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Susan Stroman Brings a Broadway Heart to the Met for ‘The Merry Widow’

Susan Stroman, center, during a rehearsal of “The Merry Widow.”Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

In a chilly room deep within the Metropolitan Opera on the morning after Thanksgiving, a rehearsal was about to start. Susan Stroman looked over at the pianist and spoke a phrase that had quite possibly never before been heard in the high-art precincts of the Met.

“Hit it,” she called out, and the music began.

The language of Broadway has come uptown. For a new production of Lehar’s fizzy operetta “The Merry Widow,” to be uncorked on New Year’s Eve, the Met has turned to Ms. Stroman, who has won five Tony Awards for hit shows like “The Producers,” “Contact” and “Crazy for You” but has struggled over the last few years through a flurry of flops. The company is learning her exotic vocabulary of high kicks and jump splits, and is also adjusting to that operatic rarity: a dual director-choreographer.

“Even scheduling me is unique for them,” Ms. Stroman, dressed in her characteristic uniform of all black, said after a recent rehearsal. “They’ll put me in two different rooms at the same time” — slating the director to work with some actors, for example, at the same time the choreographer is supposed to deal with the cancan dancers.

This “Merry Widow,” conducted by Andrew Davis, is a throwback to “a period of time when Broadway and opera had a freer exchange of talent,” as Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, put it. Not only is Ms. Stroman making her Met debut, but so is the musical theater star Kelli O’Hara, acclaimed in Broadway productions of “South Pacific” and “The Pajama Game” and the recent live television broadcast of “Peter Pan,” here playing Lehar’s ingénue, Valencienne. They join the soprano Renée Fleming, singing Hanna Glawari — who, per the work’s title, has not let the loss of her elderly husband get in the way of some jollity — for the first time.

Ms. Fleming has herself recently dipped her toe into straight theater, appearing last summer at the Williamstown Theater Festival in Massachusetts as — what else? — an opera diva in Joe DiPietro’s comedy “Living on Love,” arriving on Broadway this spring. And while the baritone Nathan Gunn, playing her “Merry Widow” love interest, is perhaps best known for the title role in Britten’s opera “Billy Budd,” last year he sang Billy Bigelow in concert performances of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “Carousel” with the New York Philharmonic.

“The Merry Widow,” and operetta in general, responds well to this blending of worlds, with music that is, at its best, substantial yet effervescent. The work’s librettist, Victor Léon, wrote that operetta “is not caviar for the people. Its purpose is to serve as entertainment, ‘pur et simple.’ ” The genre, characterized by its cheerful stories, catchy tunes and spoken dialogue, is committed above all to pleasing.

“I’ve been telling friends it’s musical comedy with high notes,” Ms. Fleming said by phone. “I’ve never done an operetta before, and it’s lighter in every way.”

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Kelli O’Hara, center, during a rehearsal.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Lehar’s masterpiece, “The Merry Widow,” which had its premiere in Vienna in 1905, was among the greatest theatrical successes of its time. In a recent article on the work for the Cambridge Opera Journal, the operetta scholar Micaela Baranello wrote that by 1921 it had been performed 8,338 times on German-speaking stages. It dominated its genre for decades and inaugurated what became known as the Silver Age of Viennese operetta.

“For all that it respects many established operetta conventions,” Ms. Baranello wrote, “it uses them in a way that is arguably more consistent, creative and dramatically pointed than any other work of its era.”

Full of appealing melodies that wormed their way into the ear of a rehearsal-observing reporter and remained there, maddeningly, for weeks, the work combines the daffy appeal of a farce with the sentimental heart of a romance. Set in Paris and populated largely by diplomats of the Balkan nation of Pontevedro, a thinly disguised stand-in for Montenegro, its plot revolves around the efforts of the Pontevedrin envoy (the veteran baritone Thomas Allen) to keep the tax proceeds from Hanna Glawari’s millions within the state by marrying her to Danilo, a count.

It turns out that Hanna and Danilo were involved long ago but then separated, and their stubborn reluctance to rekindle their love gives the story its tension and warmth. (Will they? Won’t they? Spoiler alert: They will.) A subplot deals with the envoy’s wife, Valencienne, and her halfhearted attempts to ward off the advances of a charming young French aristocrat, Camille de Rosillon (the rising tenor Alek Shrader).

All is resolved amid the titillating chorus-line grisettes of the cabaret Maxim’s, a Parisian landmark. In 1905, this was a location too naughty to depict onstage, and the libretto’s final act transferred the dancing girls to a party at Hanna’s palace. But times have changed, and the Met production fearlessly leads its audience into the heart of Maxim’s, a sea of cancanning crinolines. (The genially traditional sets are by Julian Crouch, and the elaborate Belle Époque costumes by the prolific William Ivey Long, in his Met debut.)

This “Merry Widow” had its genesis as a vehicle for Ms. Fleming. “Renée, who is winding down her operatic career, wanted to do it,” Mr. Gelb said in a phone interview. “And it seemed like the right time and the right place.”

Originally written for performers who specialized in operetta rather than grand opera, Hanna inhabits a largely lower range than the lyric soprano roles Ms. Fleming is known for. (The mezzo Susan Graham will take over the part for performances in April and May.) But the character’s centerpiece aria, the “Vilja Song,” a Pontevedrin faux-folk narrative, is challenging in its lyrical sweep; a new solo, borrowed from Lehar’s “Paganini,” has been interpolated near the end; and the dialogue, not to mention the dancing, will offer a truly new showcase for Ms. Fleming’s abilities.

