'The Rake's Progress' deserves, and got, laughs

PRINCETON - Igor Stravinsky's theatricality often seemed to exist more in his musical imagination than in any external staging. How often has

The Rite of Spring

been choreographed all that successfully?

So the belly laughs that greeted Stravinsky's 1951 neoclassic opera The Rake's Progress in a new Princeton Festival production were as surprising as they were warranted in a work whose composer and librettists (W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman) were among the wittiest individuals of their time but created an opera whose laughs tend to be quiet and cerebral.

What made the difference here Sunday was a capable cast, the X-ray intelligence of Steven LaCosse's staging, and a factor that, by itself, should be worth the drive for next Sunday's performance: the size-appropriate McCarter Theater.

Character-driven laughs truly register in this 1,100-seat house. Thus, the opera itself (which is hardly as sturdy as La Boheme) projected more momentum than usual, overriding occasional moments when singers and orchestra struggled and the spare production gave only a sketchy sense of time and place. Those who were overheard at intermission complaining about the opera's lack of tunes nonetheless stayed to the end. And why wouldn't you?

Tunes or not (and they are there), The Rake's Progress is a heap of fun. Stravinsky aped Mozart and Rossini on the surface (and enjoyed the pretense of doing so) in a classic deal-with-the-devil morality tale that takes a young man away from his sweetheart and into dissolute 18th-century London, where he marries a sideshow freak (Baba the Turk) and ends up in Bedlam.

Behind the intricate libretto's art-for-art's-sake rhymes, Stravinsky's music had a humanity not always apparent in higher-concept productions. This one went in for ornate period costumes, leaving the London cityscapes and lonely graveyards to be conveyed with shadow silhouettes on the screen - framed and facilitated by old-fashioned footlights. You were reminded in a gentle Brechtian way that this is indeed theater (as opposed to a refraction of real life). Also in that spirit, the epilogue was sung by singers in backstage makeup robes. Less-obvious smart touches were everywhere: Choruses that can merely bustle made key dramatic points.

The opera's musical components don't always fit easily. More seasoned ensembles than the Princeton Festival Orchestra (conducted by Richard Tang Yuk) have struggled harder with the score. Vocal lines aren't very vocal, but the singers made sense of them thanks to a strong sense of their characters. So even when tenor Lawrence Jones was vocally overtaxed by the title role, the dramatic inference he brought to everything he sang compensated for lack of vocal weight. Soprano Jodi Burns (Anne Trulove) was just the opposite - too much vocal weight to navigate details - though her appealing presence went a long way.

As the demonic Nick Shadow, Kevin Burdette had a commanding baritone juxtaposed against dramatic points effectively made with glances, nuances, and a restrained physical vocabulary. As Baba the Turk, Cindy Sadler almost made you forget she was a bearded lady, so much did she project matronly warmth behind extravagant egotism. You loved her from her first note - along with the rest of the opera.