'The Tempest.' (Ken Howard/Metropolitan Opera)

And now, as they say, for something completely different.

Just nine months after finishing up his woeful production of Wagner’s Ring cycleat the Metropolitan Opera, the director Robert Lepage has done an about-face. He has abandoned the technical wizardry of the Ring—the 3-D video projections, the enormous rotating set—and pared back his style.

For the Met premiere of Thomas Adès’s 2004 opera The Tempest on Tuesday evening, Mr. Lepage used one of the oldest tricks in the book: a theater—Milan’s great opera house, the Teatro alla Scala, to be precise—within the theater. Old-fashioned wheels turn, and characters charmingly vanish into and emerge from the prompter’s box. Mr. Lepage has put aside the forward-thinking ambitions of his Ring for the kind of hoary, aggressively adorable entertainment that is the specialty of another favored Met director, Bartlett Sher.

Like Mr. Sher’s bland version of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore, which opened the company’s season last month, Mr. Lepage’s Tempest looks like something that has been exhumed from a dusty storage vault. But this new production is the more mystifying of the two: why has the Met chosen to do a contemporary opera, one with a spiky, glinting score, in such a stale, static, cheesy-looking way?

The fault is not entirely Mr. Lepage’s. The opera, which has been extravagantly praised since its premiere eight years ago, is deeply flawed as theater, with its tantalizing sound world rarely coming into dramatic focus.

The music is often sheerly beautiful. “Shimmering” is a word that is mentioned in almost every prose account of the work, and it does indeed seem to shimmer. There are long passages—Caliban’s soaring Act II aria, “Friends don’t fear,” is the best of many—in which the sound seems to hover weightlessly in the air. The score manages the nearly impossible task of our postmodern era: being eclectic without feeling inorganic or inauthentic. It runs the gamut from the jazzy rhythms of the very beginning to a Baroque-inspired quintet near the end, and it never sounds like pastiche. It all sounds like Adès.

But after the rhythmic peppiness of that opening, the plot gets underway with a long, sluggish dose of exposition, when Prospero and his daughter, Miranda, slouch onstage to retell the story of his exile from the dukedom of Milan and their difficult journey to the magic island he now rules. Things never really get going from there. Mr. Adès’s music is far more adept at creating an ethereal, kaleidoscopic mood than at shaping characters or drama.

Part of the problem is Meredith Oakes’s libretto, which shows admirable willingness to mess with Shakespeare but doesn’t go far enough. The Met has stranded us once more in doggerel land, the same place we ended up in Jeremy Sams’s stomach-turningly cutesy libretto for last year’s Baroque pastiche, The Enchanted Island.

So there are ineptly rhyming couplets like “Fearful story/I’m so sorry,” and an antiqued, ersatz mood that feels out of step with the score. Mr. Adès’s work has classical inspirations and aspirations, but it is of our time, seething and strange. It deserves less polite, less stagnant words.

And though it is good and necessary that the collaborators reshaped the play, it seems strange that one of the elements excised in the transition is the threatening nature of Caliban’s character, and the aggression with which Prospero has enslaved him and Ariel. These are racial politics seen through a poignant, personal lens, and an aspect of the drama that would have spoken to us. Instead this Caliban is a dull, defanged monster, his half-hearted complaints those of a spurned lover (he lusts after Miranda) rather than those of an oppressed, infuriated minority.

Indeed, all of the characters’ interactions lack weight and urgency. In the opera, when Miranda decides to marry Ferdinand against her father’s wishes, it is meant to be an act as solemn and painful as Brünnhilde’s rebellion against Wotan. But in the Ring Wagner crafts the father-daughter relationship so carefully and richly that its dissolution is heartbreaking. It is hard to believe in Mr. Adès’s characters with anything approaching the same fervor.

With few philosophical or personal stakes, the music, as good as much of it is, remains essentially decorative. And I kept thinking that the score might have been better served—lighter and, yes, more shimmering—with a conductor other than the composer. Things frequently felt overplayed, italicized, more drawn out than transparent.

The cast was committed to parts that are often unrewarding. Prospero is onstage much of the opera, but mostly just to stand around and look moody and forceful. Simon Keenlyside, who originated the role in 2004, is ready enough to do this, and he is an intelligent singer, but his voice these days is less commanding than his physique and manner.

Alek Shrader and, especially, Isabel Leonard sing tenderly as Ferdinand and Miranda. Audrey Luna diligently handles Ariel’s stratospheric wails, closing the opera with an otherworldly echo, and Alan Oke sings Caliban with naturalness and sincerity, less impassioned than Ian Bostridge on the recording but more affectingly subtle.

But many of the distinguished, mostly young artists—Iestyn Davies, Toby Spence, Christopher Feigum, Kevin Burdette, William Burden—are given precious little to do. The would-be comic relief, from Mr. Burdette’s Stefano and Mr. Davies’s Trinculo, is painfully unfunny. By the time the great acts of forgiveness and redemption arrive near the end, it is simply hard to care about these people. For all its eagerness to distinguish itself from Shakespeare, the operatic Tempest replaces the play’s deeply felt emotions and deeply held ideas with wan sketches.

Davies as Trinculo, Burdette as Stefano, and Oke as Caliban. (Courtesy Ken Howard/Met Opera)

Perhaps sensing the limitations of the work, Mr. Lepage has fitted it with a Big Idea. After doing a Ring that was stubbornly anti-concept, the director has done a Tempest that is only concept. It wasn’t a problem, in theory, to situate The Tempest at La Scala. After all, the island in the play and opera ends up being a kind of colony of Milan, somewhere that is both Milan and not, a place where its citizens go to be subtly but significantly different than themselves. One of the city’s great theaters is a natural parallel.

