Trouble in Tahiti and L'Histoire du Soldat

The troublesome score and libretto of Trouble in Tahiti isn't worth the trouble. Leonard Bernstein's pretentiously modern one-act opera is an attack on hollow suburbia. Even in 1952, when it was written, that was a boringly standard iconoclasm. The music is generally wearisome, the libretto, also written by Bernstein, generally clumsy.

Directors David Sloss (the music) and George Hamlin (the staging) have adopted this problem child and provided a musically competent, visually disastrous production unhappily married. The suburban couple (Richard Lee and Miriam Boyer) have adequate voices, but are sorely tried by Bernstein's libretto. Only Danny Kaye could enunciate some of the convoluted lines without dragging the tempos. Those scenes, which like Leete's locker-room soliloquy were more musical comedy than opera, were the most successful.

But neither Leete nor Miss Boyer knows how to move onstage. Leete occasionally relaxed enough not to look pained, but Miss Boyer was obviously frightened by the smallest prop manipulations. The general staging was no help. The two principals played against fuzzy, torn transparencies in a ramshackle slatboard set that was simply disgraceful, and moved underneath two ugly purple-specked quadrangles that had absolutely no function. An engaging jazz trio that sang mocking platitudes with Gleem-bright smiles was a lonely ray of grace amid the general desolation.

John Lithgow and James Paul's Histoire du Soldat is witty, charming, visually engaging--everything that Trouble is not. Stravinsky's score is a minor classic and the seven-piece ensemble plays with precision and grace. The English text by Michael Flanders and Kitty Black occasionally becomes more childish than childlike in its rhyming, but it captures the spirit of the original Russian folk tale more closely than the French text of C.F. Ramuz.

Lithgow stages this tale of a soldier bargaining with the devil and learning better, with whimsy verging on burlesque. Lithgow himself plays the devil as a slithery eccentric who goes after souls with a butterfly net. The ubiquitous Arthur Friedman as narrator bounces in and out of the action, as does a chameleon chorus that appears as everything from peasants to sheep to a fluid landscape. Philip Heckscher, the soldier, is appropriately ingenuous but his voice often betrays uncomfortable strain. Jane Mushabac has choreographed the play. Her group dances have wit but become overly frantic when Lithgow's devil gets twitchingly carried away with himself. Mushabac gives a long puzzling, oriental dance to the Princess (Beverly Hirschfield) that slows Histoire's pace. The Princess bends her arms and legs at right angles like a beautiful girl forced into Sumo wrestling.

Lithgow has been content to make a mere fairy tale out of what may have been meant with more seriousness. But if it has none of the pretensions of Trouble in Tahiti, Histoire du Soldat is warm, charming theatre.