopher Louie of Walter Robot Studios delivered an elegant, nimble animation that permitted singers to peep through hinged portals and graft their human heads onto the torsos of illustrated wildlife, often to great comic effect. But in a world barraged by synchronous multimedia, even the partial presence of a moving image sets off spectatorial instincts trained by Hollywood to relegate any and all invisible music to the secondary role of mood. And so the consequence of the screen—for all its immersive, technocratic, 21st-century glitz—was a noticeable reduction in orchestral power in exactly the narrative places where music is most responsible for world-building. Forced instead to coordinate with film, Janáček’s meticulous structural dramaturgy became sublimated to soundtrack.

That is, until the second act, when twin doors slid open at the base of the screen to allow The Vixen—Mané Galoyen, vocally irradiant (if at times too merely beautiful)—and The Fox—Samantha Hankey, the night’s standout, a complete dramatic presence with a voice as lustrous as it is molten—to step out and take their love duet on stage. Almost immediately, the orchestra unshackled from the background and congealed around the entwined, corporeal pair with grateful gasps of concentrated expressivity. The moment was a revelation: Vixen only works because opera’s excessive humanity can mingle with non-human realms through music’s promiscuous and transformative magic. When heaving flesh shimmers alongside animal illusion, the piece breathes at last like opera. So when the pair inevitably return to their hand-drawn world, the resultant energetic abatement comes as a disappointment.

Janáček’s original wager in Vixen was to reinstate humanizing thickness and vibrating viscera in a two-dimensional comic with the expectation that opera’s amniotic music would bridge the imaginative gap. Sharon, by assuming that the solution to staging mongrel bodies was not to stage them at all, inadvertently weakened the very modality that gives this work its power. That the life-blood of his Vixen was recuperated is owed to a committed cast of singers with a gift for vocal storytelling, but the defining question of Sharon’s tenure lingers still: whether scenographic spectacle is substitute enough for raw theater in thrall to the singing body.

—Ty Bouque