A sound rule of operatic thumb: A director may take all sorts of liberties with the time and place of a time-honored opera, provided he knows what he’s doing and can get away with it.
Director Stephen Lawless, whose poignant and often hilarious take on “Falstaff” opened Friday in the Carpenter Theatre at Richmond CenterStage, is an old and assured hand with Verdi’s last opera.
Verdi based his “Falstaff” on Shakespeare’s farce, “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” in which the fat, amorous, scheming, hard-drinking, aging and self-deluding Sir John Falstaff gets his come-uppance at the hands of two equally scheming housewives.
Sir John wants to seduce the good ladies as a prelude to grabbing their husbands’ fortunes. As “Falstaff” plays out, these merry matrons of Windsor would like nothing better than to smother the fat knight in stinking laundry and toss him in the River Thames.
Lawless has fast-forwarded “Falstaff” from Shakespeare’s England to the late 19th century. He’s reset the action largely in a theater in which our corpulent knight is an actor-manager all too mindful of time and mortality.
The effect, in Lawless’ retelling, is a hugely affecting valentine to the theater, which couldn’t be more appropriate as the opera world celebrates Verdi’s 200th birthday this year.
“Falstaff” is no “Aida.” Don’t expect visual grandeur and soaring arias at the Carpenter Theatre. Instead, the story — plots and subplots — is told mostly through the interaction among characters as they negotiate Verdi’s intricate and rich score, which ends in a triumphant vocal fugue that has to be heard to be believed.
“Falstaff” requires performers as adept at acting as they are at singing. That’s where Lawless’ production succeeds, beginning with the wonderful introspection that baritone Stephen Powell brings to the title character. His Falstaff is just as foolish as Shakespeare’s King Lear, but this is foolishness raised to a majestic level.
The rest of the cast — 10 named characters, to say nothing of 26 chorus members and four supernumeraries, all backed up by conductor Joseph Rescigno’s on-target 51-member orchestra — follows Powell’s lead splendidly as actors and singers.
At first, scenic and costume designer Russell Craig’s gray-and-green-painted brick walls suggesting the corridors of an ancient elementary school may be off-putting, but only until we realize we’re backstage in a theater. Those walls do all sorts of inventive things, as do the profusion of red-velvet drapery that reinforces the theater idea.
Craig’s costumes take their main cues from late 19th-century dress, but hold a lot of delightfully anachronistic surprises, and Pat Collins’ lighting is in sync as the increasingly rollicking proceedings wend their way toward a cream-pie-throwing finale.
“Falstaff” gets the Norfolk-based Virginia Opera’s 2013-14 Richmond season off to a splendid start.