Part of their "Fallen Women" season (Manon Lescaut, Boulevard Solitude and La Traviata), WNO's production of Puccini's Manon Lescaut toured in Spring 2014. For all his populist tunes I love Puccini and I have always been a huge fan of WNO but I had never seen Manon Lescaut on stage. As a result I was really looking forward to this production and became quite excited on first seeing the set. The magnificent WNO orchestra struck up, the huge chorus swept in disciplined lines across the stage, back projection kicked in, everything was going so well - and then it all started to go wrong.
Basically this was a modernist film noir style production set on a railway station with a Matrix style chorus and back projection effects for cityscapes and trains. Except that it didn't really work because it hadn't been thought through and was littered with non-sensical elements that left most of the audience confused and irritated. Why were there air stewardesses who became guards? Was the near naked woman necessary, or clasping his breathing mask to her nether regions? Why was the phone off the hook? Why have the cheap station seats in the supposedly posh bedroom ("Look at the Gold and the Colour" they sang in the monochrome space)? Why interact with elements of the station set when you are pretending to be somewhere else, it destroys the illusion? But most importantly, why create such a theatrically complex production around a core cast who can sing but can't act?
This was a disaster barely rescued by the music ...
