HOT production of Britten’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ a first for isles

Benjamin Britten is one of the most popular 20th-century composers, and in recent years both the Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra and the University of Hawaii Concert Choir have given local audiences the opportunity to hear his music.

You haven’t heard his best, however, until you’ve heard Britten’s work for opera. That’s the opinion of conductor William Lacey, who grew up listening to Britten’s music in his native England.

“Of course he wrote some very good orchestral pieces and chamber work, and the songs are wonderful. But with him, until you know the operas, you don’t really know him,” Lacey said. “In the operas he shows everything of himself.”

Lacey will conduct Hawaii Opera Theatre’s production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare’s fanciful romantic comedy set to music by Britten, which opens today for three performances. Featuring a new production from HOT artistic director Henry Akina, it will be the first time a Britten opera has been performed here.

“I’ve wanted to do this production since college, which was considerably before I got involved in opera,” Akina said. “It’s been in New York and London and Paris and the great (metropolises) of the world, but this is the first time in Honolulu.”

Admirers of Shakespeare’s complex, comical ode to the trials and tribulations of romance (“the course of true love never did run smooth,” says one of the characters) won’t be disappointed by the operatic adaptation.

Britten and librettist Peter Pears pruned much of Shakespeare’s script but focused on the primary plot points, including the famous flirtation scene between fairy queen Tytania and a half-man, half-ass, while retaining the Bard’s elegant language, adding only a few words of their own. (The production will be performed with supertitles.)

The cast, huge by opera standards, includes three groups of characters: fairies, led by King Oberon, who is at odds with his queen, Tytania, their minions and the mischievous sprite of a character in Puck; “royal” romantic pairs; and “rustics,” who bring some blue-collar comic relief to the story.

BRITTEN’S INVENTIVE, colorful score binds it all together, with individual orchestrations for each group — feathery passages on the celesta for fairies, lush strings for the lovers, brass for the rustics, as well as leitmotifs for individual characters. It represented the culmination of Britten’s musical interests at the time.

Lacey said that a few years prior to “Midsummer Night,” which premiered in 1960, Britten visited Bali and became enthralled by gamelan music. He then set about trying to incorporate the colorful, hypnotic sound of the percussion orchestra into his own work, employing vibraphone, xylophone, glockenspiel, timpani, triangle and bells.

“This piece probably uses more elaborate percussion than any of his previous operas, and they (percussionists) are so busy,” Lacey said. “It’s just two guys who are playing, and they’re just continuously changing instruments, playing everything.”

Singing the two lead roles will be soprano Anne Carolyn Bird as Tytania and countertenor Daniel Bubeck as Oberon. Their fight over a young orphaned boy, whom they want for their own entourage, is akin to the nonsensical battles that entangle longtime couples.

“I want him because she has him,” Bubeck said, describing Oberon’s motivation; meanwhile, Bird-as-Tytania said, “I want him because he wants him.”

The battle throws their magical forest kingdom out of kilter.

“In the opening, Tytania and Oberon are going on about the upheaval that is in the world because they’re fighting,” Bird said.

“The seasons are altered. The spring is not the spring. The leaves are changing color when they’re not supposed to,” Bubeck said.

Comedy ensues when Oberon, trying to manipulate Tytania, asks the mischievous Puck to apply a magic love potion, which gets misused and afflicts the relationship between two bickering couples who are wandering in the forest. The potion also causes Tytania to fall for Bottom, a man whom Puck has transformed into a half-human, half-ass.

It’s a scene that Bird relishes. She gets to sing one of her favorite arias in the opera, telling Tytania’s fairies to “take care of him, and describing all these things that I want to do to him, in very Shakespearian language.”

“It’s so fun because you can be as suggestive as you want to with the music,” she said. “There is a moment that is very PG-13, right at the end. I love it.”

Bubeck’s major moment comes in the first act, where where he sings about Oberon’s sinister plans for Tytania. “I sing about this beautiful place, and this is where I’m going to cast a spell and cause her to have horrible fantasies,” he said. “So it’s my revenge aria, but it begins very evocative of nature and the beauty of nature.”

OPERA FANS will especially enjoy hearing Bubeck’s countertenor voice. The high-pitched male voice, which has a range roughly equivalent to a female mezzo-soprano, is often heard in music of the 17th and 18th centuries but is a relative rarity in opera.

The singing won’t be the only thing to enjoy. Hamming it up as Puck will be Paul Mitri, head of the University of Hawaii-Manoa Theatre and Dance Department. His primarily speaking role has only one line “that I’m supposed to try to find the pitch on,” he said, but he more than makes up for it with a role that has him cavorting on stage throughout the opera.

Mitri said he’s especially enjoying the “dichotomy” of the character. “Britten called him ‘amoral and innocent,’” Mitri said, “so he’ll cause problems but he’s not necessarily mean-spirited. He’s also called a ‘hobgoblin’ and ‘sweetpockets,’ so it’s that kind of duality that I’m playing with.

“I think Shakespeare and opera are very similar. You have the content and the form, and in that form you have to fill it. So the singers have to fill this incredibly difficult music with the passion to go from speaking to singing, and likewise for me: I have to find the passion in movement and not just stand there all the time.”

Inspired by Britten’s score, Akina is presenting the work as a combination of old and new. Much of the costuming is from Edwardian England but with a little bit of “Game of Thrones” thrown in as well, Akina said, saying his concept resulted from “a very visceral response” to the music.

As has become popular in recent HOT productions, projected scenery will allow the characters to travel through a magical forest. “It’s Shakespeare with contemporary means,” Akina said.

This will be a far cry from the last time that Lacey conducted the Britten opera, a 2012 production that was set in a British boarding school for boys and performed in Moscow. That was the first time “Midsummer Night’s Dream” had been performed in the Russian capital in 50 years, having been essentially banned during the Soviet era.

Lacey considers these performances of Britten’s work just as significant.

“Here it’s the first time ever, which is even more important,” he said.