`MAGIC FLUTE' THAT'S QUITE A SIGHT.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

An overgrown schoolboy. An oversexed genius.

Ever since Peter Shaffer's play ``Amadeus'' and Milos Forman's subsequent movie version, that's been the popular if widely debated image of Mozart.

Yet as L.A. Opera's current revival of ``The Magic Flute'' reminds us, it takes a very mature artist to see the world like a hyperimaginative adolescent. Set halfway between lush children's fable and pre-Enlightenment allegory, ``The Magic Flute'' exists in a state of magically arrested development - ever anxious, ever hopeful and forever promising that whatever's around the corner will be better than what we have now.

Originally directed by Sir Peter Hall, with sets and costumes by British illustrator Gerald Scarfe, this production stirred international interest when it premiered at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in 1993. In its present state, directed by Paul L. King with strong comic timing, the production's most salient feature remains Scarfe's brilliantly conceived design schemes.

Best-known as a savage political satirist, Scarfe makes the most of the Dorothy Chandler's massive canvas, filling it with richly saturated Froot Loops colors, psychedelic rear-screen projections and a bestiary of whimsical creatures such as a half-baboon, half-tiger and a tottering penguin with a crocodile's head. Scarfe turns Mozart's ancient Egpyt into a pop-operatic fusion of Sesame Street and Haight-Ashbury, circa 1967, a realm simultaneously fantastic and vaguely frightening.

This playfully menacing sensibility permeates the entire production, whose appearance suggests a baroque rock concert. Our hero, Tamino (tenor Greg Fedderly), wears Luke Skywalker all-white, with hair he might've borrowed from David Bowie in his Ziggy Stardust phase. Mozart's heroes were lovers, not fighters, and the sweet-sung Fedderly (impressive in last fall's ``La Boheme'') is cut from the proper cloth. He's pure, if not overpowering.

Same goes for soprano Gwendolyn Bradley's Pamina, an innocent but determined vocal presence amid Mozart's exotic tonalities.

The remaining cast offer generally solid support, though it's a shame to have versatile baritone Kurt Ollmann underutilized here as the Speaker. Making his long-overdue North American operatic stage debut as Papageno the bird-catcher, Austrian lyric baritone Wolfgang Holzmair steals the production with his euphoric and self-mocking phrasings. And Sally Wolf carries off the Queen of the Night's tongue-twisting coloraturas with aplomb.

Oddly, at Friday's opening-night performance, nearly everyone sounded a bit muted in Act 1, as if that giant pyramid at center stage were a black hole sucking up noise. Even Kenneth Cox's commanding Sarastro seemed distant.

By contrast, the orchestra was gently commanding. Under Sir Peter's original direction, Mozart's singspiel has received a large injection of British comic-operatic irreverence, a Gilbert and Sullivan tongue-in-cheek that permits absurdity without silliness. Conductor Julius Rudel, however, keeps these 19th-century impulses in check, ensuring that an opera ahead of its time stays true to the spirit of its own age.

THE FACTS

What: ``The Magic Flute.''

Where: Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Music Center of Los Angeles County, 135 N. Grand Ave., Los Angeles.

When: 7:30 tonight, Thursday, Saturday, Feb. 26 and March 1; 1 p.m. Saturday.

Tickets: $24 to $135. Call [phone].

Our rating: Three Stars.

CAPTION(S):

Photo

Photo: Soprano Gwendolyn Bradley and baritone Wolfgang Holzmair appear through March 1 in Mozart's ``The Magic Flute'' at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.