Yet Mr. Lepage makes the classic concept-production blunder: the action feels like it could just as easily be taking place anywhere and just happens to be on this particular set. I wish, in a way, that he had gone further, and done something closer to Mary Zimmerman’s flawed yet intriguing 2009 Met production of Bellini’s La Sonnambula, which was set among a company of singers putting on La Sonnambula. If you think The Tempest is about theater, make it about theater. If you think Prospero is a director, make him a director. Instead Mr. Lepage has given us a standard production of The Tempest, but has set it, rather awkwardly and unattractively, inside La Scala.

Near the end of the show, when a ship returns to bring everyone back to Italy, sailors come out and begin pulling at the backstage ropes, which we suddenly realize are analogues of the ropes of the ship. The metaphorical and “real” worlds mingle movingly. But such moments occur all too rarely. Given a far more problematic work than Wagner’s Ring, Mr. Lepage has responded with an approach that looks utterly different but is really just more of the same: a flat, largely emotion-free production that sometimes impresses but never moves.

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Deborah Voigt as Brünnhilde and Jay Hunter Morris as Siegfried in Wagner's “Götterdämmerung.” Photo by Ken Howard. Courtesy Metropolitan Opera

I hope it will spoil no one’s six-hour evening to learn that Robert Lepage’s production of Götterdämmerung, the fourth and final opera in Wagner’s Ring cycle, ends the way Mr. Lepage’s cycle began.

Although it was only September, 2010, it seems a long time ago that the Metropolitan Opera’s 2010-11 season opened with Das Rheingold, the first Ring installment. Bathed in blue light, the monumental set of 20 enormous planks levitated in silence, like something out of Kubrick. The music began: that long, low E-flat that in Wagner’s ears was the sound of the birth of the world. Then, like the music, the machine began undulating—first slowly, then faster. My mouth fell open; I was looking at the river Rhine.

For a minute or two, it was magic: everything felt possible. In the 15 hours of the Ring that Mr. Lepage has given us since then, there have been other heart-catching moments in which the visual spectacle and Wagner’s stirring, searching music alchemically combined. There’s even one in Götterdämmerung, right at the start of the score, when deep chords sound and the machine swoops upward, like a charmed snake.

It is no surprise that the most memorable sequences of this Ring have come at the beginnings of the operas, since the defining problem of Mr. Lepage’s cycle is his inability to sustain visual or dramatic interest for more than a few moments. In an epic, complex work that requires that sustained intensity, Mr. Lepage has been plainly at sea, nowhere more so than in Götterdämmerung, his most timid, dully conventional installment yet.

As he did in the other three operas, in Götterdämmerung Mr. Lepage shows greater interest in the workings of his set than in his characters. In the first scene of the first act, a large central panel majestically swings around for no apparent reason; no one has used the doorway that the slow rotation replaces with a wall. But while we are puzzling over the pointless mechanics, we have lost a crucial opportunity to pay attention to and learn about Gutrune, the complicated, conflicted character standing in front of us.

Immense effort seems to have gone into how to transition the elaborate video projections from a rocky beach back to the Gibichungs’ hall. Comparatively little attention has been given to what, exactly, the mood is inside that hall. Wagner tells us plainly that the Gibichung siblings are melancholy, lovelorn, childless, and vaguely incestuous, but all that is unreadable here. What does Gunther think about Gutrune? Gutrune about Gunther? Hagen about either of them? If Mr. Lepage has any idea, he doesn’t reveal it to us. By the time the director makes what seems like a conscious, even interesting choice—to focus on the sorrowful Gunther during Siegfried’s funeral march—we don’t know or care enough about Gunther for it to register.

Over the course of the cycle we’ve grown used to Mr. Lepage’s much-heralded projections picking up some of the slack of characters that never quite come alive. Yet the visuals are more halfhearted in Götterdämmerung than in the previous operas. One of the selling points of the projections was their remarkable, seductive interactivity. When Alberich waded in the Rhine in Das Rheingold, his every step dislodged some loose pebbles; little circles of fire flared up around Loge when he walked.

Whether it’s due to limitations of time, money, or inclination, that’s all gone: when Hagen and Gunther walk into the Rhine in Götterdämmerung, they are simply walking on a projection of water. It doesn’t matter, of course, except that we’ve been sold on the idea that this is what is important in Mr. Lepage’s Ring, that this is the cycle’s point.

There certainly isn’t a point about the work’s ideas to be found here. “Götterdämmerung is the only opera in the Ring that has a chorus,” Mr. Lepage says in an interview in the program. I’m glad he noticed. But you get the sense that he hasn’t thought much about why the chorus, made up of the Gibichungs’ subservient vassals, has been added here. Certainly, in Mr. Lepage’s blandly benign vision of pagan feudalism, there is nothing of Wagner’s own hatred of social hierarchies, his conviction that money and power corrupt everything, everywhere.

That would have been a story well worth telling, particularly in New York, particularly at the Met, in a time of gross social inequality and Occupy Wall Street. But relevance to our own time—indeed, to any time—may have conflicted with what Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, generously refers to in a program note as the production’s “literal but imaginative approach.”

The production is in actuality about as imaginative as Fabio Luisi’s well paced and well-balanced, but less than poetic, rather faceless conducting. The orchestral performance is in keeping with the general spirit of this Ring, which at its most competent achieves a smooth corporate sheen.