A “Merry Widow” is staged for its prima donna, pur et simple. But Mr. Gelb had also been on the lookout for the right occasion to invite Ms. Stroman, the latest in a line of Tony winners he has introduced to the company, including Mary Zimmerman (“Metamorphoses”) and Des McAnuff (“The Who’s Tommy”). In 2012, Michael Mayer (“Spring Awakening”) created a “Rigoletto” set in the Rat Pack Las Vegas of the 1960s. Bartlett Sher (“South Pacific”) has directed five productions, and will open next season with Verdi’s “Otello.”

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From left, Renée Fleming, Ms. Stroman and Ms. O’Hara.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Ms. Stroman’s brightly upbeat, extravagantly dancey style makes her in some ways a more difficult fit for opera than these colleagues. One can’t really imagine, for example, a Stroman “Otello.” But “The Merry Widow” actually provides a greater range of dances than most of the musicals she’s done: the lilt of the waltz permeates the first act; the kolo, a traditional Slavic folk dance, is featured in the second; and, of course, the cancan kicks its way through the third, with the grisettes lowering to the stage from the flies

“Not even in a Broadway show do you get that many types of dance that are so extreme,” Ms. Stroman said. “That was a real opportunity for me.”

But her conception of the piece includes emotional depths as well as crackerjack choreography. “Her commercial experience brings a different level of rigor to her work,” Ms. Fleming said of Ms. Stroman. “She also has the choreographic piece, seeing things in pictures and movement. But I’m really happy she goes far beyond that and is willing to invest detailed moments in the scenes. Hardly any directors do that. Opera directors are happy to create a brilliant concept, but they rarely work with singers in a detailed way.”

Ms. Stroman’s Met debut arrives at a sensitive moment in her career. Since her blockbuster staging of “The Producers” closed in 2007, she has failed to score another critical and popular success in New York. Her most recent Broadway production, “Bullets Over Broadway,” an adaptation of the Woody Allen film, received largely negative reviews and closed in August after just 156 performances. (Ms. Stroman said her newest musical, “Little Dancer,” with a book and lyrics by Lynn Ahrens and music by Stephen Flaherty, will travel this summer to the Ahmanson Theater in Los Angeles after receiving a mixed reaction at the Kennedy Center in Washington this fall.)

“You really don’t know what’s going to catch on, do you?” Ms. Stroman said. “It’s a mystery. You just need to do the stories you want to do. You would love for ‘Big Fish,’ ‘Scottsboro Boys,’ ‘Bullets,’ all to be running. But you just don’t know what’s going to take.”

Mr. Gelb said: “Her talent is as great as ever. It’s a question of the material she’s working with. A director and choreographer is only as great as the show.”

So substantial effort has gone into making the “Merry Widow” script and cast as strong as possible. The Met hired Ms. O’Hara, who has been nominated for five Tonys and has a fan base passionate about her luminous, heartfelt performances in both hits like “South Pacific” and misses like “The Bridges of Madison County,” which opened and closed earlier this year.

While she studied opera performance in college and is more secure in her classical technique than many Broadway singers, Ms. O’Hara may have a more slender tone than some Met stars. She has had a few sessions with Ms. Fleming’s coach, Gerald Moore, to build her confidence and sharpen a few aspects of her singing.

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Ms. Fleming in the title role in “The Merry Widow.” “I’ve been telling friends it’s musical comedy with high notes,” she said.Credit...Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

“I don’t pretend to come in here and say, ‘I’ve been treating my voice as carefully as you guys have,’ ” she said during a break in a recent rehearsal. “I want to come in here and use what I think are my strengths.”

The company has commissioned a new English translation from Jeremy Sams, who has become something of a New Year’s Eve staple at the company, devising and writing the Baroque fantasia “The Enchanted Island” in 2011 and translating and directing Johann Strauss II’s operetta “Die Fledermaus” last year.

“Die Fledermaus,” a rather thornier piece than “The Merry Widow,” also gestured toward an opera-Broadway hybrid, with the musical-theater actor Danny Burstein in the speaking role of the drunken jailer, Frosch. The baritone Paulo Szot, a Met regular who sang Falke, won a Tony in 2008 for “South Pacific.”

But the production sagged under a flood of expository dialogue and jokes that didn’t always hit their targets in the cavernous house. “What I’ve learned is, the less dialogue the better,” Mr. Gelb said. “The Met is built for opera singing, not for spoken lines.”

“The Merry Widow,” for which Mr. Sams has memorably rhymed “chanteuses” and “floozies,” among innumerable other couplets, aims to be less talky than “Fledermaus,” and the speaker system will be more sophisticated this year to make the spoken lines clearer. (Just the dialogue will be amplified, never the singing.)

The main challenge is opera’s compressed schedule, especially for works in which the precise timing of jokes is integral. Adjustments can be made in rehearsal — a keyhole through which some “Merry Widow” characters spy on others, for example, was moved from one side of a door to the other to make the sight gag funnier — but New Year’s Eve is still the production’s first outing before a paying audience.

“Your first preview is your opening night, and that’s pressure,” Ms. Stroman said. “And with a comedy, there’s a thing we say downtown where you ‘ride the audience.’ You surf the audience, meaning you learn where to stop, where to go, where to keep moving. But I’m afraid we’re just going to go for it up here.”

“Downtown,” by the way, is how Ms. Stroman refers to the Broadway theater district, as opposed to the Met, which is “up here” in her personal lexicon. The two will come about as close as they ever have on Dec. 31. Hit it.

A correction was made on 
Jan. 4, 2015

An article last Sunday about the director Susan Stroman’s new version of the Lehar operetta “The Merry Widow,” in a fresh English translation by Jeremy Sams, misidentified the composer of the operetta “Die Fledermaus,” which Mr. Sams translated and directed in 2013. He was Johann Strauss II, not Offenbach.

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section AR, Page 8 of the New York edition with the headline: A Beating Broadway Heart at the Met. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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