BWW Reviews: WIDOW is Not Very Merry with Fleming in Charge at the Met

Once upon a time, the Met used to be able to pull off an operetta, like the Rudolf Bing-era FLEDERMAUS, with its Garson Kanin libretto and lyrics by Broadway's Howard Dietz. But for the second year in a row--after last season's dire FLEDERMAUS from writer Douglas Carter Beane and director Jeremy Sams--the company rolled the dice and came up craps. How bad is the new production of Franz Lehar's THE MERRY WIDOW (DIE LUSTIGE WITWE)? Let me count the ways.

The cast of characters includes:

Director Susan Stroman, who should never have taken on the project while she was in the midst of creating the production for the Flaherty-Ahrens THE LITTLE DANCER at Kennedy Center. That production was miles more creative and entertaining than WIDOW (which didn't have much that was distinctive) even if they both suffered from the same shortcoming: the libretto/book. At the Met, the culprit was...

Librettist Sams, who should be banned from the Met after his dual disasters of FEDERMAUS and WIDOW, with not half a wit between them. (Granted, he only directed FLEDERMAUS and did better with the Met's Baroque pastiche THE ENCHANTED ISLAND.) Of course, he was not helped in the matter by...

Soprano Renee Fleming, the merry widow of the title, who was game enough, but really isn't a comic actress (no matter what the producers of her Broadway-bound "Living on Love" say). She's just way too high-falutin' for the down-to-earth Hanna Glawari, no matter how much she tries. She looked great and sounded finecthough her "Vilja," one of the score's highlights, didn't have its usual sure-fire effect--but she's too stiff for a role that calls a more relaxed approach. And she wasn't helped at all by...

Baritone Nathan Gunn, as Count Danilo, who looked like he wondered what he was doing in this production. Again, he sounded fine but seemed very uncomfortable, unlike...

Broadway's Kelli O'Hara, who seemed most at home amidst the silliness of the story--the mythical country of Pontevedro (a stand-in for Montenegro) is about to go broke and needs local-girl Hanna to marry a local-boy (Danilo) to keep her money at home. O'Hara's Valencienne. the wife of the Pontevedran ambassador to Paris (the veteran baritone Thomas Allen in a non-singing but well-played role) and is having an affair that is one of the show's worse-kept secrets. She showed off a lovely, trained soprano that she doesn't get to use much on Broadway but might be a bit slender for the 4000-seat Met.

All this is not to say that there's no fun at all in the production (and, thankfully, it is shorter than the Wagnerian proportions of FLEDERMAUS last year). Conductor Yves Abel conducted a lively version of the score with the Met orchestra and the best of all the numbers was the all-male "Who Can Tell What the Hell Women Are," where Gunn was at his best. And the can-can Stroman featured in the scene at Maxim's, the famed Parisian restaurant, was lively, if too repetitive. (I kept waiting for Dolly Levi to make her entrance, which, alas, never came.)

As for the operetta's most famous music, "The Merry Widow Waltz," it kept reminding me of Alfred Hitchcock, who used it famously in SHADOW OF A DOUBT. I kept hoping this production might have a murder of its own--just to liven things up.

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Photo: Kelli O'Hara as Valencienne with the Grisettes at Maxim's

Photo by Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera

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