Hulking and calm, with a rich voice of utter steadiness, the bass Hans-Peter König delivers the finest vocal performance of the cycle as Hagen, but why is he playing this malevolent character so kindly? If this is his and Mr. Lepage’s choice, it introduces a level of subtlety that this simple-minded production can’t encompass.

By the third act Stephen Gould showed some signs of strain as Siegfried, but he sang throughout with sensitivity and a big, rounded tenor more appealing than the bright edge of Jay Hunter Morris, with whom he is alternating in the role. The soprano Deborah Voigt closed her first-ever Ring cycle sounding as she has in the other operas: brave, underpowered, and shrill. Other Brünnhildes have been memorable despite similar vocal shortcomings, but Ms. Voigt is too busy keeping afloat to point the text. The broad emotions are there—anger, love, stony resignation—but they are as generic as the silent-film gestures she keeps resorting to. Her estimable reserves of energy don’t have focused direction.

Ms. Voigt did some of her most exciting singing in the scene with her sister, Waltraute, sung by the brilliant, urgent, wildly committed mezzo-soprano Waltraud Meier. Passages of purely lovely singing alternated with rougher patches, but Ms. Meier’s cameo was the first and only time in the entire cycle that we experienced a character who actually seemed invested in her own story, that we got a sense of the scope and urgent stakes of Wagner’s work. There was finally something to care about.

Mr. Gelb has his own explanation for the opposition to Mr. Lepage, who was loudly booed on this production’s opening night. He writes in his program note, “Of course, because our Ring is revolutionary, not everyone supports it.”

But Ms. Meier’s success in the midst of so much failure was a reminder that Mr. Lepage’s production is, at heart, less a forward-thinking one than it is a throwback to the hyperrealistic Franco Zeffirelli spectacles that have long clogged the Met’s repertory. As anyone who’s seen enough Zeffirelli knows, the productions are utterly mutable. Like Mr. Lepage’s Ring, they are grand spaces in which stick figures are moved around. They ignite when you have compelling performers and sink when you don’t.

That has been the traditional character of the Met: dependence on charismatic singers for its artistic and financial lifeblood, with desultory attention paid to theatrical values and intellectual point of view. I understand why Mr. Gelb is eager to mark his tenure as a “revolutionary” shift from that ethos, but saying it doesn’t make it so. His Met is functioning in the same way that this great, flawed company has always functioned, with a couple more Tony Awards in the directorial credits.

Mr. Lepage’s Ring began with jaw-dropping clarity; its great disappointment has been its subsequent confusion. After tens of millions of dollars and six or seven years of development, there is no evidence that Mr. Lepage, an artist renowned for his visual and conceptual imagination, has a coherent, consistent sense of his production: the level of stylization versus naturalism, what the projections signify, how the stage space is organized, the difference between the narrow strip of stage near the orchestra pit and the “trench” behind it, how the characters interact with the projections and each other, how the aesthetic values—costumes, projections—changes over the course of the cycle.

The anticlimactic apocalypse of Mr. Lepage’s finale—capped, I kid you not, by little explosions that burst open the heads of white statues representing the gods—elicited more chuckles and eye rolls than shock and awe. And the return to the undulating Rhine in the final bars left me unmoved, a reprise that emphasized how empty the intervening 15 hours had felt.

If you haven’t created a convincing world, who cares how it ends?

This scenic shift takes place right after the god Wotan has been forced, harrowingly, to disown his favorite daughter, Brünnhilde. She lies on the ground in shock; he has turned away in grief. Our attention should be fixated on the tortured pair as the orchestra swells in solemn sympathy, but instead we watch in awe as the massive set--a series of enormous, seesaw-style beams that together weigh about 45 tons--noisily creaks its way upward. It's only after 30 seconds or so, when the passage is over, that we remember that there are two people onstage in desperate pain. That Mr. Lepage has chosen to draw us away from them at this crucial interval turns out to be disastrously typical of his costly production.

Many people assume that the Ring is about size and splendor, but as Alex Ross observed in last week's New Yorker, the cycle is ultimately not about spectacle but is rather "a deconstruction of power, the dismantling of grandeur." Tracing an eerily familiar story of the gods who want to hang on to power at any cost, as well as those who can glimpse a new world order, most of the Ring is, in fact, disconcertingly intimate--far closer to Ingmar Bergman than to Cecil B. DeMille. And yet too often in the new production, Mr. Lepage keeps giving us the DeMille--big, often gorgeous stage pictures--because, you suspect, he's worried that the Bergman material isn't enough to keep our attention.

In Walküre, the second of the Ring's four parts, Mr. Lepage does some stunning things. As with his production of the cycle's prelude, Das Rheingold, the beginning is a high point. He brings the opening storm to vivid life: We are in a sky full of dark, rushing clouds; then we are in the middle of a forest during a snowstorm; then we are inside a hut glowing with firelight. It is sweeping and evocative, showing off the set's much-touted ability to swiftly morph into the cycle's dozens of settings.

So Mr. Lepage understands the mixture of stylization and realism that can make us seem to see what we are hearing. But far too often, his interventions undermine his cast's connection with the audience. There's that scene change on the mountaintop, which diverts us from one of the opera's most intense moments. Even worse, once the snowy mountain is in place and Wotan and Brünnhilde confront each other with heartbreaking candor, Mr. Lepage further undercuts the performers by distracting us with projections of avalanches. These have no inspiration in the libretto or score; they're just punctuation, something to keep us from getting bored. But it's hard to imagine anyone being bored by one of the most moving, riveting scenes in the opera, as Wotan finally forgives his rebellious daughter before abandoning her forever.

