Camping on Olympus

Everything was out of date in Kansas City--and they went about as far as they could go to make it that way.

At the Nelson Gallery of Art, a stage festooned with candelabras was the setting for a recital of faded favorites by such composers as Rossini, Liszt and Chabrier. On the Liberty Memorial Mall, an old-fashioned fireworks display climaxed a promenade concert of orchestral chestnuts (Suppe's Poet and Peasant Overture, Strauss's Blue Danube). All over town last week--from century-old French costumes and sketches at the public library to art nouveau table settings at Halls department store--the style was redolent of the era of the potted palm.

The occasion for these campy carryings-on was a festival of 19th century music presented by Kansas City's venturesome, three-year-old Performing Arts Foundation. Producer Lawrence Kelly, borrowed for the occasion from the Dallas Opera, billed his "Nineteenth Century Affair" as an attempt to capture the "gaiety and spirit of the romantic era." Nowhere did it succeed more effervescently than in the centerpiece of the week-long festival: a polished, witty production of Jacques Offenbach's 1858 operetta, Orpheus in the Underworld.

Fine Froth. Offenbach, a dapper dynamo with a prolific melodic gift and a boffo theatrical sense, made the French comic opera of his time into the granddaddy of today's musical comedy. In Orpheus, his first big success, he took what were then scandalous liberties with the Greek legend in order to parody Gluck's opera Orfeo et Euridice, to spoof solemn antiquity worship, and to satirize the manners and morals of the Second Empire under Napoleon III. His fiddle-playing Orpheus is glad to be rid of the unfaithful Eurydice until a character called Public Opinion forces him to complain to Jupiter. The gods, bored with ambrosia and the Olympian idyl, squabble rebelliously; and Jupiter, when he descends to the underworld to investigate Orpheus' complaint, is so taken with Eurydice that he arranges the plot in order to take her away from Orpheus at the end.

The Kansas City production, deftly directed by Ellis Rabb and churned to a fine froth by Conductor Nicola Rescigno, skipped along with the sauce and savoir-faire of a boulevardier on the Champs Elysees. Effective as the singing was--notably Frank Porretta's mugging Orpheus, Jack Bittner's crafty Jupiter and Jeanette Scovotti's vapid Eurydice--it was almost overshadowed by Zachary Solov's spirited, stylish choreography, brilliantly danced by New York City Ballet Stars Melissa Hayden and Jacques D'Amboise. With the help of Jack G. O'Brien's updated English libretto, the buffoonery as well as the bite struck a contemporary nerve: the god Mercury was decked out like the symbol of the telephone company, and Public Opinion drew a loud, if edgy, laugh with her reassurance that she was enforcing marital fidelity only onstage, not in the audience.

Final proof that the show was an authentic triumph was in the enthusiastic applause of French Theater Manager Jean Robin. He went away convinced that Kansas City's Orpheus should be exported to Paris.

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