Uh-Oh

We previously opined that the description of the staging of the new Met production of Berlioz's Damnation de Faust by director Robert Lepage was Curiously Encouraging News.

Maybe not.

It seems the press isn't prepared to say it, but I will: the new Robert Lepage production of Berlioz's Damnation of Faust is boring. Soporific, empty -- and, least forgivably, literal.

[...]

One cannot just pass the buck to Berlioz himself. Yes, he wrote not an opera but a series of scenes connected (if at all) by dream logic, but within each bit his idiosyncratic musical dramaturgy holds as characters emerge seriatim from the illogic into song. But here drama is entirely suppressed by a production overlay that flattens the human element twice over....

RTWT here.

And there's this by Martin Bernheimer:

The result [of the Robert Lepage staging] is often picturesque, occasionally distracting, sometimes naively literal. When the nostalgic Marguerite sings “D’amour l’ardente flame”, she is dwarfed by a massive replication of her own face while hungry flames lick multiple screens. Before the final curtain, the heroine ascends a seemingly dangerous ladder to heaven, flanked by Christmas-card angels. The production, a variation on multimedia extravaganzas at the Saito Kinen Festival in Japan and the Paris Opéra, reminds us that Lepage has worked similar service for Cirque du Soleil in, yes, Las Vegas

[...]

And so we brace ourselves for the revelations of a revolutionary Ring in 2010. Now Berlioz, next Wagner. Time to turn another Lepage.

RTWT here.