ByteVibes

If a troupe of latter-day vaudevillians wandered into a pristine, 18th-century jewel-box theater and was inspired — or compelled — to perform Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” what might be the result? Mary Zimmerman’s “The Matchbox Magic Flute” offers one answer: a streamlined romp, laden with shtick that hits all the essential plot points but surfs over the depths of the work.

The “matchbox” in the title refers to the toy car brand, and thus the smaller scale of this production, which opened last week at the Shakespeare Theatre. First seen at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre earlier this year, the matchbox version condenses the cast to 10 singers, reduces the orchestra to five players and forgoes a chorus. The score is shortened, too, and the action focuses on the love interest and adventure narrative rather than the musical drama, which grows throughout the opera’s two acts into a grand, sublime, confused cantata of Enlightenment symbolism.

The matchbox may also refer to the toy car’s evocation of nostalgia, which this production is steeped in, for a real or imaginary theater style full of gags, gimmicks and stock gestures. Perhaps this dates to the actual melodramas of the 19th century, or to the silent films of the early 20th century, or to some more recent theme-park or cartoon appropriation of the faux-histrionic style. Zimmerman has made a career of deftly mixing the codes of theater, slipping effortlessly but with comic effect from the poetic to the vernacular, with slangy asides that deflate the epic and the tragic.

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At her best, as in the lovely Ovidian drama of “Metamorphoses,” this creates a state of suspended emotional valences, sad, sweet and silly all at the same time. More recently, it seems to be a defense mechanism, keeping audiences safely distant from the content of the drama if it ever threatens to become truly cathartic. That, alas, is the case throughout this production of “Magic Flute.”

Mozart’s opera, written near the end of his too-short life, is a wild affair, musically and dramatically. It borrows heavily from styles deemed, at the time, high and low, exalted and popular, mixing florid Italian arias with engagingly melodic German singspiel melodies. Dip into the libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder and you instantly see why it is the Mozart opera that has inspired the greatest license among theater directors: This is strange, surreal stuff, full of anthropomorphic birds, dragon-like serpents, callow princes and wily villains, and a morality tale unmoored from any stable sense of morality.

When it comes to the genuinely weird and fanciful in the drama, Zimmerman is strangely conventional. She tells the story pretty much as it plays out in the original. The magnificent overture is cut entirely and the drama opens just as the young prince Tamino, played by Billy Rude, is fighting off a rather unprepossessing monster. With a lot of condensation, it proceeds to the happy ending, with Tamino and his beloved Pamina (Marlene Fernandez) united in love and incorporated into the curiously cultlike realm of Sarastro, a priest-king figure sung by Keanon Kyles.

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Stylistically and dramatically, this is a world of slapstick fairy tale, with costumes (Ana Kuzmanic) and scenic design (Todd Rosenthal) that give it a dinner-theater-meets-Disney storybook quality. Mozart and Schikaneder adapt well to that idiom, and even the most traditional productions of “Magic Flute” use the drama as occasion for slipping in topical and hokey jokes and crowd-pleasing pratfalls.

But Zimmerman’s version lives entirely within her curious aesthetic of detachment, in which very good actors pretend to act in stereotypical ways because they want you to believe they are condescending to outdated dramatic conventions.

So, the director avoids some of the serious problems of the work, which demand solutions rather than elision. The most notorious of these is a character called Monostatos, a Black servant of Sarastro. Monostatos is both a stock villain and a Shylock-like character, who sings a self-lacerating aria about the humanity that underlies the racist perception of his skin color, echoing in tone Shakespeare’s famous plea: “If you prick us, do we not bleed?” It’s an aria that makes contemporary audiences deeply uncomfortable, for obvious reasons.

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Russell Mernagh plays Monostatos as an over-the-top melodramatic villain with a devil’s tail and, at one point, the black top hat of Snidely Whiplash. The topic of race is erased. Problem solved? Or swept under the rug?

The other great challenge of interpreting “Magic Flute” is the relationship between the two protagonists, Sarastro and Pamina’s mother, the Queen of the Night (sung by Emily Rohm). Just below the surface of their conflict one finds a familiar stew of 18th-century antinomies between good and evil, light and dark, male and female, rational and hysterical. But beneath that? The structure of Mozart’s and Schikaneder’s world seems grounded on nothing, merely irrational preference.

That’s a dangerous place to go, even for a contemporary theater director. Zimmerman uses a brief monologue by Sarastro at the beginning of the second act to posit a solution: The Queen of the Night is guilty of bad parenting, smothering her child. But there’s not time nor room nor will to follow through on this conceit, so the drama ends with the Queen and Sarastro apparently reconciled with an ironic wink.

Operatic productions of the work often use plenty of ironic winks, but then the music takes over and the postmodern abhorrence of genuine emotion is suspended. Melodically, the music is recognizable, and there are a few moments when it is properly symbiotic with the drama. The singers are amplified and sing with musical theater voices, small and often pretty, though often with inadequate diction. Rude’s rendition of the aria known as “Dies Bildnis ist bezaubernd schön” is a revelation: a light, lyrical head-voice interpretation that skates easily and happily over the wide skips of the melodic line. This may well be what the original tenor, Mozart’s friend Benedikt Schack, sounded like in 1791.

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Rohm’s big Queen of the Night aria, “Die Hölle Rache,” has plenty of attitude and all the high notes, though the lower reaches want more support and heft. Fernandez is an appealing Pamina, deftly negotiating between genuine vulnerability and conventional damsel-in-distress clichés. Kyles’s Sarastro wants more gravitas in the lower voice, and perhaps more time onstage to develop a sense of character.

The audience responded warmly to the show I saw, perhaps because the musical theater casting makes for a more physically rambunctious evening, with charismatic actors and a livelier sense of repartee. But the whole style, the vaudeville-meets-opera with “let’s put on a show” insouciance, leaves one with the sense that no one takes it quite seriously, including the obligation to give a satisfying account of Mozart’s score.

If you believe I’m a snob for saying so, send me the usual hate mail. But before you do, listen to Otto Klemperer’s great 1964 recording. My inbox is open.

The Matchbox Magic Flute, at the Shakespeare Theatre, runs through June 16. About two hours including intermission. shakespearetheatre.org.

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