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Manon lescaut sf opera1/7/2023 The first act also had to contend with the Sean Panikkar effect (that's Sean above). I'm not sure how the scene could be staged intelligently, but the solution here seemed to be "keep it moving at all costs" and it screamed "OperaLand!" That is, except for one weird guy who turns out to be the tenor, who is dressed in blue just so you'll know he's The Romantic Hero. The first act is supposed to be set at a country inn populated by students, gamblers, townsfolk and so on, but in this production you can't tell if the scene is supposed to be inside or outside, and the stage is so continuously busy it starts to look like Grand Central Station, except that everybody is dressed in beige outfits. She is also a wonderful actress, though you wouldn't necessarily know it from this production where she appears as a Zombie Ingenue in Act One, an Idiot Kept Woman in Act Two, and a Dingbat Victim in Acts Three and Four. The reason to see this production is on account of the superstar diva, the Finnish soprano Karita Mattila who is in her prime and who can seemingly sing anything beautifully. The French composer Massenet's greatest opera is his 19th century treatment of the same tale, and in that version the story sort of makes sense, but the Puccini version is a ridiculous mixture of highlights from the Prevost novel and the composer's own obsession with pathetic, masochistic, dying women. The original eighteenth-century novel by Abbe Prevost was probably quite interesting, painting a corrupt French society through the tale of a good girl on her way to the convent who goes bad, and then who gets punished way out of proportion to her actual misdeeds. Though the music is continuously interesting, the opera has to be one of the dumber pieces in the operatic repertory, and that's saying something. Puccini's early opera "Manon Lescaut" opened a 7-performance run November 18th at a San Francisco Opera Sunday matinee.
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