Happy Marriage: Intermezzo at City Opera

The New York City Opera's production of Intermezzo served as a happy reminder of many of the reasons I love Richard Strauss: music and drama with a sense of humor, and unstinting compassion and creativity.  Publicity makes much of Christine, the wife who believes herself wronged, as a comic character... but Strauss' music and drama are more nuanced than that, and the singers' performances acknowledged as much.  The bright production tended to veer too far towards gimmicky for my taste, but was generally serviceable and sometimes charming.  The Art Deco furnishings looked so nice I wanted to steal them, while bits of spiking tape and an absence of painted walls were an occasional distraction (the Beloved Flatmate and I briefly debated whether this was an intentional commentary on the issue of the central couple's private life being in the public eye, and then the subsequent issue of staging a domestic episode precipitated in part by this tension...but thought, on the whole, that it wasn't.)  The 1920s costumes were individualized enough to serve the characters well; Christine, the volatile central character, had a wardrobe full of slightly-eccentric chic.