Is it possible for a show to be simultaneously entertaining and annoying? Such is the paradox presented by Elizabeth Swados and Erin Courtney's propulsive opera Kasper Hauser at the Flea Theater. The performances by this talented young cast are uniformly excellent, the staging is mesmerizing, the music is fun and engrossing, and yet... at the nexus of all this dazzling theatricality is the title character, a pigeon toed half-wit with a tendency to drool and babble incoherently. He's sitting onstage as one enters the theater, manically rolling a toy horse back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. The performance was delayed on the night I attended, and after about 15 minutes I began fantasizing about jumping onstage and stomping the squeaky-wheeled toy to bits. That irritation never really abated, though it was balanced out by Swados's stellar score and dynamic direction.
The story is a mostly faithful dramatization of the life of Kaspar Hauser, a mysterious orphan who became the talk of Nuremberg in the 19th century. In 1828, a teenage Hauser was found wandering the city's streets carrying a letter addressed to a cavalry captain; the missive was written by an unidentified man who claimed to have raised the boy since infancy, but could no longer support him. Hauser was barely capable of speech, and was taken in by a series of caretakers. Over time, he revealed that he had been raised in a small, darkened cell with no human contact, surviving for years on bread and water left for him by an unseen man. Rumors swirled that he was the hereditary prince of Baden, and had been stolen at birth by the mendacious Countess von Hochberg, who wanted her own son Leopold to assume the throne.
Swados's rollicking score, a spicy mix of Weill and Sondheim, is served up with brio by the giant ensemble, whose thunderous voices go a long way to compensate for the flawed narrative. Simply put, I didn't care one bit about the slobbering, grotesque Hauser. Though enthusiastically portrayed by Preston Martin, I have to wonder whether the role is worth portraying at all. (Werner Herzog certainly thought so; he made an award-winning film adaptation of the Hauser tale in the '70s.) Here, the sordid milieu of Nurmberg's fithy streets and aristocratic parlors is vibrantly recreated, and the cast of 19 seems like a cast of thousands as they boisterously evoke the bawdy world of peasants and princes. I only wish Swados and Courtney had chosen a more compelling central character to set at the center of this otherwise electrifying production.
