Shortly into the second act of The Matchbox Magic Flute, the hero Tamino embarks on three trials to win the hand of his beloved Pamina. How the challenges come about in this adaptation of Mozart’s 1791 fairy-tale opera involves a slightly wooly backstory that isn’t important at the moment.
What matters in this transporting scene depicting the trial of silence is how charmingly, touchingly, and movingly it plays in adaptor and director Mary Zimmerman’s production at Berkeley Repertory Theatre. Seated downstage, Tamino (Billy Rude) is not only trying to keep his own mouth shut but that of his chattering avian sidekick, Papageno (Shawn Pfautsch).
Enter Pamina (Marlene Fernandez), who knows nothing of the trials and can’t fathom why Tamino is giving her the silent treatment. As the hero and his befeathered companion rise and slowly process offstage, their enforced silence expressed as solemn movement, Pamina remains behind to pour out her heart in an anguished minor-key aria, achingly sung by Fernandez.
That’s just one of many inspired, multifaceted moments in this show, which had its official opening on Thursday, Oct. 31, at Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theatre after a cast injury forced a week’s delay.
Staged on a compact set that evokes both the candle-lit atmosphere of an 18th-century opera house and a puppet theater fitted out with movable trees and rotating set panels, this Flute inhabits a kind of time-spanning music hall with a loose-jointed, high-spirited vibe. It’s romantic and grave, faithful (in its fashion) to the original and puckishly funny (references to BART and Jan. 6 flit through the English-language dialogue), fanciful and slyly self-aware.
For Zimmerman fans, the director’s transforming touch will feel both familiar and fresh. Over 28 years at Berkeley Rep, dating back to Journey to the West and including such memorable feats as her take on Ovid’s Metamorphoses (set in and around a shallow pool) and the myth-based Argonautika, Zimmerman has tapped widely diverse sources with a kinetic and seemingly boundless imagination. She has also staged full-scale productions at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
First produced by Chicago’s Goodman Theatre, this Flute is performed by a cast of 11, with five musicians in a narrow pit. The voices, which range from pop-Broadway pallid to Fernandez’s ardent best-in-show soprano, are not the main attraction. The music, wittily adapted and arranged by Amanda Dehnert and André Pluess and well performed by the band, gets touches of post-Mozart color from piano, xylophone, and woodblock.
In streamlining story and score, Zimmerman and her collaborators have animated their fleetly moving Flute with humor, grace, and enchanting design. A presiding Spirit (a nimble Reese Parish) signals the tasseled red curtain to rise, and the inventions begin on Todd Rosenthal’s set, which gets configured and reconfigured like multiple Joseph Cornell boxes.
After a puppet dragon downs Tamino in the woods, a trio of wiseacre ladies in shaggy green shifts and twiggy hairdos descend eagerly on the knocked-out prince. One of them remarks that he looks like he’s spent some time at the gym.
Dancing animals recall the family-friendly Magic Flute directed by Julie Taymor (of Broadway’s The Lion King) for New York’s Met. San Francisco Opera mounted a silent-movie-style production earlier this year. The Magic Flute makes directors yearn to turn conjuring tricks.
Zimmerman’s Flute is a little slow to catch fire in the first act. There’s some wheel-spinning dialogue and static blocking. But stay tuned. After intermission the delights keep coming.
There’s a meta moment at the top of Act 2, when the priest Sarastro (a sonorous Fernando Watts) both explains and embraces the conventions of “old stories.” This, he adds, “is one of them.” Emily Rohm, looking glamorously sinister in costume designer Ana Kuzmanić’s sculptural gown, makes the Queen of the Night a scary, steely-voiced helicopter mother to Pamina.
In a neat twist, Pfautsch’s winningly volatile Papageno is a red-beaked bird here rather than a bird catcher. His courtship of and high-speed propagation with Papagena (a preening Lauren Molina) is love at first flight. Tail feathers avidly wagging, they almost make Pamina and Tamino seem, in their happy union, like mere mortal afterthoughts.
Berkeley Rep’s production of The Matchbox Magic Flute runs through Dec. 8.
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
