Arts & Events

West Edge Opera currently presents three performances, August 5, 13, and 19, of French composer Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet at their new venue at Pacific Pipe, an abandoned steel factory in West Oakland. I attended the Sunday matinee on August 13. Although based on Shakespeare’s play, many of the bard’s famous lines are missing from the libretto of this opera, the work of Michel Carré who adapted it from a play by Alexandre Dumas père. The great “To be or not to be” speech is truncated. Only “Être ou ne pas être” survives. The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and everything else in this beloved speech are cut. Never-theless, much of the greatness of Shakespeare’s Hamlet comes through in this opera, especially when it is as grandly sung as in this West Edge Opera production. 

Ambroise Thomas premiered his Hamlet in 1868, and it is composed in a late bel canto style, with dazzling coloratura passages, especially for Ophelia (Ophélie in French). The role of Ophélie is here sung by soprano Emma McNairy, and she handles the difficult coloratura of her mad scene with gorgeous singing. More about this mad scene later. The role of Hamlet is here splendidly sung by baritone Edward Nelson, whose voice seems to grow richer and stronger every time I hear him. Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, is elegantly sung by veteran mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer; and the role of Claudius, murderer of Hamlet’s father and newly wed to Gertrude, thereby assuming the throne as king, is convincingly sung by veteran bass Philip Skinner. 

The unitary stage set designed by Jean-François Revon is a stylized abstraction of the wood-trussed Pacific Pipe factory that is the venue for this production, though how this set relates to Hamlet’s Denmark is anyone’s guess. As the orchestral Prelude to Hamlet is played, director Aria Umezawa has Gertrude and Claudius mime the murder of King Hamlet, thereby giving us a kind of flashback that sets up the psychological drama that faces young Prince Hamlet. Little by little, he becomes ever more suspicious that his father was murdered by Claudius with Gertrude’s connivance. This suspicion is enhanced by the fact that his father’s ghost appears to Hamlet and calls for his murder to be avenged. The ghost was here ominously sung by bass Kenneth Kellogg, who appears only as a shadow. As the opera progresses, the ghost appears multiple times, becoming ever more explicit that it was Claudius who killed him and must be killed in turn. But the ghost instructs Hamlet to spare his mother. 

The score by Thomas is full of color, with even a saxophone used to striking effect. As conducted by Jonathan Khuner, the orchestral reduction penned by Khuner displayed Thomas’s highly original orchestration. Trumpets often ring out in a forced effort to create a mood of celebration, when in fact there is little cause for celebration, for, as Shakespeare aptly put it, “Something is rotten in Denmark.” When Hamlet makes his first appearance, dark, brooding cellos introduce the melancholy Dane. He sports a black and white garment that is a cross between a Renaissance tunic and an Oaktown hoodie. (Director Umezawa intended the hoodie as a sop to Oakland fashion.) 

One bit of staging by Aria Umezawa struck me as very questionable. This was when she had Hamlet and Ophélie engage in a torrid simulated sex scene in which Ophélie rips off Hamlet’s shirt and mounts him while he lies supine on a raised platform. They then engage in thrusting away at each other while Ophélie wraps her legs around Hamlet’s shoulders. Though this scene seemed out of place in Shakespeare’s Denmark, it fit right in with Mark Streshinsky’s tenure as General Director of this company, for in an effort to be ‘edgy’ he features at least one such graphic sex scene (and often many) in nearly every West Edge Opera production. (In last year’s Powder Her Face there were so many graphic sex scenes of a sado-masochist sort that even those who applauded this production called it porno-graphic.) 

In Thomas’s Hamlet, Ophélie’s brother Laertes is reduced to a bit player, as is her father Polonius. Laertes was ably sung by tenor Daniel Curran, and Polonius was convincingly sung, in the few passages given him, by bass-baritone Paul Cheak. Hamlet’s famous ‘mousetrap’, a pantomime play he stages in order to “catch the conscience of the king,” does in fact work, angering Claudius who, grown pale at the similarities between the mimed murder of Gonzaga and his own murder of Hamlet’s father, gruffly orders the play stopped and the players summarily dismissed. Earlier, in prepping the players, Hamlet offers them wine and leads them in a merry drinking song that is one of the highlights of Thomas’s score. Later, when Hamlet overhears Claudius and Polonius whispering about the murder of Hamlet’s father, this adds to Hamlet’s anguish, for he wonders aloud how he can think of marrying the daughter of a man who conspired in the killing of Hamlet’s father. Little by little, Hamlet draws away from Ophélie, much to her confusion and dismay. Eventually, Hamlet brusquely tells Ophélie the French equivalent of “Get thee to a nunnery.” 

Ultimately, Ophélie becomes thoroughly unhinged by Hamlet’s apparent betrayal of their fervently professed love, and her mad scene becomes the highlight of Thomas’s Hamlet. As Ophélie, Emma McNairy made the most of her opportunity to show off her ability to sing bel canto coloratura. (Neither her spectacular 2014 title role in Alban Berg’s Lulu nor her role as the raunchy maid in last year’s Powder Her Face by Thomas Adès offered McNairy anything approaching bel canto.) While singing with increasingly frenzied flights of coloratura, Ophélie thinks she sees the image of Hamlet in the waters of a lake, and she wades into the water and drowns. Dramatically, this scene involved Ophélie’s voluminous blue skirt that became the water that swallows her up. This device worked quite well. 

The famous gravedigger scene remains from Shakespeare’s play, though quite truncated. When Horatio and Marcellus, the gravediggers, unearth a skull, there is no “Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him well.” Indeed, when Hamlet asks whose skull this might be, the gravediggers reply “We don’t know.” Horatio was sung by baritone Nick Volkert and Marcellus by tenor Greg Allen Friedman. Nor do Rosencrantz and Guildenstern make an appearance in Thomas’s Hamlet. The ghost of Hamlet’s father makes one last shadowy appearance in the gravedigger scene, insisting that the time for revenge is at hand. So Hamlet at last thrusts his sword into Claudius, killing him. But Hamlet himself is killed by Laertes to avenge the death of his sister, Ophélie, leaving Gertrude bereft of the men in her life, now alone to mourn her fate. 

Set Design was by Jean-François Revon; Lighting Design was by Lucas Krech; and the imaginative Costume Design was by Maggie Whitaker. Conductor Jonathan Khuner led the orchestra in a fine rendition of Thomas’s colorful score. Though differing considerably from Shakespeare’s play, Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet offers a dramatically coherent condensation of this drama. This production of Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet plays one more time, at 1:00 pm on Saturday, August 19, at Pacific Pipe.