William Friedkin's mounting of the Strauss-von Hoffmannsthal comedy handsomely and wittily confirms the general director Plácido Domingo's belief that an enlightened opera aficionado or two lurks in the Hollywood film colony, ready to contribute to the Los Angeles Opera's burgeoning stockpile of original productions.
The Academy Award-winning director of The French Connection has proved to be a resourceful and musically sophisticated guide through this oddly constructed piece, in which the backstage shenanigans of the prologue yield to the simultaneous performances of a dour mythological opera seria and a commedia dell'arte diversion.
Narcissism is a way of life in La-La Land, so it comes as no surprise that Friedkin has transposed von Hoffmannsthal's conceit from an 18th-century Viennese estate to present-day southern California.
It surprises us little that the curtain rises on a house in which the curving masonry looks suspiciously like the interior of Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall down the road (Edwin Chan, of Gehry's architectural firm, is listed as designer).
The opera itself plays out not in an elegant Viennese garden but outside a Hollywood parvenu's dream house - a Malibu beach front property, where Ariadne's companions build sand castles, dolphins leap in the distance, Zerbinetta's cronies cavort with plastic pool toys and Bacchus arrives on a windsailing craft.
Friedkin, for all his ingenuity, savours the virtue of restraint, although he cannot resist occasional roguish wit: why shouldn't Bacchus, god of the grape, swig from a bottle now and then?
Absent from the repertoire for more than a decade, the opera has returned with an impressive cast of debutants. Petra-Maria Schnitzer informed Ariadne with a soaring lyric soprano comfortable at both extremes of her range.
Peter Seiffert's Bacchus brought genuine Heldentenor credentials to this ungrateful role. Lyubov Petrova left no listener uncharmed, as she scaled the soprano heights of Zerbinetta's demanding solo scene.
As the geeky composer whose opera is sacrificed to expediency, the light mezzo-soprano Lioba Braun invested the assignment with youthful fervour. The music director Kent Nagano elicited glowing responses and a sweeping Straussian line from his 36 players.
Tel 01 213 972 8001. To October 2
