Review: Pocket Opera’s ‘Vixen’ proves an entertaining wildlife fable

There aren’t many operas in the usual repertoire as laborious to get your head round as Leos Janácek’s 1924 comedian fable “The Crafty Little Vixen.” The music makes luscious, lovely sense, however what the heck is definitely occurring right here?

There are animals of every kind — forest creatures, barnyard livestock and people — and so they work together freely, as if limitations of species and language had been merely fictions. OK, that’s fairly customary for fairy tales.

However the Forester … is he in love with the titular fox? Is there an erotic factor, even?

These are unsettling and unanswerable questions, and one of many virtues of the pleasant, vivacious manufacturing by Pocket Opera that opened Sunday afternoon, April 14, on the Hillside Membership in Berkeley is that it doesn’t even try to have interaction them. As with a lot else in “Vixen,” issues are merely taken on religion.

In Creative Director Nicolas A. Garcia’s suitably breezy manufacturing, that features a fairytale world populated by gossipy villagers, domineering roosters, bibulous clergy and balletic dragonflies. It’s a world during which two foxes, Sharp-Ears the vixen and her dreamboat beau Goldstripe, undergo the identical courtship rituals (flustery feminine doubt, oily male sweet-talking) which were a staple of human folklore for hundreds of years.

Most significantly, it’s a world during which conventional notions of dramaturgy appear to have wandered off into the tall grass. As a substitute, “Vixen” provides a leisurely two-hour go to to a country panorama structured solely by the pure cycles of life, demise, rebirth and the progress of the seasons.

“Vixen” marks a daring and spectacular endeavor for San Francisco’s Pocket Opera. The corporate’s mission has at all times concerned an intimate, up-close remedy of the repertoire, with scaled-down orchestral accompaniment and clear English translations created by its founder and longtime creative director, the late Donald Pippin.

“Vixen” posthumously options one among Pippin’s translated librettos, which apparently was by no means staged as a result of Janácek’s orchestral calls for had been at all times too overwhelming. However an ingenious new adaptation of the rating, created final yr by Jonathan Lyness for the Mid-Wales Opera Firm, has made it doable.

Sunday’s efficiency, nimbly led by conductor Jonathan Khuner, stuffed the corridor with lush sound, making the viewers really feel that we had been getting the total gist of this wealthy rating. And a big, agile solid, cavorting deftly throughout designer Daniel Yelen’s evocative set (and typically by the corridor as properly), conjured up the moody milieus of forest, farmyard and tavern.

Within the title function, soprano Amy Foote (who memorably sang the identical function with West Edge Opera in 2016) created a mercurial stage persona whose silvery tones and twitchy physicality appeared aptly half-human and half-feral. Baritone Spencer Dodd introduced sturdy vocal supply to the a part of the Forester.

But, maybe essentially the most magnetic displaying got here from mezzo-soprano Hope Nelson as Goldstripe — a efficiency directly full-voiced and sinuous, with a muscular lyricism that infused her each scene.

The rest of the big solid moved out and in of their episodic moments casting simply the fitting spell in every case. They included Robbie Stafford because the poacher Harasta, Sara Couden in a dexterous double-dip because the Parson and the Badger, Leandra Ramm because the aggressively protecting barnyard canine Lapák and Alicia “Ash” Hurtado as a hilariously territorial rooster. Dancers Bela Watson and Stephen Fambro flitted invitingly throughout the stage to execute Lissa Resnick’s light-footed choreography.

In the long run, this “Vixen,” like so many productions earlier than it, each invitations and blithely disregards questions of who and what and wherefore. It’s a vivacious, charm-filled leisure for all ages — Sunday’s viewers included a wholesome proportion of well-behaved youngsters — and that can suffice.

Correction: An earlier model of this overview misspelled the names of the dancers. They’re Bela Watson and Stephen Fambro.

Attain Joshua Kosman: jkosman@sfchronicle.com