It’s High Time

Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” was his first opera blockbuster. It proved enormously popular at its premiere in Turin in 1893. It got far better reviews, in fact, than did its successor, “La Boheme.”

Yet “Boheme” is everywhere today while it is easy for devoted opera lovers to have missed seeing “Manon Lescaut.”

One reason is the opera is difficult to cast, said director Bernard Uzan, who created the 1998 L’Opera de Montreal production that Opera Pacific is presenting tonight through Sunday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

“Vocally, the part of Des Grieux [Manon’s young lover, sung by Hugh Smith in this production] is a monster. The part lies so high. It’s always in the passaggio [the break between registers in the voice]. The tessitura is always almost at the edge of crumbling.

“Manon [Sylvie Valayre], is also very difficult vocally. It’s a lot of singing. It puts an enormous demand on the vocal cords. I don’t mean to use the word ‘screaming,’ but it’s almost that.”

Puccini’s opera and Jules Massenet’s very popular (1884) “Manon” derive from the same source--Abbe Prevost’s “L’Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut,” the story of a beautiful young girl who, torn between love and money, chooses money and slowly comes to regret it.

Uzan, who has directed both operas, calls Puccini’s version “more concise’ than Massenet’s popular work.

It’s also closer to the novel, he adds. And to understand Manon’s character, Uzan says it is necessary to go back to the source.

“Manon does not really exist by herself in the novel. The main character is the Chevalier des Grieux. It’s actually a tale told by a man who meets a man who tells the story of a friend who told him about a woman he knew . . .

Uzan tries to direct the leading lady to emphasize the character’s spontaneity.

“She’s genuinely in love with Des Grieux, but essentially, she’s also in love with money. Every second, she’s totally herself. But to be totally herself is to be totally diverse. That’s why she falls. She cannot resist an appetite for everything.”

Audiences tend to forgive Manon, Uzan said. But Des Grieux, is a less sympathetic character.

“In the novel he kills somebody, but makes an excuse for it. ‘I didn’t know that the pistol was loaded.’ ”

As in most of his operas, Puccini is far more interested in the women than the men.

“The character of Manon undergoes a big change. She begins as a young girl, full of desire. In the second act, she’s something else. She progresses a lot.

“Des Grieux always stays the same. He cries. He screams his head off. As soon as [Manon] touches his hand, he falls apart. He does that from beginning to end. He’s less complex than Manon.

“It’s the same with Rodolfo [in “Boheme”] and Pinkerton [“Madama Butterfly”] and Cavaradossi [“Tosca”]. The men stay the same.”

Uzan, a native of France, has been general and artistic director of L’Opera de Montreal since 1988. He directed Verdi’s “La Traviata” and Gounod’s “Romeo et Juliette” for Opera Pacific in 1990 and 1993, respectively.

Both productions were straightforward in their staging.

“Some operas let you have freedom to put the characters on motorcycles, if you want,” Uzan said. “Some do not need that or even authorize that. It’s not a question of when they were written, but of what is the style of the opera.”

He did a modernistic staging of Berlioz’s “Damnation of Faust,” for instance.

“Not motorcycles, but their equivalent. Berlioz’s music is all cerebral, it’s all intellectual. That gives freedom to the director, the freedom to fantasize. But Puccini is all sensitivity, emotions--not intellectual. It’s not called verismo for nothing.”

So his approach is to “get real motivations from the people on stage.”

In the current production, the only moment of fantasy might come in the last act, when Manon, disgraced and sent as a convict to the “desert” of Louisiana; 18th century Frenchmen had the vaguest notion about the geography of the New World.

There, Manon dies in the arms of Des Grieux who has followed her into exile.

“The set of the last act is a lot more symbolic than realistic,” Uzan said. “And a lot more romantic.

“We did that on purpose. First, ‘the desert of Louisiana’ means nothing. We set it almost like a Delacroix painting. It’s symbolic of the fall of Manon.”

* Opera Pacific will stage Puccini’s “Manon Lescaut” tonight, Thursday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. The leading roles will be sung by Sylvie Valayre as Manon, Hugh Smith as Des Grieux, and Frank Hernandez as Lescaut. John DeMain will conduct. $32-$107. (800) 346-7372.

Chris Pasles can be reached at (714) 966-5602 or by e-mail at chris.pasles@latimes.com.