A sure sign that Mr. Lepage doesn't quite trust the text he's been given to interpret is that the most effective of Wagner's radically extended monologues are the ones with which he feels most compelled to interfere. To Siegmund's Act I description of his troubled childhood, Mr. Lepage adds an unfortunately Disney-ish animated shadow illustration of the story. Later, when Wotan tells Brünnhilde the dark story of the Nieblung's ring, Mr. Lepage has an eyeball emerge from the floor; onto it he projects, dutiful as CliffsNotes, the narrative's key images. But when you have, as Siegmund and Wotan, two of the world's greatest singing actors--the tenor Jonas Kaufmann and the bass-baritone Bryn Terfel, respectively--you need to guide them and focus their emotions, not distract from them or compete with them for the audience's attention.

As in Mr. Lepage's Rheingold, the performers seem largely to have, if anything, been left to their own devices, a lack of cohesiveness not helped by James Levine's erratic conducting, including a lethargic first act. Sometimes the absence of directorial attention worked out all right: Mr. Kaufmann, an intensely eloquent, intelligent singer, used his focused, dark tone to project Siegmund's wounded cautiousness, his sense of isolation. The mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe, a resplendent Fricka, seemed more vocally comfortable than she had in Rheingold.

But this is Wotan's opera, dominated by his agonized monologues about his tragic lust for power, his fears about losing everything. While Mr. Terfel sings richly, he could, with the help of a more acute director, broaden his emotional range and turn a powerful performance into an unforgettable one. The soprano Eva-Maria Westbroek, making her Met debut as Sieglinde, seemed blandly generalized before withdrawing due to illness after Act I.

Perhaps most egregiously, Mr. Lepage hasn't helped to guide the soprano Deborah Voigt, singing her first-ever Brünnhilde, past stock expressions of grief--fake crying and awkward contortions--in the final act. We should always respect the risk-taking that separates true artists from merely good singers, but Ms. Voigt was disappointing. As always, she was a warm, tender presence, pointing the text with clarity. But her tone has turned edgy and thin in the past few years. She now lacks the vocal flexibility to capture all the facets of this complex character, a task made more difficult in a production allergic to complexities.

The only complexities are, alas, logistical ones. Act I seems to take place behind a low wall, such that we only see the performers from the knees up. The set was noisy throughout the opera, and the huge planks bounced disturbingly as the singers climbed on them. On Ms. Voigt's first entrance, she tripped trying to step onto a particularly steep section, and Ms. Blythe at one point seemed terrifyingly close to stumbling off the structure entirely.

These flaws, though, are minor and fixable. The production's deeper problem is its utter lack of vision and lack of trust in the intelligence and power of the work and the talented cast. Mr. Lepage might justify his emphasis on visual splendor at the expense of a deep reading of this rich text as a post-ideological reaction to the grandly charged Ring stagings of directors like Patrice Chéreau. But it looks more and more like he just doesn't have any ideas.

Next season brings Mr. Lepage's Siegfried and Götterdämmerung. Perhaps we should be optimistic: As Wotan says in Act II of Die Walküre, "Things can suddenly happen that have never happened before." But Mr. Lepage's Ring has thus far been so opposed to the spirit of the cycle that the prospect of the final two installments is more depressing than exciting.

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"And, in a way," he concludes, "I think it's exactly how, each time, we should go to theatre: with the open mind of a child."

To that end, Mr. Lepage has created a seductive combination of intimacy and spectacle. Though the production is hardly unambitious--BAM's orchestra pit is flooded with 12,000 gallons of water, into which the singers wade waist-deep--Mr. Lepage tells these charming stories using the simple conventions of Vietnamese water puppetry: puppets of the shadow variety as well as uncannily humanlike puppets deftly operated by singers standing behind them.

The critics have found that Mr. Lepage's work in The Nightingale and Other Short Fables certainly fulfills the "childlike wonder" aspect of its promise. The critic for The Times wrote that the production contained "the most affecting and intricate puppetry I have ever seen." Le Figaro wrote of a previous revival in France that Mr. Lepage "has succeeded in the space of an evening in giving back to adults ... a capacity for enchantment reserved for children."

The production was indeed enchanting. There was so much going on, so much of it well crafted and well executed, that it felt odd and almost perverse to be so bored by it all. And boredom, more than anything else, was also the primary reaction to another recent Robert Lepage production, one far removed from the Stravinsky evening's self-consciously straightforward and simple aesthetic.

New York operagoers have been getting a heavy dose of Mr. Lepage's work lately, and we will be spending a great deal of time with him in the coming years. In September, his production of Wagner's Das Rheingold opened the Metropolitan Opera's season, the first installment in the Met's new Ring cycle, which will be rolled out over the coming year. (Die Walküre, the second opera in the cycle, opens April 22.)

There is nothing restrained or intimate about Mr. Lepage's Ring. A 45-ton "machine" forms the set of all four of the cycle's operas. The whole Ring production will cost around $16 million, and the weight of the set required the Met to reinforce its stage. Enormous planks seesaw individually and can rise and fall as a unit, creating a huge variety of shifting configurations. Moreover, the entire structure functions as a constantly morphing projection screen, particularly for the interactive digital projections in which Mr. Lepage and his team specialize, like a hill of pebbles that gently roll down as the dwarf Alberich climbs up and a small circle of flames that accompanies the fire god Loge when he walks. It's a long, long way from shadow puppets.

