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Fantastic Mr Fox
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Composer |
Tobias Picker |
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Librettist |
Donald Sturrock after Roald Dahl’s book |
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Venue and Dates |
Los Angeles Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion 9-22 December 1998 (5 performances) World Premiere |
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Conductor |
Peter Ash |
|
Production |
Costumes, after designs by Gerald Scarfe |
|
Performers |
Fantastic Mr. Fox : Gerald Finley Mrs. Fox : Suzanna Guzmán Bennie Foxcub : Jason Housman Lennie Foxcub : Theo Lebow Jennie Foxcub : Lauren Libaw Pennie Foxcub : Amy Recinos Farmer Boggis : Louis Lebherz Farmer Bunce : Doug Jones Farmer Bean : Jamie Offenbach Agnes the Digger : Jill Grove Mavis the Tractor : Lesley Leighton Miss Hedgehog : Sari Gruber Badger the Miner : Malcolm MacKenzie Burrowing Mole : Jorge Garza Rita the Rat : Josepha Gayer Porcupine : Charles Castronovo
Children's Chorus of Trees Various geese and chickens |
|
Notes |
See http://www.tobiaspicker.com/fox.html for more information and a short video clip of this production |
What the critics say
Paul Griffiths, New York Times, December 17, 1998
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D01E6DB133DF934A25751C1A96E958260
Foxes, Hedgehogs, Rats and Humans
The world is littered with great children's books that failed to make the transition into great operas. Now Roald Dahl's ''Fantastic Mr. Fox'' is joining the list, thanks to a work commissioned from the composer Tobias Picker and presented by the Los Angeles Opera. I just hope all those fifth graders in Tuesday night's audience will accept a reassurance. Opera can be thrilling and terrifying. You can hear things you never thought possible. It's not always a matter of being vaguely polite (or not) to the adults who took you along.
The original story is strong, and it works. Like much of Dahl's writing, it has an engaging coarseness: it reeks of greasy chicken dishes and freshly dug soil. These smells do not go forward into Mr. Picker's score, which is thoroughly nondescript. He rises reasonably to the occasion for the ditty that the four fox cubs sing about the three farmers who are the fox family's enemies, but every other ball he drops. In an opera whose main characters are nocturnal animals, and whose action unfolds after dark, the night sounds are disappointingly tame. Worse, foxes, hedgehogs, rats and humans all sound much the same. The music is woefully undercharacterized.
Admittedly, there is not much help from the libretto, by Donald Sturrock, who is also responsible for the lame direction. The text is wordy and sentimental. It misses all the opportunities it creates. The mechanical digger with the soul of an artist, for instance, could have been a funny and real operatic character, but here she just brings one smile in the middle of the pervasive embarrassment.
Mr. Picker gives her tuba and trombones, with more than a suggestion of Wagner's Fafner, but otherwise his music deals in small change. A couple of times it provides atmospheric, if rhythmically flaccid, writing for a children's chorus of tree spirits. There is, rather oddly, a good bit of showy if ungainly counterpoint. Nothing seizes the imagination.
Some of the animal costumes, after designs by Gerald Scarfe, are delightful, especially those for the mole, badger and porcupine. Philip Hill gives the fox cubs neat animal movements. There are also some wastefully good performances, notably from Gerald Finley in the title role and from Jamie Offenbach as Farmer Bean. Apart from anything else, these two are the only members of the cast who get the words across; they are also both lusty singers, and Mr. Finley's lyrical baritone is good to hear even in indifferent music.
Heidi Waleson, The Wall Street Journal, 28 December 1998
Children's Hour
Creating operas for children must present composers and librettists with a terrible temptation toward saccharine prettiness and preachy messages about self-esteem, but Tobias Picker and Donald Sturrock, the authors of "Fantastic Mr Fox ," which recently had its premiere at the Los Angeles Opera, did not succumb. Instead, they stayed true to their subject matter -- a novel by Roald Dahl. Children love Dahl, whose many other books include "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," for his macabre sense of humor, grotesque characters who always seem within the range of possibility, and sophisticated plots
in which right triumphs but cleverness plays a crucial role in the besting of the stupid, the greedy and the venal.
Mr. Picker demonstrated a profound grasp of dramatic musical
storytelling in "Emmeline," his first opera. Mr. Sturrock, a British film and television director, heads the Roald Dahl Foundation. Together the pair captured Dahl's spirit in a musical language that challenged, entertained and never pandered, skilfully balancing dark and light. And darkness there certainly was. A trio of farmers, Boggis, Bunce and Bean decide to annihilate a family of foxes who have been stealing their fowls. They lie in wait outside the animals' den, waiting for Mr. Fox to emerge, but only succeed in shooting off his tail. Trapped in the hillside by the farmers, Mr. Fox hatches a plan. With the aid of some other burrowing creatures, he tunnels his way out the other side, into the farmyard, which the animals joyfully pillage for a celebratory feast. Meanwhile, the farmers, abetted by two huge earthmoving machines, have dug up and destroyed the hill to no avail, and are, as Mrs. Fox puts it, "still waiting."
