Platee. - Zellerbach Hall, Berkeley, CA - dance reviews

One of the loveliest dance events of 1998 is Mark Morris's poignant yet wickedly apt restaging of Jean-Philippe Rameau's 1745 hit, the comedie-lyrique, Platte. In its three sold-out American premiere performances as the centerpiece of Berkeley's early music festival, this Royal Opera Covent Garden production, superbly conducted by Nicholas McGegan with magical costumes by couturier Isaac Mizrahi, revealed how cruelly humorous a baroque ballet bouffon can be.

Morris serves as both choreographer and director of this comic operatic tale of an amphibian swamp queen, Platte, who believes herself a "salamander fatale' to all males, including the Olympian god Jupiter. Jupiter, in order to teach his jealous wife, Juno, a lesson, pretends he will marry the hairless, suction-cup-fingered Platee, who sheaths her pendulous breasts and beach ball-sized abdomen in a sheer slip that ends just above her enormous webbed feet. Morris physicalizes the affront this cross-species romance presents by having Platte, magnificently sung by tenor Jean-Paul Fouchecourt, perambulate in lurching walks and stifflegged spurting jumps, while declaiming in comically mispronounced French.

The opera begins with a prologue, which Morris sets in a big-city bar late at night with a crowd of tipsy gods and mortals trading tales of infidelities. Bacchus is the bartender (charmingly danced by Guillermo Resto, who returns in the second act as a randy satyr wearing cloven feet, nipple rings, and a leather jockstrap) and the other denizens include a Dyke and her partner. At the prologue's end, their talk, and the setting, fade into Act I, a massive blowup of the terrarium behind the bar, where Platte and her amphibious subjects--alligators, lizards, snakes, frogs, and a pair of copulating tortoises--slither about.

This surface burlesque, however, cloaks Morris's great musical sensitivity and parodic flair, in which musical jokes of endless chaconnes and animalistic squawks of sound are sweetly echoed in a great swamp processional of amphibians with heads darting, cheeks puffing silently in and out, and bodies undulating as they sip from the water bowl of life.

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