Review: Semele Does Boston

Murrihy's voice is especially well-matched with Saffer's, resulting in some gorgeous duets. Reclining on a banquet table, Forsythe made the most of Ino's air "There from mortal cares retiring," showing off a strong, delicious voice that (somewhat inappropriately) overshadowed her boss's.

Despite being sung in English (albeit the kind of English that calls for subtitles), George Frideric Handel's Semele wasn't performed in the U.S. until two hundred and fifteen years after it made its debut as a "secular oratorio" slipped into a series of Lenten concerts at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden. The libretto appalled the pious audiences of 1744, and Opera Boston's staging embraces its irony and the sexual antics without trying too desperately to get into 2008's pants. Bostonist is wary of attempts to sexy up opera for modern audiences—we often feel like somebody ordered us the molten chocolate cake on an awkward first date—so we're relieved that this production smartly maintains a cool distance and an almost indie-film aesthetic. There may be implied fellatio and whatnot, but everything's dressed in hipster-cupcake colors and, thankfully, Boston Baroque doesn't modernize the score, providing a seemingly effortless performance on period instruments and flawlessly expressing the emotional vicissitudes of Handel's score. (For "Myself I shall adore," Semele straddles a mirror and each note she sings echoes back at her from the orchestra pit. And, to Bostonist's childlike amusement, the two harpsichords down did seem to be arranged in a sixty-nine position, resonating with the on-stage improprieties.)

The set is a simple set of identical wallpapered panels, reconfigured between acts, with a pair of double doors under a glowing EXIT sign, like a hotel ballroom divided up and rearranged for different parties of mortals or gods. In the first act, it's just a rectangular space with the aforementioned tables and a roll-down screen, but no later configuration is so effective as this: a slideshow of baby pictures, yearbook portraits, and ungainly glamor shots, projected behind the wedding guests, gives way to streaming video, shot on the fly by Scott Ramsay as Jupiter, who has carried off the bride, fireman-style. Semele, singing "Endless pleasure, endless love," camwhores the news to her family from Mount Cithaeron. It doesn't feel like technology was inserted for the sake of placing the story in the present; this is just what unwise personal choices look like, and they often involve digital video. The bourgeois booty dancing that follows is funny for the Your Mom segment of the audience (they're grooving to classical music! how crazy is that!) and for Bostonist (it's your middle-aged relatives, swinging their hips around! how embarrassing!).

The continued flopping about on tables in the second act doesn't quite live up to the inventiveness of the first act. In act three, the tables are dismissed in favor of couches, and the non-literal interpretation of the libretto gets a bit confusing: is Semele actually consumed by flames, or is she just singing about it? The birth of Bacchus is certainly figurative (rather than from her ashes, as is traditional), as we're transported back to the wedding, where Semele is still the reluctant bride, her sister's still lovelorn and on the floor, but it's okay, because everybody's favorite divinity has arrived in trays of champagne flutes.

Semele will be performed again on Sunday at 3 p.m. (it runs just under three hours, so you'd be out of there just before kick off) and Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. ($10 rush tickets, which go on sale ninety minutes before curtain, require a student ID.)

Lisa Saffer (foreground), Paula Murrihy (background), and Tai Oney (as Athamas, with paisley tie) in a production photograph by Clive Grainger.

Fancy McCulture-Pants aided and abetted this post.