Prokofiev: The Love for Three Oranges

by Kent Nagano / Opera National De Lyon

With neat, plain, building-block designs by Jacques Rapp, Louis Erlo's energetically-staged production of Prokofiev's surreal fairy-tale is full of cartoon characters and swift farce. "The Love for Three Oranges" tells the story of a doleful, hypochondriac Prince, who can only be cured through laughter. When he breaks into hysterics at the expense of the evil witch Fata Morgana, she curses him. His fate is to fall in love with three oranges. Speed and good humor make the stage bristle with life and Erlo's sunny conception is typified by the Prince, less an effete neurotic as Jean-Luc Viala plays him than a pure Danny DeVito figure, pear-shaped and peppery. One of Prokofiev's running jokes is the warring camps of opera-lovers who keep wanting to intervene from beyond the proscenium, and Erlo realizes this conceit very effectively, with the Lyon chorus clambering in and out of stage boxes and eventually invading the onstage action.