Mastering the Wild Things

By Michael Walsh

When Maurice Sendak's dark fantasy Where the Wild Things Are first appeared between covers in 1963, some adults were disturbed by its unapologetic depiction of a child's raw emotions. In the deceptively gentle pastels of the slender 338-word book lurked naked monsters from the id, great horned behemoths who "gnashed their terrible teeth and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws" to the book's naughty young hero, Max. One alarmed reviewer wrote that Sendak's volume should not be "left about where a sensitive child might find it to pore over in the twilight." Children, with a greater capacity to find innocent pleasure in phantasms than their fearful elders, almost immediately took to Wild Things, making it one of the most popular of Sendak's books.

Now adults face a new test of their mettle. Where the Wild Things Are, a 45- minute opera with music by British Composer Oliver Knussen and sets, costumes and libretto by Sendak, received its American stage premiere two weeks ago at the Minnesota Opera in St. Paul. Like the book, the opera promises to become a minor classic.

This is in large measure Sendak's doing. The Connecticut-based author and illustrator, who also designed a sparkling production of Prokofiev's The Love for Three Oranges that premiered at the New York City Opera last month, has brilliantly re-created his fable for the stage, giving it a disarming, storybook two-dimensionality. There is the wolf-suited Max (Soprano Karen Beardsley), a youthful holy terror who hangs his Teddy bear and decapitates his toy soldiers. There is Max's snug bedroom, where he is commanded to repair without supper after his mother (Mezzo Mary King) loses patience with his antics. Just as in the book, the room blossoms into an enchanted forest and is, in turn, transformed into a broad ocean upon which floats a bark named Max that takes the boy to the volcanic land of the Wild Things. Even the smoke-snorting sea monster that pops up from the waves to terrorize Max makes an onstage appearance.

But most impressive are the Wild Things. Standing nine to twelve feet tall and made of Lycra, a synthetic fabric, stretched over an aluminum frame and adorned with yak hair, they are remarkably lifelike and utterly faithful to Sendak's vision. Actors inside the costumes manipulate the mouths and arms by means of levers, while technicians in the audience control the movements of the eyes and noses. (The singers who provide the voices of the creatures are miked offstage.) Even jaded adults get a joyful frisson when Moishe, Tzippy, Bruno, Bernard and Emil come bouncing onstage, rolling their terrible eyes and gnashing their terrible teeth. Constructed by Britons Paul and Gill Fowler for the world premiere of the opera at Glyndebourne last year, they were refined and improved for the American production. Brought to life by Knussen's witty score, which slyly quotes from composers as disparate as Mussorgsky and Debussy, they may be the most engaging anthropomorphs to appear on the operatic stage since Maurice Ravel breathed life into a Chinese cup, a cat and a tree in L'Enfant et les Sortileges, the 1925 prototype for Wild Things.

Knussen, 33, who came to international attention as a l5-year-old when he conducted his Symphony No. 1 with the London Symphony Orchestra, employs a free but conservative modern idiom to conjure up Max's fantastic experiences. In one scene, when the Wild Things, having discovered that little Max is the wildest thing of them all, crown him their king, Knussen appropriates the obsessive, bell-like motif of the coronation scene from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov. Especially effective is the naively Stravinskian Wild Rumpus, in which Max and his cohort dance a childish bacchanale in praise of anarchy. Knussen, while no avant-garde pathbreaker, has become a solid craftsman in the sturdy British tradition of William Walton and Arnold Bax.

Director Frank Corsaro staged Wild Things vividly, reveling in Max's violent rebelliousness and setting the Wild Things lurching about with a barely restrained glee. The tessitura, or range, of the role of Max lies high, which impeded the clarity of Beardsley's diction (When will composers writing in English realize this?), but she sang sweetly and admirably captured the boy's moods, including his relieved penitence at the end. In the pit, Pinchas Zukerman led the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra in a confident and polished performance. Recently, the costumes for the 1981 Corsaro-Sendak production of Janakcek's The Cunning Little Vixen at the New York City Opera were destroyed by fire in a New Jersey warehouse. The sting of that loss, however, should be partly assuaged by the pair's Minnesota triumph. Even if, musically, Wild Things is not on the exalted level of the Ravel and Janakcek works, it should still be given the chance to delight every child and terrorize every parent in the land.