At the Théâtre du Châtelet, an Orlando without any madness

The Châtelet scene is transformed into a museum. On the picture rails, paintings: a Delacroix, a portrait of Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun. Among the visitors, an elegant group of children and an elegant man who looks closely at the cartels before going down … in the orchestra pit: it is Christophe Rousset, the chef who will direct this Orlando the haunty!

Tasty start, well in a line Robert Carsen/Laurent Pelly who mixes the levels of reality, until the goalkeeper closes the museum and some turbulent children slip there for the night. It is then that the subjects of the paintings come to life, animated by the sensitive look of children: as in the comic strip Night at the museumwhich gave rise to a series of films immortalized by Ben Stiller, whose character returns here with brio at the baritone Riccardo Novaro.

Nice but boring

A good start … which will not hold its promises! It is always risky to start from the postulate that the opera characters fall under the museum. To show that they are close to us, the risk is to fall into anecdotal, and the director of the show, Jeanne Desoubeaux, ends up succumbing to it by lack of an insufficiently tense actors who are reduced to A common love triangle, missing Orlando’s madness. A touching at times, the naivety of the childish gaze passes alongside the errors of the heart and the mind, and the choreography assumed by these young students of the Île-de-France conservatories could have been more millimeter. As for the end of fish tail (we open the following morning and the characters in the drama are the parents who came to collect their children), it seems very prosaic. A nice and a little boring show, for a work that is neither.

The breath that is lacking in the staging could have been in music, but it would have been necessary for Christophe Rousset to loosen the vice of a direction which seemed very stiff and square. The strings of lyrical talents sound with opulence but not without stastism in the air, where the continuo makes the text better live. Perhaps we also wanted to spare a distribution that was not spared by winter viruses.

In the title role, Katarina Bradic has the physique and the beautiful bass of the hero of the arioste, but she is out of projection and shy in vocalizations. It is true that she had made an advertisement before the curtain raising. Also announced for Siobhan Stagg, not always agile in virtuoso ornaments, but his Angelica seduced by her bitter mild stamp. Elizabeth Deshong has a serious homogeneous register that suits Medoro’s transvestite role, without having the presence. On the contrary, the Dorinda of the Soprano Giulia Semenzato triumphs both by its irresistible acute spun and by its delicious scenic game. If we want to redo from the opera to the Châtelet – and we ardently wish it as this room is ideal for the lyrical! -, we will have to make stronger and singular proposals.

Orlando, At the Théâtre du Châtelet (Paris 1^is), until 2 FEBRUARY.