The result of all of this spending and innovation, though, was a Rheingold dull and shockingly out of touch with Wagner's intricately drawn characters and plot. The singers seemed genuinely undirected, lost in front of the set's imposing mass. The production team working down to the wire to get the technical aspects right (the climactic effect malfunctioned on opening night), but it appeared that relatively little attention was given to the acting. There were no relationships; there was no drama. No one, not even the powerful bass-baritone Eric Owens as Alberich, made much of an impact.

The lower-key, lower-tech Nightingale and Other Short Fables at BAM seemed at first like it would be an antidote to the overstuffed, underdone Rheingold. But it gradually became apparent that there, too, despite the relative simplicity of his resources, Mr. Lepage was more invested in gadgets than in characters. The reliance on puppets grew tedious. It worked best in the brief, superficial tales of the evening's first half, but in The Nightingale, which followed intermission, the emotional material is more complex. Yet the puppets continued to be the only eloquent ones, wiping their brows and projecting uncannily nuanced feelings in front of largely immobile human actors.

Puppets, of course, can be diverting, but they have no depth. This is fine if your audience has, as Mr. Lepage must hope, childlike emotional demands. But ultimately, for an adult, watching puppets is simply boring after a while, not because they're not beautifully done, but because they're not alive. After the initial burst of wonder at the logistics and detail of their operation--which fades, by my watch, in about 15 minutes--you're left with little.

Similarly, with Das Rheingold, it was only when the massive set was moving that you had a sense that the director was engaged, that you got a whiff of the cycle's dramatic stakes and the epic scope that frames its intimate narratives. But in neither Rheingold nor Nightingale were you much aware of the human emotions at the heart of both pieces; in both, as much as possible, Mr. Lepage avoided dealing with humans at all.

In this crucial respect, Mr. Lepage's intimate show using dolls is identical to his massive 45-ton machine: The director consistently creates productions in which it is nearly impossible for an actor to form a character. Indeed, Rheingold, with a plot full of effects and gimmicks, should have been the opera in the Ring cycle that most rewarded the limitations of Mr. Lepage's vision; the rest of the Ring contains an awful lot of hours of people essentially standing around and talking to one another. This can be beautiful, and moving, and fascinating, but not if it's shaped by a director uninterested in people.

After growing up lonely and isolated--he lost his hair to alopecia at an early age and suffered from depression--Mr. Lepage made his name with a series of theater works perhaps unsurprisingly aimed at channeling the spirit of childhood, including another evening of fairy tales, The Andersen Project. But he was likely hired at the Met for his more widely known successes as the director of two Peter Gabriel tours and of two of Cirque de Soleil's best received shows, Ka and Totem. He has shown himself adept at the stunning, characterless, largely plotless spectacles of the contemporary circus and rock show, giving those tired genres a bit of high-culture sheen. But when it comes to great works of art, which are never really about special effects and which demand interpreters alert to their subtleties and possibilities, his tricks fall flat.

Underlying the Met's choice of Mr. Lepage and the plans for his Ring cycle is a fundamental misunderstanding of Wagner's operas. These works are not about the sets, be they "traditional" or "modern"; not about spectacle; and not about instilling some sense of childlike wonder or "enchantment." As directors from Wieland Wagner to Patrice Chéreau to Francesca Zambello have shown, the Ring is a work of profound intellectual and aesthetic rigor, certainly (if done well) a deeply entertaining experience but just as certainly not a kids' show. These are operas for grown-ups; if he wants his cycle to rebound after Rheingold, Mr. Lepage will have to prove that, for once, he's more than a child.

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For a generation, Mr. Brook has been described as a guru of theater and one of its greatest directors. But no one appears to be listening to him.

It’s almost impossible not to see a new production today that isn’t in some way trying to be an onstage film—an alternative reality, or a simultaneous video. What happened to the power of the Word? Language? Story? Acting? How about the man-made set?

What happened to theater’s imagination—and ours?

MY PREFERENCE WILL always be for a theater that’s true only to itself. Call it one of transparent naïveté—as a storyteller sits by a fire and tells us his story. Technology may now be our new fireside. But I believe that theater’s raison d’être resides in its uniqueness as a radical alternative to the false magic of techno effects and film.

Only one theater artist in my experience has successfully married the potentially colliding worlds of new technology and theater—the brilliant French-Canadian experimenter Robert Lepage. Mr. Lepage is the postmodern visionary who has just staged Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust, conducted by James Levine, at the Metropolitan Opera House. Described as the Met’s “first interactive opera,” if you please, the ambitious new production amounts to an overture to Mr. Lepage’s forthcoming Ring cycle at the Met, the first since Otto Schenk’s admired production in the 1980s. The Lepage Damnation is a major artistic gamble by the Met’s new general manager, Peter Gelb—in my view, his most significant one.

By comparison, Mr. Gelb’s association with Lincoln Center Theater directors who are meant to reinvigorate the Met’s repertoire looks like a safe, provincial bet. Bartlett Sher staged a solid production of an old warhorse, Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, at the Met last season, and its one or two familiar theater tricks were enough to leave opera critics hyperventilating with joy. Jack O’Brien, the veteran director of the forthcoming Met production of Puccini’s triptych of one-acters, Il Trittico, is an accomplished, wide-ranging theater director (The Coast of Utopia, Hairspray)—but daringly innovative productions aren’t among his gifts.

