Review: A Game of Light and Shadow in Gounod’s ‘Faust’

The director Sara Holdren has made it pretty clear that she’s a fan of Mikhail Bulgakov.

In the biography that accompanies her new production of Gounod’s “Faust” for Heartbeat Opera, Holdren ends with a bit of Cyrillic script that translates to “Manuscripts don’t burn,” the most famous line from Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita.”

A passage from that book, a Soviet spin on the Faust story, also appears in Holdren’s note about her staging. During her work she thought often, she wrote, about one of the devil’s lines: “What would your good do if evil did not exist, and what would the earth look like if all the shadows disappeared? After all, shadows are cast by things and people.”

This idea, that light and shadow, and all they represent, are intertwined and essential to life itself, guides Holdren’s take on “Faust,” which opened on Thursday at the Baruch Performing Arts Center, in a new adaptation by her and Jacob Ashworth, with a chamber arrangement by Francisco Ladrón de Guevara.

Before “Faust” was a sprawling grand opera in the 1860s, sung through across five acts and including a ballet, it was a humbler opéra comique, with spoken dialogue between its flights of musical expression. Holdren blends the two versions, trimming the length and adapting the spoken lines to sound as if they were written today.

The goal, as always with Heartbeat Opera, is to breathe urgency into a classic. And “Faust,” which isn’t performed often, was once the classic. Perhaps the most popular work of its day, it opened the Metropolitan Opera in 1883. (Martin Scorsese depicted one of those Gilded Age performances of “Faust” in his film adaptation of “The Age of Innocence.”) Now, however, it’s harder to come by. The Met hasn’t even presented it in over a decade.

Holdren, who was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize this year, is also an excellent theater critic for New York Magazine; often, I’m convinced she’s the finest in town. You can sense a real, exciting theatrical instinct in her production of “Faust,” particularly in the inventive ways she plays with light and shadow (designed by Yichen Zhou).