‘Romeo and Juliet’ gets update at Hawaii Opera Theatre

Sometimes we enjoy Shakespeare’s lofty language so much that we forget how good a storyteller he was.

So it is always pleasing to have one of his stories adapted to another art form, especially when the story is “Romeo and Juliet” — certainly the greatest romantic tragedy the world has ever known — and the adaptation is into opera, an art form so powerful that merely to describe something as “operatic” is to imply over-the-top dramatics.

Hawaii Opera Theatre’s production of “Romeo and Juliet,” set to the music of the great French composer Charles Gounod to a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carre, promises nothing less. The production will present the story of the star-crossed lovers in modern style, with a contemporary, minimalist set, urban hipster costuming and other references to modern life.

Many of the principal artists in the production bring a relatively fresh outlook to “Romeo and Juliet.” Tenor Derek Taylor, as Romeo, and director Brad Dalton are coming to the opera for the first time. Soprano Amanda Woodbury, making her HOT debut as Juliet, and guest conductor Emmanuel Plasson will be performing it for only their second. They’re all approaching the performance with elation and excitement.

“I have a very special weakness for ‘Romeo,’ ” Plasson said. He noted that the opera, though popular, has not reached the exalted status of Gounod’s “Faust,” considered his best opera.

“The level of inspiration that Gounod in ‘Romeo’ reaches is even higher than in ‘Faust,’” Plasson said. “Every melody seems so real and pure in its invention. It’s just so beautiful. With ‘Romeo,’ it’s really the art of the melody.”

SETTING THE STORY in modern times presented the director Dalton with a number of interesting choices. Should there be a more of a back story to the conflict between the houses of Capulet and Montague? Can it reflect tensions in the Middle East, or touch on social movements like Black Lives Matter or #MeToo? Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” – certainly the most popular rebooting of the Shakespeare play — set the story amid racial conflict between New York City street gangs.

In the end, Dalton decided to hew closely to the Shakespeare, which did not provide much detail of the conflict. “People don’t mull over the history of what happened between the Capulets and the Montagues,” Dalton said. “So we did it in a clean fashion, which is I what like anyway.”

But there are times when the original story, along with Gounod’s music, stretches the imagination just a bit, in almost a steampunk “modern, but old” style, Dalton said.

“I could see someone coming out on stage wearing boots, jeans, a French-cut shirt that’s open — and also have a sword. I can accept that,” Dalton said. “And you have to have swords, because there’s sword-fighting music written for it. If you pull out a gun, you just shoot someone with it, but there’s all this sword-fighting music that sounds like a woman-tied-to-a-train-track scene.”

DALTON AND PLASSON also cut some of the opera’s longer scenes, and Dalton reworked the translation extensively to modernize it. Some of Shakespeare’s famous poetry is woven into the libretto, but not a lot. “It’s clean, it’s clear, it’s vivid, and often very colorful,” Dalton said.

Shakespeare, of course, wrote in English, an unwieldy language for traditional opera, though great for the comic opera of Gilbert and Sullivan. This “Romeo and Juliet” will be sung in the original French, with supertitles. In addition, operagoers will be hearing an authentically French version of the music, led by Plasson, an acclaimed interpreter of the French repertoire.

“I think there’s some elegance to it, the melodies, some lightness to (French music),” he said. “There’s a texture to the sound in the orchestra, and the singers as well. I think it’s a very special, very unique characteristic, that way of playing, that has to be treated with care.”

Woodbury performed her first Juliet with New York’s Metropolitan Opera House last year, getting one scheduled performance and then “covering” (understudying) for the much of the staging. She got lots of experience, as lead soprano Diana Damrau was out for an extended period during rehearsal.

The Met staging was in traditional style, so Woodbury laughed when asked about the modern touches that HOT has brought to the opera.

“So far, we’ve got people taking selfies in the party scene,” she said. “There’s a potion that she takes to put herself to sleep. It’s not a potion. We use a syringe.”

VOCALLY, Juliet’s arias present an evolution of the character from childish teen to lovesick maiden, she said.

“It’s quite the progression,” she said. “She starts out pretty light and lyrical, with some coloratura and some flair, and then it goes into the deeper, more intense long lines and held, dramatic high notes. It really continues with her progression of her seriousness and her passion for Romeo, that comes to the point where she is having to decide between death and him.”

Woodbury’s favorite song comes when Juliet is deciding whether to take the poison, appropriately named “The Poison Aria.” “It’s really the most beautiful part of my role,” she said.

Taylor, who performed in HOT’s “La Boheme” and “A Little Night Music” in the 2000s, said Romeo is a “dream role.” He, too, is known for his French repertoire, having lived in Switzerland for many years, but the role of Romeo had eluded him until now.

“I don’t feel like many roles have as much meat to them as Romeo,” he said. “It’s highly romantic. There’s a street duel. You have a very exciting sword fight. Romeo is full of rage in that part. There’s remorse, there’s love, there’s anger. Romeo really runs the gamut as far as emotions.”

“He starts out just so innocent and so idealistic, and ends in a completely different way, so much that he takes his own life.”

Similarly, Romeo’s music is equally emotional. “It’s an extreme role,” Taylor said. “It’s extreme in its emotion, it’s extreme in its range. Gounod was very clever to write such a demanding role, because with the difficulty of it comes a feeling of desperation at times, and at times a feeling of absolute joy for the listener.”

Be sure to have your hankies out at the end. Taylor said the ending of Gounod’s opera is even more moving than Shakespeare’s play, which ends with the warring families mourning together.

“I think the epilogue that Shakespeare wrote took a little bit of the momentum out of it,” he said. “The ending of the opera is just a gut punch.”