Then again, my disappointment in filmmaker Penny Woolcock’s current Met production of John Adams’ Doctor Atomic is primarily over her surprisingly poor, literal-minded use of video. Second-rate video work onstage is quite usual, however, and it’s invariably overpraised—from Rupert Goold’s watery rip-offs of lowbrow slasher movies and even Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining in his recent Macbeth, to Ivan van Hove’s presumptuous tribute to Ingmar Bergman in the flat, uninspiring video close-ups of his actors in The Misanthrope.

But Robert Lepage is in a virtuoso super-league of his own.

He isn’t locked into a predictable avant-garde style like, say, Elizabeth Le Compte at the Wooster Group; to the contrary, the work of his internationally renowned Quebec company, Ex Machina, remains unpredictably open in its search for a new theater vocabulary. Wanting to create a genuine dialogue between different ways of storytelling, Mr. Lepage is testing the limits of what he calls “the toys”—his bag full of technological gadgets—that in turn are fast becoming more sophisticated with each passing day.      

THIS DAMNATION IS the latest incarnation of a production that first opened nine years ago at the Saito Kinen Festival in Japan. Now 50, Mr. Lepage has staged relatively few operas. His double bill of Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle and Shoenberg’s Erwartung that I caught in the mid-’90s was a minor experiment compared to his previous theater piece—the astonishing Needles and Opium, his wholly original riff on Jean Cocteau, Miles Davis, opium and flying. No matter that my preferred theater esthetic is anti-technology, Mr. Lepage’s surreal synthesis of video and theater was nothing short of mind-blowing.

Elsinore, his subsequent one-man show (in which he starred), was intended as a sketchbook for a future full-scale production of Hamlet. He played Hamlet, Gertrude, Claudius et al., which led me to the conclusion that he wasn’t a genius after all, but a nutjob.

Then, among Mr. Lepage’s theater productions that have traveled to New York with frustrating infrequency, came The Seven Streams of the River Ota, his masterly 1996 epic about East and West, Hiroshima, AIDS and generational apocalypse. His technological assurance didn’t swamp the actors onstage, or merely illustrate the multilayered narrative. He uncannily fused the mundane humanity of everyday life with the fantastic.

JUST AS Seven Streams drew on several disciplines (Noh theater, the novel, Japanese puppetry, experiments in sound, film), so Mr. Lepage’s Damnation springs from opera as the traditional meeting place of the arts (music, painting, ballet and architecture among them).

Feverish and daunting, Berlioz’s opera, set in heaven and hell (and various mystical vistas in between), was conceived as a free-form oratorio and has rarely been fully staged. It’s a wild theatrical journey in itself that’s more frequently performed in concert versions. (James Levine has conducted two of them.) This is the first complete Met production of La Damnation de Faust since 1906, and Mr. Lepage has now riskily reclaimed it in that great gilded barn with its 3,900 seats and nose-bleeding fifth balcony.

The vast, imposing set (by the director’s longtime set designer, Carl Fillion) is a five-tiered scaffold divided into 24 inner stages that transform into video screens. I’ll leave the production’s musical accomplishments—particularly James Levine’s glorious leadership of the Met orchestra and its 80-strong chorus—to the opera critics. Mr. Lepage’s techno-wizardry is the thing.

His new interactive technology—in which a digital image onscreen (the opening one of a flock of birds, for example) changes shape according to the pitch and surges of a singer’s voice—creates lovely stage pictures that breathe in sync with the music. Similarly, the soldiers who march perpendicularly up the scaffolding through a field of long grass and fall into the arms of their stricken loved ones.

Or the autumn leaves that morph into gnarled, barren trees as Mephistopheles approaches. And most beguiling of all, when Faust is taken by rowboat to an enchanted lake that shimmeringly mirrors the boat. The little rowboat is charmingly real, the lake digital. Suddenly, the boat capsizes and Faust appears magically underwater in a hypnotic effect that Mr. Lepage first conjured up in Needles and Opium.

His painterly crowd scenes are wonderfully alive, though his human Christ-figures are kind of kitschy. Such technological coups de théâtre as the Mephistophelean demons swarming like snakes over the dancers and the entire set are a too familiar touch of Cirque du Soleil or of event theater like Fuerzabruta. In 2004, Mr. Lepage—no theater snob—created and directed KÀ for Cirque Du Soleil at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. He used the $30 million extravaganza as an experimental playground for the future.

But some of his techno coups are less effective than others, among them the JumboTron image of mezzo-soprano Susan Graham’s face surrounded by flames, which dwarfs her Marguerite as she sings the aching aria “D’amour, l’ardente flamme.” At such dominating, digitally inspired moments, the human being onstage becomes tiny and insignificant, even unnecessary, and one thinks: Why don’t they go whole hog and make a movie?

And yet, when all is said and digitally done—what does Robert Lepage’s La Damnation de Faust begin and end with? A ladder! Faust gingerly descends a ladder from on high at the start, and Marguerite very gingerly ascends another to heaven at the curtain.

At heart, you see, Mr. Lepage believes in a theater of naïveté and innocence. And the essential message is, not by technology alone.

jheilpern@observer.com

There's no one quite like him-and how I wish there were! His happy marriage of technology and theater has created a unique contribution at the very time it's most needed. He humanizes the technological, rather than being swamped by it. On the eve of a new age-our Brave New World-Mr. Lepage's masterly theater of memorable images dissolves seamlessly into the void. His stories are not small, not middlebrow. They burst from a center of playfulness and admirable sensual simplicity. His experimental collaborative work with the Ex Machina company of Quebec is the future.

