Updated operetta,’The Merry Widow,’ is at Northwestern this weekend

To the uninitiated, opera gets a bad rap. Common complaints: They are long; they are in foreign languages an English-only speaker won’t understand; they are often sad and old-fashioned.

Plus the tickets are expensive.

This week’s production of The Merry Widow at Northwestern’s Cahn Auditorium puts all of those stereotypes to rest.

Breaking stereotypes

The Merry Widow clocks in at about 110 minutes, which includes a 15-minute intermission. It’s an operetta, that is, sung and spoken, whereas opera is only sung. It’s in German, but there are short, easy-to-read supertitles that appear above the stage. This operetta premiered in 1905, which is fairly new for an art form that started in the late 1500s.

In The Merry Widow, no one dies of consumption, gets stabbed or dies by suicide.

The storyline is timeless: There are devious and calculating matchmaking efforts aimed at a wealthy widow, but she is suspicious of the attention being paid to her. Add a chance at true love the second time around. There are issues of trust, pride and ego, so people can relate. Mix in antiquated laws that affect inheritance rights and you get The Merry Widow.

Synopsis

The story is set in Paris, primarily at the French embassy of the impoverished Balkan principality of Pontevedro. Hanna, the titular wealthy widow, will be a guest at a ball held to honor the grand duke. She inherited millions from her late husband; both of them were from Pontevedro. The ambassador, Baron Zeta, wants her to remarry a man from Pontevedro, not someone from France, to keep her money in their country’s bank. If she withdraws the money, the bank and Pontevedro would collapse. The man the Baron “assigns” to marry Hanna, Count Danilo, refuses. He and Hanna have history together.

As for ticket prices, there is no better bargain — whether for a classical music buff or anyone curious to experience this art form — than the ones produced three times a year by Northwestern’s voice and opera department. Cahn Auditorium is convenient, comfortable and unpretentious. Another bonus that women will appreciate: Cahn Auditorium has one of the largest ladies rooms in Evanston.

Watching a rehearsal

I watched part of a song and orchestra rehearsal and about half of the dress rehearsal on Sunday. This is where the last-minute kinks get ironed out. Jen Pitt, stage director, offered a few notes to performers but what I observed was mostly polishing. “Make hand gestures like this” and that sort of thing.

There are two casts that alternate performances. Opera singers do not use microphones and their voices need to rest after singing a complete opera or operetta.

There are some 25 to 30 students in the full orchestra and about 75 students on stage and behind the scenes responsible for costumes, set design, hair and makeup, choreography, lighting, audio and more. This is their job, and they do it well.

The students on stage sing and speak in German as well as English. Their voices are tremendous. Even nonmusical types can appreciate the skill and finesse that go into each production. Those on stage need to sing, act, dance and emote as if they were part of a professional opera company. Admirably, they pull it off.

A focus on a woman’s choice

Pitt comes from an experimental theater background in New York and works in the vocal arts department at The Julliard School. She said on a Zoom call, “I am always looking for things that are a little bit more daring, pushing the envelope. I like to experiment. … As far as The Merry Widow goes, it’s definitely not your grandma’s operetta that people will be watching. On its face it has a really thin and fluffy plot over a beautifully orchestrated score. And so the juicy challenge for me was to really plum any profundity that’s lying underneath it and bring it to the surface.

“There are a lot of numbers in this opera that are about a woman’s choice and her dance partner. They even say, ‘Women are always fighting for a vote and for a choice, but when they get it, they don’t take it.’ And so that, to me, really resonated a bit with conversations, horrible conversations we’re having now, and hearing young men talk about ‘your body, our choice,’ things like that, you know. And so I did want those things to be in conversation with one another.”

She continued, “And so what is usually a typically very waltzy, pretty dance number that’s called ladies choice, we made into a bit more of a darker view into what the people are actually saying, because they are trying to manipulate this widow. So it’s not really her choice. The whole reason there is a ball and this dance to begin with is to try to sway her one way without her consent. And so we’re having her move about the men as if she’s on an assembly line, conveyor belt and things like that. And so that’s a refrain that my concept has in the staging.”

Exploration of love

Pitt said, “Another thing we really explore in this opera, and a theme that I love to explore in my work and anything I direct, whether it’s Chekov or something completely experimental or opera, is, how do we love?

“One of the characters is in love with two people at the same time. Usually the person playing the Baron they make into an old fool, and the other person she’s having, ambiguously, an affair with is the strapping tenor. It’s not like it’s sort of an easy predicament for her to be in. But what’s so great about having a young, vivacious, attractive cast is that you can really show that it’s a problem for her and that some people are in love with two people at the same time. And it’s not so monolithic as one person being bad, one person being good and cheating is bad.”

She continued, “What we’ve come up with in the rehearsal room is that there’s two men who tried to grasp and control love in a very patriarchal and capitalistic way, the Baron and Danilo, and they suffer some consequences for that themselves, and create sort of their own hell for themselves. And then there’s the people who really want to set love free and love in this really pure, almost spiritual way, which would be Hanna, the merry widow, and Camille, the strapping tenor, and then Valencienne [the Baron’s wife, greatly admired by Camille] was stuck in between these two worlds. We keep saying that she’s in love purgatory.”

Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow is at Cahn Auditorium, 600 Emerson St., from Thursday-Sunday, Feb. 27-March 2. Showtimes at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday and 3 p.m. on Sunday. Jen Pitt, stage director; Patrick Furrer, conductor; Joachim Schamberger, director of opera. Performed in German; new dialogues by Jen Pitt in English. This production includes the use of strobe lights. Run time is approximately 110 minutes, including a 15-minute intermission. Tickets are $18 for the general public and $8 for students with valid ID.

Updated operetta,’The Merry Widow,’ is at Northwestern this weekend is from Evanston RoundTable, Evanston's most trusted source for unbiased, in-depth journalism.