A Sumptuous but Silly ‘Widow’

San Francisco —  SAN FRANCISCO--The first shot in the “Widow” wars has been fired. At the War Memorial Opera House on Tuesday night, San Francisco Opera unveiled an opulent new production of “The Merry Widow.” On Sunday night, Los Angeles Opera will mount its first production of Franz Lehar’s operetta. It is not so new, imported from Utah Opera. But both productions are by the same director, Lotfi Mansouri, and use the same set and costume designers.

San Francisco, it would seem, has the advantage. It commissioned new dialogue by playwright Wendy Wasserstein, which is exclusive to the San Francisco run. General manager of San Francisco Opera from 1988 to 2001, Mansouri gave himself the production for his grand exit. Next week, PBS will document performances for broadcast next fall.

There are very good reasons why “The Merry Widow,” which finds merriment in a society on the brink of change, should be in our lives right now. And there are very good reasons to pay attention to San Francisco Opera, which has a new general manager, Pamela Rosenberg, whose unusually interesting ideas will begin showing up on stage next season.

Although it is set in Paris and concerns the plight of a rich, young Balkan widow whose millions might save her country from bankruptcy, Lehar’s operetta is actually an extraordinary snapshot of Viennese sensibility early in the 20th century. It captures the smoldering eroticism of a culture in which women were just emerging as a political force and all the more alluring for that. And it points to the casual attitude the pleasure-loving Viennese had toward the Balkan strife that would soon ignite World War I and end the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Indeed, “The Merry Widow,” which was popular culture in its day and has been beloved since its premiere in 1905, was also revolutionary in its way. At the moment when Richard Strauss was using music to demonstrate a psyche in disarray in “Salome” and Schoenberg was driven to find a new musical language that revealed a society breaking apart, Lehar revealed a Vienna addicted to dance tunes so irresistible that even Strauss and Schoenberg were also smitten by them.

For Mansouri, however, this “Merry Widow” is nostalgia for a world that never was. People in lavish, silly costumes make lavish, silly fools of themselves, and they go on doing it for a very long time, 31/2 unfunny hours in this performance. It is not only a waste of time; it is also a waste of very fine talent.

The first waste is Wasserstein. She brings little new to “The Merry Widow.” She removes many of the ethnic jokes from the original Victor Leon and Leo Stein libretto; in their politically incorrect stead, however, is a vulgar parody of a fat lady.

Mostly, though, Wasserstein’s lines are simply innocuous, without bite, satire or flair. One running gag that got few laughs Tuesday concerned male manicures. As for the sung lyrics, those were Christopher Hassall’s cornball English translation of the witty original German.

On top of this, Mansouri imposes shtick and more shtick on classy singers. Yvonne Kenny, the lucent Australian soprano, seems to have resisted the director’s excesses more than others in the cast, but she compensated by being a more bemused than carefree Anna (Hanna in the original), less the type to live it up than to carefully manage her mutual funds.

Danish baritone Bo Skovhus was a Danilo with a split personality, eloquent in song but buffoonish in speech. That there was so little chemistry between the lovers may have been caused by the fact that Anna had to address both personalities. Angelika Kirchschlager, the Austrian mezzo-soprano, sounded gorgeous, but she was not allowed to show her intelligence or wit as the flirtatious Valencienne. Her lover, Camille de Rosillon, was entrusted to earnest young tenor Gregory Turay, working his way up through the company ranks.

The various Pontevedrians (Pontevedro being a thinly disguised Montenegro) who populated Michael Yeargan’s colorfully painted stage and wore Thierry Bosquet’s fanciful costumes (Anna in native dress looked like a Pontevedrian Pocahontas) kept up the flat slapstick, which got an extra dose of surrealism by being glamorously lit by Jennifer Tipton. Erich Kunzel, a well-known pops conductor, was the blandly brisk bandmaster in the pit, seeming not to mind additions here and there from other Lehar pieces, which nonetheless broke the musical flow.

The Los Angeles production (with Carol Vaness and Rodney Gilfry) will inevitably be less opulent, less newsworthy and, with luck, less offensive.

But it could well be more musical and, because it adds some Hollywood actors to the cast, more amusing. However it turns out Sunday, it won’t be the national embarrassment a “Great Performances” broadcast threatens to be for San Francisco Opera, whose first shot in the “Widow” wars was in its foot.

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“The Merry Widow,” San Francisco Opera, continues through Dec. 8 with the original cast, and returns Jan. 11-19 with Frederica von Stade and Rodney Gilfry as Anna and Danilo, $23 to $165, War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco; (415) 864-3330.