Review: 'Rappaccini's Daughter' a mixed experience

Who knew that Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote a fairy tale?

Yes, the author of The Scarlet Letter, that epitome of Puritan repression and angst, published a short story that ticks all the fairy-tale boxes. There's the once-upon-a-time medieval setting; the fair maiden sequestered by an obsessive and overprotective father; the young man who glimpses her, falls in love, and offers to spirit her away; the wise bystander who warns the two, to no avail, of the dangers they face if they pursue their plans; the inanimate objects that come to life and sing. There's even a clucking godmother-type who nudges the young lovers toward each other. Alas, she has no wishes to grant, and the young heroine dies by the very means her hero uses to try to save her.

In this particular story, the mad scientist Rappaccini keeps his daughter Beatriz not in a castle tower, but in a lush garden whose plants he's breeding to produce powerful poisons. Having spent her entire life amidst the toxic vegetation, she's immune to it, and her father expects her and her young suitor, Giovanni (whom he welcomes, unlike most fairy-tale fathers of sequestered maidens) to produce a race of unkillable, god-like super-humans. Alas, lifelong contact with the garden's toxins has made Beatriz herself poisonous, and when Giovanni gives her an antivenin in hopes of healing her, it kills her instead. And the rest live unhappily ever after.

Hawthorne being Hawthorne, his Rappaccini's Daughter reflects upright, uptight Puritan values. But when the Nobel-winning Mexican poet Octavio Paz made the story into a play, La hija de Rappaccini (1953), it became a sort of Latin American version of a French Symbolist fever dream, full of flowery, passionate, and (to an Anglo-Saxon ear) over-the-top language - and much better suited to opera than New England moralism. Naturally, it's the latter version that composer Daniel Catán and librettist Juan Tovar chose to adapt for their 1991 opera, which Vulcan Lyric presented on Saturday at the Prince Theater.

True to his source, Catán's full score sounds rather like the arch-Symbolist opera, Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande, if it were orchestrated by Erich Korngold for a 1930s Hollywood epic. Happily, Vulcan Lyric artistic director Andrew Kurtz used the composer's own reduction for two pianos, percussion and harp, which provided some much-needed delicacy. Kurtz conducted his five-member pit ensemble cleanly and kept the proceedings from bogging down in the piece's luxuriant, sometimes verbose emotionalism.

The young cast's voices didn't seem fully polished (at least not yet), but their pitch was generally accurate, which is all too often untrue of opera singers with far more fame and experience (and higher fees). The diction was by and large clear, and one of the singers - tenor Maximiliano Marques as the warning bystander - produced some genuinely beautiful, understandable Spanish. (In fact, with his youthful face and emotional involvement, he might have made a better Giovanni than the fuller-voiced, more generically ardent Marco Panuccio.)

Dramatically, though, the cast seemed left to fend for themselves: director John Nicholas Peters appeared to have told them where to go when and not much more. Most of the duets and dialogue, no matter how love-soaked, were delivered face-forward in the park-and-bark fashion that gave operatic acting a bad name; nobody reminded the singers that when, for instance, their characters are supposed to be talking softly, they should be singing softly; they generally seemed to be miming their emotions rather than playing them, let alone experiencing them. And as we know from children's theater, you can only pull off a fairy tale onstage - especially one that's (over)written to be a fever-dream, as this one is - if the actors completely believe in what their characters are doing. That wasn't close to happening here.

And frankly, I could hardly blame Jennifer Braun (who played Beatriz the damsel) if she poisoned Peters, who humiliated her by making her walk upstage after her dying words, stand before the rear screen, and wave her arms around like a little girl pretending to be a fairy or ballerina or synchronized swimmer.

The idea behind Vulcan Lyric - presenting new or underrated music-theater during one of the emptiest parts of the cultural calendar - would be a boon to any city's cultural life. But the company says explicitly that its vision "is based upon a passionate belief in theater's power as a theatrical experience," and with La hija de Rappacini's, Vulcan Lyric didn't come close to putting that belief onstage. It simply has to do better than this.