Dreamlike `Little Vixen' delightful

What a spectacle the San Francisco Opera has put together in its new production of Leos Janácek's ``The Cunning Little Vixen.'' It's inspired: a dream world brought to life and life evoked as a moonlit dream in a chocolate forest. The cast, led by soprano Dawn Upshaw as the trickster fox and baritone Thomas Allen as the old forester who pursues her, is that rare thing: a group that palpably enjoys itself on stage.

And, oh, Janácek's music: It's jagged, tipsy, beautiful and unique, the real star of the show, which opened Friday at the War Memorial Opera House. This masterwork was first performed in 1924 when the Czech composer was 70 and seriously in love with a much younger woman -- married and elusive, a ``vixen'' in his mind. It has never before been staged by the San Francisco Opera.

Tautly played by the San Francisco Opera Orchestra and conducted by Alexander Polianichko, the instrumental score is the soundtrack to this psycho-myth about love and growing old. Every emotion felt by the characters -- wonder and weariness, happy lustfulness and lust-filled frustration -- is made vivid by the orchestra, which swamps the singers, even the stars, for much of the night. This is minor criticism: In ``Vixen,'' the great sound of the orchestra is the subconscious world, the ``ocean,'' in which we are all swimming.

Janácek derived his libretto from a novella based on newspaper cartoons about a sly vixen, always playing tricks on people, including an old forester. Janácek was tickled: He loved the natural world, had spent years turning animal cries and bird songs into music. The cartoons became the inspiration for ``Vixen,'' with its animal songs, human speech-songs, Moravian folk-inspired songs, and brilliant passages that sound like Debussy on ice.

As the curtain rises in San Francisco, the beer-weary forester sits in a Moravian pub. Trapped by a marriage that's gone sour, he fixates on the dream-image of a young, scarlet-haired Gypsy woman, Terynka. Now the leafy latticework at the rear of the pub opens up into the forest where the forester captures the scarlet-haired vixen -- Terynka transformed.

He brings the fox home. She tries to liberate the chickens in the hen house -- a Janácek spoof on Marxist organizing tactics -- then kills them and escapes back into the forest, which is womb-like, a curvaceous cathedral of trees. Even the physical landscape is sexualized in this production, directed by Daniel Slater, with sets by Robert Innes Hopkins.

The themes get dark: The forester and his friends, a schoolmaster and parson (tenor Anthony Laciura and bass Gregory Stapp), all burn with sad desire in drunken songs about unrequited love.

But at its essence, the opera is buzzingly alive with Janácek's love of the forest. Badger, mosquito, cricket, grasshopper -- all sing, and some even fly. The vixen marries and has babies. And Upshaw -- more Peter Pan's Wendy than a peppery trickster -- is at her best in these scenes, which include a passionate duet with her ``man,'' the fox, played by the exuberant Czech mezzo-soprano Dagmar Peckova.

There are many reasons to see this production: the graceful, erotic dancing in scenes straight from ballet; the innocent, joyful singing by chorus members, many of them children.

Yes, the vixen is shot and killed by a poacher in the end, her coat turned into a muff. But as the opera closes, the forester meets the vixen's daughter -- the spitting image of mom -- and rediscovers memories of youthful love from the early days of his marriage. He is exhilarated and exhausted, ready to keep living, but mindful of death's closeness. And he wonders about his life: Has it been ``a fairy tale or real?''

The Cunning Little Vixen

Where: War Memorial Opera House,

301 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Saturday, 7:30 p.m. June 23, 2 p.m. June 27, 7:30 p.m. July 1.

Tickets: $25-$195

Call: (415) 864-3330, http://www.sfopera.com/