Mr. Sturrock enlarged Dahl's basic story, deepening some characters and creating others. Two entirely new creatures gave Mr. Picker the chance for some particularly inspired writing: Miss Hedgehog (soprano Sari Gruber), who laments her spinsterhood in a touchingly lyrical aria, and Agnes the Digger (Jill Grove), a butch earthmover with a dramatic mezzo range who is even scarier and more powerful than the nasty farmers with their guns. Mr. Sturrock depended on his lively characters rather than plot to explore the theme of people and machines pitted against the natural world. The Dahl story devotes much more time to the tunneling operations of the foxes and their friends, while the opera, weighted toward the colorful bad guys, didn't quite capture the sense of struggle and victory among the good. Mr. Sturrock also tended to overuse text, cramming in too many words rather than letting music take over.
This sometimes made Mr. Picker's settings feel rushed and cramped. A smaller theater might have helped: In the huge Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, it was often hard for listeners to distinguish all those words, a particular frustration for the nonreading youngsters who couldn't take advantage of the supertitles.
But with Mr. Picker's lyric gift and dramatic sense, the opera was a captivating and witty entertainment. Oboe themes representing the natural world contrasted with the percussive characterization of the people and the machines. Mr. Picker also made colorful orchestral use of mallet instruments and a piano. The fox family and the quintet of bad guys had catchy ensembles, there were two haunting chorales for a children's chorus of trees, and the fox pair celebrated their victory at the end with, of course, a fox trot.
The only misstep was the flamboyant, klezmer-tinged aria of Rita the Rat (Josepha Gayer), which appeared late in the show, and tried too hard to appeal to the adults in the audience by comically quoting Spinoza. Baritone Gerald Finley was a sonorous Mr. Fox, mezzo Suzanna Guzman his supportive mate. Tenor Charles Castronovo, in the brief role of the Porcupine, is a singer to watch.
Conductor Peter Ash was not always scrupulous about keeping the
Orchestra from overpowering the singers. Designer Gerald Scarfe, who has an eye for the grotesque, created a delightful rotating set of a hill, rather like a child's paper collage, which switched easily from fox hole to farm to eviscerated land. His costumes matched the outsize characters, particularly the hugely fat Boggis (Louis Lebherz), the attenuated long-headed Bean (Jamie Offenbach), the lavishly spiked Porcupine in muscle-displaying gear, and red Agnes, whose mechanical shovel had gleaming eyes. The foxes' pointy masks, fastened to the tops of their heads rather than their faces, did not impede their singing and gave them animal-like features while their human clothes took care of the anthropomorphic side. Mr. Sturrock's directing was almost secondary to the sets and costumes, and of the animals, only Mr. Fox suited his movements to his character.
Now for the kid report: This piece isn't for the very young or easily frightened child. A little girl behind me was terrified by the shooting of
Farmer Bean's gun in the first scene, never quite recovered, and had to be removed, but my five-year-old nephew announced that he wants to be Bean next Halloween (the Bean's goosestepping walk was a common sight during intermission.) He was bored by Miss Hedgehog's plaintive aria, however, which was my nine-year-old daughter's favorite part. My six-year-old daughter particularly adored the malevolent Agnes, and is still singing the foxcubs' chant, "Boggis,
Bunce and Bean. One fat, one short, one lean." They'd all see it again, and so would I.
Joshua Kosman, San Francisco Chronicle, 14 December 1998
Picker's Barnyard Opera Comes a Cropper in L.A.
Simply from looking at the Los Angeles Opera's world premiere production of Tobias Picker's opera ``Fantastic Mr. Fox,'' an unwary audience member could easily get the impression that a work of imaginative whimsy was afoot.
Designer Gerald Scarfe has given the piece a glorious visual identity, creating a comic-book fairy-tale world full of vibrant color and beguiling shapes, and the moonlit shades of Richard Pilbrow's lighting say ``Once upon a time . . .'' clearly.
But the opera itself, a laborious barnyard fable based on the 1970 Roald Dahl book, is anything but light-footed. Its mixture of child- friendly and adult elements turns out not to expand the piece's range -- Picker's notion that it is for audiences ages ``five through one hundred and five'' is self-deception -- but to constrict it.
The result, encountered in a Saturday matinee heavily attended by children, is a piece that can't quite make up its mind what to be, and ends up falling between both stools. Adults may be less than enthralled by the opera's air of forced comedy (some of it owing much to the Three Stooges), while kids can hardly be expected to sit patiently through arias about humanity's place in nature or a character's fears about the onset of spinsterhood.
