Devil wears a red dress in "Star Trek" Pelleas

By Michael Roddy

LONDON, May 14 (Reuters) - There are plenty of rock musicals in London's West End, but if you want to see the devil with the red dress on, she's at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden.

Perhaps not exactly a she-devil, but Austrian mezzo-soprano Angelika Kirschlager's Melisande, costumed in a bewitching, diamond-panelled red dress for Debussy's mystical "Pelleas et Melisande", is anything but the wan heroine of productions past.

This is a Melisande for a metro-sexual age, ordering Prince Golaud, who finds her alone in a forest, not to fish out a crown from a fountain (how'd it get there, huh?).

Later, eyes flashing mischievously, she'll nonchalantly toss the wedding ring he gives her down a well.

"I'm not stupid," Kirschlager, still wearing that dress, says of her character backstage after last week's London premiere of a new Salzburg-Royal Opera co-production with Simon Rattle on the podium.

"I'm always watching and trying not to get into a bad situation, but I'm not passively shy," she adds. "I'm reflecting my situation."

Hers -- in the red dress -- is decidedly better than the rest of the superb cast who are outfitted in baggy, bangled white body suits that are a cross from some campy outcast aliens in "Star Trek" and Elvis-impressionist gear.

Couple this with a staging using huge monolithic boxes a la "2001 A Space Odyssey" that open to reveal, variously, 91 blood-stained pillows (marriage on the rocks, get it?), or the vixen herself in THAT dress, pinioned as if in a butterfly collection amid 38 copies of same, and you feel pinioned by director Stanislas Nordey's static movements and clobbered by designer Emmanuel Clolus's heavyhandedness.