Grimm for Grownups

The opera had all the makings of a flop. The set designer had never designed a set before. The male lead had never sung outside the shower. The conductor could not see the singers onstage.

As for the opera, its last professional U.S. production, seven years ago, had been decidedly unsuccessful. Yet when the Minneapolis Center Opera Com pany presented Carl Orff's The Wise Woman and the King at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater last week, it proved to be one of the most engaging productions of the U.S. opera season.

Wise Woman falls somewhere be tween opera and Broadway musical. Adapted from a fairy tale, it is Grimm for grownups, a Rabelaisian romp peopled with a thieving mule driver, an irascible king, a too-wise queen, and a trio of drunken tramps who keep the action crackling along at a raucous, laugh-a-minute pace. The score is uniquely Orff--primitive rhythms and simple, rustic melodies, punctuated with fanfares and percussive outbursts. Orff, 69, Germany's most famed contemporary composer, believes that "melody and speech belong together," and in his Singspiel style he strives for a marriage in which neither dominates the other. Above all, his Wise Woman is what many operas are not--good theater.

Love & Lust. The opera's resounding success is due in large measure to the brilliantly imaginative staging of Director H. Wesley Balk, 32, who views the fable as a discourse on "spiritual realities, which run from earthy paganism to ethereal mysticism and back again, with lots of love, lust, violence and cruelty in between." To lend more punch to the love and lust departments, Balk deftly reworked several of the couplets, whose stiffly literal translation he believes is the major reason why Wise Woman previously failed in the U.S. Thus

Virtue is a precious dress,

Do not wear it to excess became in Balk's version

Virtue is a pair of pants,

You drop them when you get the chance, and

Good luck, good luck, she is a whore,

When you yourself can keep the score, was changed to

Good luck is a clever whore,

She always keeps you wanting more.

Since the theater's arena stage has no orchestra pit, Conductor Thomas Nee had to direct his 30 musicians behind a scrim curtain at the rear of the set. He followed the action over stereophonic earphones, delivered his cues to a closed-circuit TV camera that the cast monitored on two concealed screens.

Salvation Army. The two-level set was designed by Pop Sculptor Richard Randell, 35, who fashioned a gilt-sprayed throne out of a tangle of exhaust pipes, shock absorbers, grease guns and tireless wheels. On the lower level, he amassed heaps of railroad ties, packing boxes, oversized inner tubes pierced with spikes, and coils of baling wire--"the residue of industrial decay to show the decadent state of the kingdom, a kind of subterranean pop art."

The costumes, traditionally Early Elizabethan, became instead Late Salvation Army; most of the wardrobe was scrounged from thrift shops. The king wore ski pants; his scepter was a three-foot-long egg beater. The queen's ornate crown was made of plastic spoons melted together. One tramp had a hockey player's metal groin protector sewed to this pants, another swigged wine from a rubber enema bag.

Wise Woman was premiered in 1943, has since become one of Orff's most popular works in Europe. Thanks to the enterprising Minneapolis company, founded just two years ago, Orff's fairy tale may live happily ever after in the U.S. as well.

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