Geometry of Miracles , Mr. Lepage's homage to the new and the spiritual in the hallucinatory form of Frank Lloyd Wright and the philosopher-guru G.I. Gurdjieff, strikes us immediately as a boldly original idea. But then, an earlier brilliant piece, Needles and Opium , linked Jean Cocteau and Miles Davis in an instinctive free fall of surreal stage pictures and words. Cocteau and Davis were at the barricades of the modern, of course; and both were addicts (opium for the poet, heroin for the jazzman).

So Wright and Gurdjieff are linked in an unexpected new light. The modernist revolutionary who created organic architecture and the spiritual teacher who taught self-knowledge through organic movement were both icons. Both were monumental egotists with slavish followers, and both were revolutionary mavericks.

Some say Gurdjieff was a manipulative charlatan. Mr. Lepage suggests so in Geometry of Miracles (which was all too briefly part of the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival). Rodrigue Proteau, the amazing actor who plays him like a bullheaded samurai, also plays Gurdjieff's double, Beelzebub, a naked apparition we first see emerging miraculously from Wright's desk to sit on the master's knee like a narcissistic lap dancer. The spiritual guide and the devil are joined at the hip, as it were.

It was Wright's bossy third wife, Olgivanna, who was the true Gurdjieff disciple. In 1934, she invited the mystic (and gourmet) to Wright's Wisconsin base, Taliesin. Wright was struck by his presence and admired his holistic ideas, but Gurdjieff's influence on his architecture is more speculative than Mr. Lepage makes out.

I first came across Gurdjieff in the company of Peter Brook, whose early experimental work was influenced by him. Some of the exercises of Mr. Brook's Paris-based troupe were similar to Gurdjieff's work on self-awareness and inner harmony. The hypnotic Gurdjieffian dance movements that are the dreamlike feature of Geometry of Miracles still look a little fascistic to my untutored eyes. But Mr. Lepage is linking Gurdjieff's "sacred dances" and unity of self to Wright's mastery of space and nature, and geometric images.

So much for scholarship unless, by chance, you would like me to dip into René Daumal's unfinished masterpiece, Mount Analogue , which grappled with the Gurdjieffian mystery of essence ("Seeing that you are nothing, you desire to become/ In desiring to become, you begin to live"), in addition to, of course, the collected works of Gurdjieff's main man, the Russian-born P.D. Ouspensky (1878-1947). The point is, Mr. Lepage thankfully treats the tricky spiritual aspects of Geometry of Miracles with a sense of humor. Icon-bashing is one of the healthy games he plays.

His fictional Gurdjieff drops dead from his own hysterical, hyperventilating attempts to stop his devoted disciples from mimicking his every gesture. In another dazzling scene, Mr. Lepage has Herbert Johnson of the Johnson Wax fortune-Wright famously designed his headquarters in Wisconsin-tap-dancing the words of an inspired letter to his secretary, who's a sunny, bosomy bloke in drag, miming typing. "Now read that back to me!" he says when he stops. For a few dizzying moments, it's like watching a breezy 1930's movie.

But as always with Mr. Lepage, there are images of exceptional simplicity and beauty. He re-creates the toadstool columns of Wright's visionary Johnson Wax building with the magically naïve device of having Wright's students place several plates on top of the wine glasses that were laid out for dinner. Gurdjieff's erotic encounter with a young girl is suggested when he whirls them both through space; an effortless doodle of a spiral by Wright on paper looks familiar-the instant prototype for the Guggenheim Museum.

Mr. Lepage's synthesis of theater with film and dance, shadow play and music has its own architecture and organic integrity. At his most creative, everything proceeds with utter naturalness, as it did with his seven-hour masterpiece, The Seven Streams of the River Ota . Its imaginative scale was fantastic. With its central design motif of a triptych screen that pulsated like a heart, the story evolved from Hiroshima in 1945 to a Rear Window view of a 1960's New York apartment block, to the terrible assisted suicide of a young man with AIDS, to a holocaust of mirrors, and a bunraku story of how, by a strange twist of fate, the search for an aphrodisiac for the lovers of the Emperor of China led herbalists to invent what was to become the atomic bomb.

In its awesome way, Seven Streams was about beginning again. So is the two-hour traffic of Geometry of Miracles . It's a less ambitious piece, however, and it loses focus and steam in its second act. They ran out of ideas! It's almost reassuring. Mr. Lepage has come thus far, it seems, to end with a whimper-or a shrug-with a scene set in a disco, which has about as much in common with Wright and Gurdjieff as Puff Daddy. But then, I still remember it-this final image of order danced out of chaos, like a pagan celebration of renewed harmonious life.

But no. The undeniably great had been mysteriously reduced to the ordinary. What had gone wrong with Pete Sampras, I asked a friend, a tennis fanatic. "Bad day at the office," he replied, and laughed, for such days in such company are so ridiculous they become laughable.

That's essentially what has gone wrong with Robert Lepage's new work, Elsinore . The visionary director, whose beautiful, sprawling and utterly brilliant drama, The Seven Streams of the River Ota , took theater into a new dimension at the Brooklyn Academy of Music last season, has returned to Brooklyn with a misfire, a curiosity, an amazing oddity conceived by a nutty professor or mad scientist. His eccentric Elsinore is a brain scan of Hamlet performed by one actor. There are flashes of genius, of course. But Mr. Lepage has had a bad day at the office.

