Seattle Opera's Falstaff Gets You Drunk and Steals Your Heart (Photo Gallery)

Seattle Opera's Falstaff, all on its own, might make you believe in the future of opera. (It runs through March 13, and for this Sunday's Family Day matinee tickets are $15 for students.) Verdi's last opera reminds you that everything grows old and decays, and yet there is spring. Similarly, director Peter Kazaras finds a way to bow to opera convention, while returning the work to rowdy life. Falstaff's motto, that we humans are ridiculous creatures, can fall flat--if it's delivered without risk or sincerity.

This production--comic, high-spirited, gorgeous, and incorrigibly lusty--makes that realization an unexpected gift.

I'll start with Falstaff, as he would have hoped if he weren't fictional. This is the British bass Peter Rose's first outing as Shakespeare's rotund fount of self-regard, and it is "The first of many, I predict," said General Director Speight Jenkins. Seattle operagoers have seen Rose as Baron Ochs (Rosenkavalier) and King Marke (Tristan), but neither of those roles called for anything like Falstaff's world-devouring charisma.

Rose is wearing a fat suit--if you arrive early enough, you see him get into it, as part of Kazaras's idea to bring you closer to the stage--but it's not that heavy. It's his acting chops that send him crashing onto a bench when feeling beleaguered or lumbering across the stage in pursuit of Alice Ford (Svetla Vassileva).

Shakespeare wasn't out to make fun of fat people--he wanted to skewer instead his famous knight's self-serving appetites. It suits Falstaff to both ignore and celebrate his girth, as the mood seizes him. In Rose's take, Falstaff's eyes are always roving for an angle. His insincerity in perfectly sincere. Yes, he will say anything to get a drink, a meal, or laid, but how could anyone miss that? Fair's fair. Rose's voice was as agile as his characterization: booming, cooing, snorting, petulant. He only seemed less than perfect in a few patter-ish runs, but honestly, you could argue that that too was characterization.

He is only matched--and what a match!--by Stephanie Blythe's Dame Quickly. Blythe pulls this off mostly on her own recognizance, the opera doesn't give Dame Quickly anything like Falstaff's word count. It's just that she makes her words count. And as an actor, she's unstoppable. She backs Falstaff down with a mesmerizing display of bustle, and owns the stage from then on. (The bustle and many more beautiful and wildly serviceable costumes are the work of Anna Björnsdotter.)

The three hours goes quickly. There's very little besides the plot's progress to the libretto--and Verdi wasn't interested in musical elaboration, either. The score is mercurial. If Verdi felt like just a few violin phrases were enough to accompany a singer, he wrote that. But a minute later, the full orchestra might be standing in for a raucous tavern brawl. Then, why waste time--nine singers can sing, variously, to Alice's husband Ford (Weston Hurt), fomenting his jealousy; about turning the tables on Falstaff; and a love song. It's conductor Riccardo Frizza's task to keep all this in line, and to infuse joie de vivre besides, which is what Italian conductors seems born to do.

Kazaras keeps the rest of the cast onstage the whole time, they have seats left and right. While this kind of directorial inspiration can just lay there, here Kazaras never lets his cast feel offstage. Without stealing focus, they're engaged, in character, ready to jump in if they feel it's called for.

The two young lovers Fenton (Blagoj Nacoski) and Nannetta (Anya Matanovic) are continually flirting around corners and across the stage, which pays off in the final act, when their big moment comes. Nacoski's voice has a remarkably supple, lyric sound--something in his delivery reminded me of John McCormack, of all people. He and Matanovic (whose Nannetta is perkycute incarnate) generate some believably half-love, half-lusty heat.

Not to be outdone by the wealth of roles, the set co-stars as well. Donald Eastman summons up the dusty boards of the Globe Theatre, invites the Opera's huge rear projection screen into the mix, and creates a massive oak tree from two ladders and a host of suspended oak chairs. Lighting designer Connie Yun has huge washes of color--orange, red, pale blue--play on the rear screen, casting the actors into storybook silhouette.

She echoes a crimson from Ford's jealousy aria in Falstaff's post-Thames pep talk later. Just as Verdi doesn't allow Ford's sudden, angry suspicions a foundation, the dramatic red as background to Falstaff's ruminations on his injury comes as a visual snicker.

Then comes a "comic fugue," an orchestrated uproar. And then...it's over.

Why is this the future? I think because when you're 80, as Verdi was, you see the future more clearly for not getting there. The horizon is outlined with young people refusing to "behave," and making themselves happy instead of you. Kazaras has tapped into that restlessness and zest, and how lines, in being blurred, wake us up from old habit. You feel he means something by laying bare the stage and the actors on it--but what? We don't know. It's ridiculous.