Theater Review—

A Director’s Swan Song, ‘Opera Comique’

Is Highly Entertaining In Sherman

By Julie Stern

SHERMAN — I grew up as part of a whole class of low-brows who pronounced the credo “I hate opera but I love Carmen.”

Does that sound familiar to you? If so, it will make it ironically easy to appreciate Nagle Jackson’s farce Opera Comique, which traces the complicated shenanigans of the occupants of adjoining boxes in the Grand Tier of the Paris theater Opera Comique. Sherman Players have weekend performances scheduled until August 4 of this work. It is an enjoyable production by the local theater.

The plot is telegraphed by the title: serious works are presented at the more prestigious Opera Grand, which caters to genuine aficionados of music. The Opera Comique, meanwhile, is a place where arrivistes and boulevardiers go to be seen, to form trysts and connections, and to hang out at the bar between acts. On this night, as we are informed by the long-suffering and rather venial usher Odile, the theater is staging the premiere of a new work by Georges Bizet — you guessed it… Carmen!

Bizet, who has reserved the middle Box Five,  is outraged that the creation he spent so much time and energy on is to be wasted on this collection of bourgeois philistines. Supported and consoled by his loyal friend, Ernest Guiraud, Bizet wanders through the theater, and thereby misses the tangled intrigues occurring all around him.

In Box Three, Madame and Monseiur de la Corniche have brought their daughter Viviane to the premiere in order to arrange a marriage with the occupants of Box Seven: young Hector Vigneron, and his father, Parisian gentleman Paul Vigneron (who is actually the lover of Viviane’s mother).

Hector is an oversexed but inexperienced schoolboy, drooling over every woman he sees, including Madame de la Corniche, Odile the usher, and Martine, a cabaret hustler who dreams of seducing the elderly composer Charles Gounod (famous for Faust) in the hope that she can get him to write her a part in an opera about Mary Magdelene.

To her mother’s distress, Viviane is more interested in the sophisticated older man, Paul, than she is in his oafish son, who spends his time jumping the bones of every female in reach. She and her future father-in-law settle into some hanky panky behind the door of Box Seven.

Meanwhile, when Hector blunders into Box Five where Gounod has stashed the luscious Martine, things get out of hand and Gounod is forced to wield his trusty sword cane. Since nobody is actually watching the actual opera, it is up to the characters in Jackson’s play to provide the sturm und drang…

How this works as an entertainment depends of course on the quality of the actors and director, and in this case it’s a slam dunk. Jane Farnol has chosen this to be her swan song as director. She demonstrates conclusively what a bummer this decision is for local theater goers. Farnol is, in this reviewer’s opinion, the best director around, and shows it in the quick pacing, the physical comedy, and the spot on nuances of characterization which she coaxes from her cast.

There was plenty to like from the actors’ performances. I especially enjoyed Jenny Shuck and Kate Morris as the Corniche mother and daughter, rivals in love, caught in a family dynamic, and yet the mother so much a mirror of what the daughter will grow up to be.

Sam Everett as the hulking goofball Hector was very funny, as was Sherman veteran John Taylor as the gleefully smarmy Gounod.

Pilobolus veteran Adam Battelstein was wonderful as the creatively tormented Bizet, and Charles Roth was sincerely moving as his friend Ernest, the only non-hypocrite in the bunch.

Laura Gilbert was properly snide as Odile, while Sara Panaccio was lusciously seductive as La Tartine.

The cast was rounded out by a droll Jeff Rossman as Viviane’s father, and Jeff Solomon as Hector’s.

Everything in this production was enhanced by Bill Gilbert’s set design and Terry Hawley’s costumes, which evoked the period of 1875 Paris perfectly.

In short this made for a highly entertaining evening at the theater.

(Performances continue Friday and Saturday, August 4-5, at 8 pm, at Sherman Playhouse.

See the Enjoy Calendar, in print and online, for ticket and other details.)