Mind you, his bad days are never boring. More than anyone at work in the avant-garde today, this supreme director is telling stories in ways that we know and have never known. It isn't just that he marries technology to theater more inventively than anyone. (Sooner or later, someone else will come up with bigger and better technology.) It is more that his exciting use of image and film and words has created its own conventions, mutating into a new form of theater. I wrote of his Seven Streams that, in risky, sometimes rambling ways I've never experienced in the theater before, he expands frontiers by making life extraordinary. "Goodness knows where Robert Lepage is headed next," I wisely wrote at the time. "He could easily foul up, easily fall. It is in the nature of things."

That's true! Strip away for a moment everything in his deconstructed solo version of Hamlet -except his Hamlet. We might wonder from the outset what is actually gained by a solo version of Hamlet in which the actor-Peter Darling-must play all the roles like a demented Jekyll and Hyde. Mr. Lepage has pointed out that the action takes place entirely inside Hamlet's head-within the crowded Elsinore, as it were, of Hamlet's unhinged mind. But the outcome is a test of ingenuity rather than of interpretation, like the tricks of an escape artist, a drowning Houdini.

As we watched Mr. Darling's precarious balancing act as Hamlet, Hamlet's mom, the King, Polonius, Ophelia, the gravediggers, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, among others, we think-and can't help thinking-how on earth are the actor and director going to pull off this one ?

How, for example, can the actor play both Hamlet and the King in conversation with each other while seated at opposite ends of a banquet table? Well, Mr. Darling could dash from one end of the table to the other, I guess. But that would be silly. Mr. Lepage's solution is to have the table spin around with the actor manically rotating roles as the table itself rotates. Which is also plain silly. In any case, we're not listening to a word, so distracted are we by Mr. Lepage's postmodern version of The Exorcist .

The experimental production can be wonderfully and almost childishly nuts. Elsinore is an obsessive work-in-progress, and Mr. Lepage, like his possessed hero, is living very dangerously. To take one other example of a fall from the high wire: How does he manage to stage Hamlet dueling with himself? In other words, how can he stage Hamlet's showdown sword fight with Laertes when he has only one actor in the piece?

Well, there's an extraordinary experiment with video in which a minicam seems to be bizarrely attached to the blade of a sword. Whose sword? The outcome is wobbly and whimsical. It's also unexciting. Shakespeare knew for sure that there's nothing like a good sword fight. But we don't get one here. Then again, this Hamlet seems able to morph into two. How? In such pseudomagical moments, Elsinore is more Hamlet-meets-Penn and Teller's "Refrigerator Tour."

Mr. Lepage is here the magician with too much up his sleeve. His solo Hamlet has created a schizoid hero with famous soliloquies attached. In that surprising sense, the director goes too far and not far enough. The soliloquies seem to belong to another pretty conventional production. Nor, I'm afraid, is the capable Peter Darling a magnetic actor. He makes a witty Claudius and a touching, gently mad Ophelia, but there is no music in his prince.

And who is Mr. Lepage's prince? Hamlet is a poet and prince, scholar and antihero, a public figure in trauma, a private young man in adolescent grief, a Renaissance hero wracked by indecision, an Oedipal casebook, someone driven to madness who feigns madness, an actor, a miscast avenger, a tragic lover, a melancholic who is tender, virile, brutal and suicidal. And, most unusually, he's a royal who loves the theater.

Take your pick! "What strikes me about Hamlet is his inability to link the actions he must take to his own beliefs," Mr. Lepage explains. For him, it is Hamlet's coolness, his absence of blind passion, that prevents him from doing what he has to do. "Some may say this isn't the most important paradox in Hamlet's nature, but for me, it's the only one, because it's one I share."

Maybe so. But the prince's indecisive intellectual core is well known, and the director's interpretation confines Hamlet to the neurotic. There are times, too, when this raging, one-dimensional Hamlet is lost in the shadowy, dangerous turrets of Elsinore, drowning in technology. That's the last thing I thought I would say. Mr. Lepage is an artist half in love with stage technology and its possibilities, but he isn't its slave. To the contrary, the quiet, understated naturalism of Seven Streams was its finest contribution. The images-the stage pictures-were staggering and unique. But for all the brilliant effects, Seven Streams was an epic story well told.

His earlier, and irresistibly flashier, Needles and Opium was his surrealistic nod to Jean Cocteau's Blood of a Poet and Luis Buñuel's Un Chien Andalou . He went into the airborne, instinctive free fall of the Surrealists with an astonishing use of sound, language, jazz, shadow play and film. As with Elsinore , he could turn a screen or wall into an expanding universe, a moving graphic, a black hole, heaven and earth. And he could do it with natural magic, which became the great achievement of Seven Streams . But the shaky Elsinore contains false magic-the ultimate destiny of the Surrealists.

In the end, the Surrealists weren't free; they were stylized. And where was their content but lost in pretty effects, streams of consciousness and arty trances? Mr. Lepage's Elsinore is too self-conscious, too hit-and-miss. It isn't artless enough. Yet there are images of remarkable beauty-the sheets of an incestuous bed, the ghost of a king glimpsed murkily through a tapestry, the prince literally spinning in the cosmos, the drowning Ophelia disappearing in space, into an open grave, through the looking glass.

Such supreme moments-with set design by Carl Fillion-are priceless, and Mr. Lepage at his creative best is without equal. The rest, as Hamlet says disapprovingly to the Players, is overdone. "Now, this overdone, or come tardy off, though it makes the unskillful laugh, cannot but make the judicious grieve; the censure of the which one must, in your allowance, o'erweigh a whole theater of others." It bears study! But in other judicious words, Elsinore isn't all one had hoped.