Witless Story
Librettist Donald Sturrock, who also directed, drew on Dahl's witless and characteristically misanthropic story about a wily fox who outwits three loathsome farmers. Fortunately, he has gone beyond the drab confines of his source, providing singing roles not only for the protagonists but also for a number of be guilingly drawn animals and even for two pieces of heavy machinery -- Agnes the Digger and Mavis the Tractor -- who help the villains chew up the countryside in an effort to force Mr. Fox from his hole.
He has also fleshed out the language considerably, creating glittering reams of rhymed ditties and appealing wordplay. But the essential pointlessness of the story remains untouched.
A few standouts
Picker, whose first opera was the widely acclaimed ``Emmeline,'' writes in a blandly unthreatening style, in which a few tuneful set pieces stand out against stretches of gray arioso. Some of the arias, such as Miss Hedgehog's lament on middle age, are shapely and memorable; others, such as Mr. Fox's big number, prove utterly faceless.
Pastiche also rears its head in a klezmer number for the Spinoza- spouting Rita the Rat and (a nice pun) an elegant foxtrot for the hero and his wife. The best music comes in a pair of achingly other-worldly choruses for the trees, beautifully sung by the Los Angeles Children's Chorus.
The large cast did well under conductor Peter Ash, with standout performances by Lesley Leighton and Jill Grove as the heavy machinery, Sari Gruber as Miss Hedgehog and baritone Gerald Finley in the title role. Louis Lebherz, Doug Jones and Jamie Offenbach, as the three farmers, struggled gamely to make themselves heard.
Timothy Pfaff, Financial Times (extract)
"[Picker's score is] is a strong, flexible piece of sustained writing that skillfully juxtaposes the animal kingdom's buoyant innocence with the more mordant colours of the human realm -- music that consistently boasts grateful, characterful vocal writing."
Helmut Mauro, Suddeutsche Zeitung (extract)
"The great skill of Picker's compositional art can be seen very clearly in this opera. On the one hand the counterpoint of his ideas presents an intellectual challenge...but it is often subliminally combined with bold and catchy orchestral effects... Fantastic Mr. Fox was more than just a succes d'estime. Already it seems other opera houses seem eager to present it."
Jordan Mejias, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (extract)
"Picker surprises us with a funny, imaginative, varied and often intricately-woven score... In a masterful theatrical touch, the first act ends as a shot rings out, the second with Agnes the Digger and Mavis the Tractor caught dramatically at the moment they are about to wreak their destruction [on the Fox's den]. It's both exciting and technically flawless on the part of the librettist Donald Sturrock... While Mr. Fox walks upon the opera stage, who would want to return to the familiar world of Hansel and Gretel? I would recommend Fantastic Mr. Fox to children of any age."
Joanne Sheery Hoover , Albuquerque Journal (extract)
Tobias Picker's Second Opera is a Child's Delight
"With five opera commissions in a decade, Picker holds a select, if not unique, position among contemporary opera composers. The odds are high he will become a significant figure in the operatic world.
"Picker responded to the story's bite with some sharp characterizations. He deftly portrayed the three farmers, 'Boggis, Bunce and Bean; one fat, one short, one lean...all equally mean!'...Boggis...got deep, blunt lines...Bunce...had fussy little phrases...and the lean, scheming Bean...sang in slithering phrases.
"Picker also explored the tale's tender aspects with lyrical writing for Mrs. Fox, sensitively portrayed by mezzo soprano Suzanna Guzman. Life's darker side, in the bittersweet song about loss and aging of Miss Hedgehog, nicely shaped by soprano Sari Gruber, offered one of the opera's most touching moments. And Mr. Fox, given lithe physicality by baritone Gerald Finley, had heroic yet slightly bent melodies, reflecting both his goodness and his vanity."
Le Monde de la Musique (extract)
Georges Gad
"Can a cartoonist create a real world on stage? Is it possible to sing under a mask? Is opera for children really possible? Fantastic Mr. Fox responds affirmatively to these three questions... The director, Donald Sturrock has brought together two surprising names. He has written a libretto based on a story of Roald Dahl — the best-selling children's author in the Anglo-Saxon world. He has also chosen the famous cartoonist Gerald Scarfe to design the production. It's a stroke of genius. Sets, costumes and masks are magnificent... And it's not just the visuals that are stunning. Tobias Picker's score flows easily. Songs are linked by brief ariosos. The piano contributes a great deal and the score abounds with ironic ragtime rhythms... Each of the characters is represented by one of the instruments in the orchestra. The wit of the little love-duet between Miss Hedgehog and Porcupine is truly a delight to savour.... The piece blends caricature and emotional reality quite wonderfully. The singers are quite natural in their masks, and Gerald Finley as Mr. Fox, the philosopher ecologist, stands out from the ensemble as a truly remarkable presence."