Photo by Kyle Flubacker
Ascending the elevator to Winspear Opera House in Dallas, Texas, feels like climbing into a giant glass spaceship. Floor to ceiling windows tower above its atrium, and the glowing red interior exudes a sleek, Death Star charm. Dallas Opera’s Don Carlo promised a true spectacle, boasting a starry cast and a house renowned for its acoustics. Staff at all levels were courteous, kind, and accommodating. Attendees ranged from young students to stylish hipsters to white-haired grandees. Sequins sparkled in the dim ambience. In the auditorium, multicolor lances plunged downward in a spectacular chandelier, retracting into pinprick stars as the lights dimmed. The scene was set for a special evening – and a special evening was what we got.
When Stephen Costello, playing the title role, began Don Carlo’s Fontainebleau aria in Act I, one realized that the strength of the show would be the music. Costello is suited for this role. Despite a few early dropped notes, the tenor stayed on even footing throughout the night. Costello was particularly strong in his scenes with Elisabetta, sending notes of despair slicing across the audience as the two wrap themselves in a duet of plaintive, forbidden love. Etienne Dupuis as Rodrigo, the good-guy bosom-brother of Don Carlo, leans into his ability to convey fraternal love with a warm, noble baritone. Dupuis’ “Per me giunto…O Carlo, ascolta”, is an aching thing. His musical sensitivity is astonishing. Some play Rodrigo’s sacrifice as defiant, others as sad and inevitable. Dupuis chooses the latter, easing on and off the vocal gas with surging fortissimi and gentle diminuendi. As my companions (both Don Carlo first-timers) pointed out, the plot does not fully prepare one for Rodrigo’s sudden death. It takes a standout performance of this sequence to achieve credibility, and Dupuis delivered.
Christian Van Horn as King Philip is a force to behold. Physically imposing, Van Horn combines an intimidating stage presence with a resonant, butterscotch bass-baritone befitting a king. The centerpiece of the role is Philip’s Act III showstopper, “Ella giammai m’amò.” It was hard to tell whether his interpretation was rushed at times, or the orchestra simply lagged. There was a moment when Van Horn, during the King’s aria, opened his mouth and poured out a cascade of sound, subtly turning his head in anguish, filling the house with a virile power, like warm water from a hose. In his podcast, Van Horn has said that he’s prepared his whole life for the role. His goal is to play Philip in every major house in the world. One can only hope he does.
In her garden scene, Clementine Margaine, playing the Princess Eboli, sounded thick-voiced at first, but gained strength in her “O don fatale,” as her voice filled with anguish and determination. Nicole Car was Elizabeth. Her quicksilver voice played cool and bitter during “Tu che la vanità.” Car is an excellent singing actor whose grace and stage presence portrayed the despairing queen with fatalistic dignity. Rounding out the leading cast was the cavernous bass Morris Robinson, whose tectonic voice and presence lent an ideal aura of terror to his Grand Inquisitor.
The direction was less impressive. In his program note, director Louis Desire argues persuasively for Don Carlo’s enduring power and relevance: “It may seem strange, but Don Carlo is not a love story,” he writes. “Here, time drifts without ever healing a wound.” Desire wants us inside the minds of the protagonists; he urges us to recognize the limitations of force through “symbols of a power already cracking, of a monarchy kneeling under the weight of a more terrible throne.” This is a vision for our time. Unfortunately, the projections, lighting, blocking, and set design were inadequate to the task of conveying the universal, ineffable, and perhaps – as Verdi suggests – inevitable forces shaping and eventually destroying the lives of the principals.
The high water mark of these supporting creative forces came at the start of the show – disembodied hands claw the curtains back to Don Carlo standing on a broken cross, bathed in a spotlight, flakes of ashes swirling around him. A black-voiced monk – the bass Raymond Aceto – sings offstage, and a clutch of dark-cloaked figures stand to the side, motionless and waiting. Carlo is shivering; the ashes could well be snow or leaves. A projection of a huge naked corpse – presumably that of Charles V, but also an obvious allusion to the themes of mortality and hubris throughout Don Carlo – emerges into the giant screen above. The orchestra – in excellent form under the baton of Emmanuel Villaume – rose and fell in a wash of browns, golds, and reds, at times sparkling, at others, ominous, and always crisp. All of these elements created a startling sonic and visual effect.
Unfortunately, the novelty of the tableau wore off quickly. Diego Mendez-Casariego’s set design is anchored by a toppled cross that, while evocative at first, became an inert signifier. The dark-cloaked figures slowly shuffled off-stage without imparting much of the theocratic dread illustrated by Verdi’s shadowy score. In Act III, ropes descend like serpents to the stage, denoting an abstract prison – effective as visual theater, but nonsensical in practice. When Rodrigo visits Don Carlo in prison, the infante grips the rope, presumably tied up for interrogation, which requires an unnecessary imaginative leap – even by opera’s standards.
Some of the night’s shortcomings came down to execution, some to conception, some to both. Consider the lighting. “To give these young characters the cinematic intensity their tragedy deserves,” Desire writes, “light and projection will carve the space, shifting it constantly, so that each moment seems to breathe, to shimmer, to change its skin.” Lighting, therefore, is a critical component to the director’s vision. It failed both in execution and design. Led (in a last-minute program change) by lighting designer Driscoll Otto and projection designer Zachary Borovay, the projections – with the notable exception of the giant naked corpse looming over the participants like a cosmic grand inquisitor – were flat and uninspiring. The Act I scene I garden scene is accompanied by a pixelated projection of manicured hedges straight out of a late ‘90s video game, the mood-lit backdrop a paltry substitute for meaningful world-building. There was even a moment in Act III where the spotlight shone against the supertitles for an extended time, and throughout the show, there were abrupt changes in its hue and intensity.
Even the costumes failed to support the dynamic performances of the orchestra and vocalists. According to the director, the costumes are meant to evoke a feeling of “not [belonging] to any country or city.” But from the audience, the costumes – led again by Mendez-Casariego, doubling as costume designer – landed somewhere between Renaissance Fair and Star Wars, achieving the effect of neither. The blocking vacillated between “park and bark” and awkward and touchy in a way that, according to one of my companions, felt (pejoratively) “sweaty.” Don Carlo and Rodrigo, for instance, hold hands and walk slowly back and forth, angled, at times, away from the audience, disconnecting us from the flood of beautiful singing. In the famed scene between the King and Grand Inquisitor, Robinson grabs Van Horn’s hand in a sort of death grip, at odds with the essential infirmity of his character.
One hopes that some of these miscues might be chalked up to opening night inconsistencies, but I fear that the creative team’s vision may exceed its grasp. In any case, this is a Don Carlo to hear in the house.
