The Umbrellas of Hangzhou: Opera Boston Premieres Madame White Snake

Between the high-gloss black floor and shrinelike assemblages below black-and-white photographs of unnamed faces on plain white walls, the action seems to take place in an art gallery of the damned. Exotic details few and far between in Robert Woodruff's staging, which leans heavily on descending screens, animated projections, and intensely colored lighting.

Where the production does concede to Chinese opera decorum, we're pleased: instead of the onstage makeouts, we're treated to an oblique aria about serving dinner, while projections convey waves of abstract flesh, like the background of a liquor commercial. The vocal parts do employ some un-western-ish inflection and whooping sprechstimme, and we definitely heard an erhu—a two-stringed instrument that's kind of like the two-stringed jinghu played by That Guy In Harvard Square, though we've been told that's totally, totally different.

For lack of a traditional lady-impersonating dan actor, Madame White Snake's androgynous, green servant Xiao Qing is played by Michael Maniaci, which isn't really a lack at all. Even before the prologue explained that she's a half-human who used to be a snake who used to be a dude, we knew something was up. The modern world suffers from a dearth of singing castrati ("everybody has the right to keep their balls" is Bostonist's working definition of modernity) so we're lucky to have a miraculous male soprano who produces a sound like an effortless pool of Renaissance honey. His green-robed, faux-hawked character describes herself as "the worst of all possible worlds," but her voice—his voice—is the best of at least two.

The chorus is sometimes a Greek one; sometimes the dustbunnies in Totoro, watching curiously and scattering at sudden movements; sometimes a grove of crisp silhouettes, hovering flat and black against intensely-colored backgrounds, and one thinks, This is what an iPod ad with a contemporary opera soundtrack would look like. They express their unease at the unfolding romance in chants and whispers, and the string section makes a sound like a dozen elevators descending. "But isn't Truth the Love that we feel?" Madame asks her husband, who wonders where she and Xiao Qing go every month when they're secretively shedding their skin in a pond.

Abbot Fahai (Dong-Jian Gong, heavily accented but powerful), shares the chorus's disapproval, arriving in autumn with his ancient gutterpunk robes and music like heavy footfalls and low, brassy doom. His encounter with Madame is a murky echo of spring's love-at-first-human-sight. His own thousand-year spiritual quest in the service of Love has led him to the couple. Upon recognizing the snake demon's deception and her cross-species pregnancy, his mission culminates, instead, in a defense of Truth, in the form a bitter, abortifacient tonic to undo the work of Madame's aphrodisiac tea.

Unluckily for her betraying husband, Madame White Snake is the anti-Butterfly. She is not a cornered woman, after all, but a force of nature. The apocalyptic storm she summons up is represented by a monochromatic wave rolling over the cast on a translucent screen. The score is effectively terrifying here, though the costume changes and flaccid kung fu aren't, quite. We are left with Xiao Qing warning against certainties under a floating canopy of tsunami victims, hanging silently from wires.

When Bostonist left the theater, a chorus of drunk children on Tremont street was singing Enrique Iglesias, and the world outside was merely soggy.

The second and third performances of Madame White Snake are this afternoon and Tuesday evening, and it's not like you're going to have another chance to see this opera any time soon, unless you've booked your flight to Beijing.