When it comes to staging the bread-and-butter operas it must depend on, the Metropolitan Opera has been loath to take risks with untraditional new productions. So the company at least deserves credit for entrusting Verdi's eternally popular but problematic "Il Trovatore" to the bold British director Graham Vick.

	The mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick as Azucena in the Met's production of "Il Trovatore." (Sara Krulwich/The New York Times)

Certainly, Fabrizio Melano's 1987 Met production, in which the stage was dominated by monumental movable columns, had employed the traditional approach and failed. The time had come, it seemed, to reclaim "Il Trovatore," a famously easy target of parody, as a great, grim and deeply humane work of musical drama.

Mr. Vick's production is full of ideas. Too many ideas. And even the potentially effective ideas were ineptly executed during this shaky opening performance. An honorable cast gamely tried to make something happen. But with the exception of the mezzo-soprano Dolora Zajick as Azucena, the singers looked painfully uncomfortable.

What went wrong? Mr. Vick rightly believes that the convoluted plot turns of "Il Trovatore" should not be seen as flaws. For Verdi, the libretto, however contrived, was a streamlined vehicle rich with situations that he could seize on to depict with his uncanny psychological insight into characters in the throes of archetypal human conflicts.

Trying to similarly focus attention on those situations and characters, Mr. Vick jettisoned the story's setting of 15th-century Spain. The opera is a 19th-century Italian melodrama, and Mr. Vick and his creative team have tried to evoke that period in the direction and visual concept.

The backdrop of "Il Trovatore" is the civil war that has been raging between the House of Aragon, whose troops are commanded by the Count de Luna, and the rebels pledged to Prince Urgel, led by Manrico, the brooding son, or so he thinks, of the Gypsy woman, Azucena. Though they do not know it, the Count and Manrico are brothers. Azucena knows the truth, and it is killing her. Long ago she stole the infant Manrico from the man who murdered her mother. Verdi, who made enemies easily, was excited by the idea of political and romantic rivals who are drawn together by a primal connection they don't understand.

But Mr. Vick's production is at cross-purposes with itself. The touches of Italian melodrama do not work well with the stark, modern abstract look of the set: two huge movable, intersecting walls, one charcoal gray the other creamy white.

And the costumes are highly stylized to no discernible effect. Manrico, portrayed by the tenor Neil Shicoff, and the Count, the baritone Roberto Frontali, are meant to look eerily alike: uniformed and trim men with pasty-white facial makeup and matching black beards and mustaches. They wind up seeming spectral and insignificant, like mere props in the director's show. And the count's troops, who also wear pasty makeup, look like Keystone Kops in soldiers' costumes with gold epaulets, crimson sashes and funny hats.

In a good production, Leonora, the lady-in-waiting to the Princess of Aragon, is much more than a generically noble Verdi heroine. Though pursued by the willful Count, she loves Manrico, an impassioned stranger from a lower class, the troubadour of the opera's title. But here Leonora, portrayed by the Russian soprano Marina Mescheriakova, must wear a low-cut gown with an enormous puffy skirt. She looks like a parody of Scarlett O'Hara at a ball. What's the point? That Leonora is ensnared in her social station? If so, is making that point worth encumbering a soprano with a demeaning costume?

You had to feel sorry for Mr. Shicoff, who, it was announced, was singing despite his lingering flu. Surely it was not his cold, but the travails he was subjected to that caused his visible distress. In Act II, the libretto says, Manrico appears as if from heaven at the chapel where Leonora, thinking him dead, is about to take the veil. Mr. Vick treats this image literally: Mr. Shicoff had to walk down a ramp in the shape of a cross that fell from the gray wall of the set with a thud on the altar. As he tenuously trod the plank, the audience just laughed. Later on he had to sing "Di Quella Pira," the most spectacular tenor cabaletta in opera, while balancing himself on a seesawing white staircase. This time the audience felt too badly for him to laugh.

The poignant final scene when Manrico and Azucena are in prison awaiting execution is played atop a rippled floor meant to look like a slab of the white wall that has collapsed and buckled. Why? All you could do is worry that the singers would slip and fall. This is the kind of set piece that may have looked powerfully abstract as a mockup model. But the rickety reality was absurd.

Perhaps discomfort with the production accounted for the tentative musical performance, but the conductor Carlo Rizzi must be mostly held responsible. Even simple matters of coordination between the singers and the orchestra were off. The chorus sounded surprisingly feeble.

Mr. Shicoff valiantly persevered and did some impressive singing. When his throat clears up he should sound splendid. Ms. Mescheriakova's voice was curiously uneven, sometimes rich, vibrant and attractive, at other times marred by weak low tones, pinched high notes and a tendency to veer sharp in pitch. Mr. Frontali gave an ardent, stylish and solid performance.

Ms. Zajick's powerhouse voice and stage presence has never seemed more welcome. At least she had a decent costume, a plain black dress and gray wig. She looked like a long- suffering Italian widow, and she dominated every scene she was in. It was as if she had decided that whatever else was going on around her she was going to sings Verdi's music with all her soul and be Azucena.

Who would ever have thought that lovers of "Il Trovatore" would actually miss those clunky black movable columns from the unimaginatively traditional old Met production?

IL TROVATORE

Opera in four acts by Giuseppe Verdi, libretto by Salvadore Cammarano, from Antonio Garcú} Gutiérrez's drama "El Trovador"; conductor, Carlo Rizzi; production by Graham Vick; sets and costumes by Paul Brown; lighting by Matthew Richardson. At the Metropolitan Opera.

WITH: Marina Mescheriakova (Leonora), Dolora Zajick (Azucena), Neil Shicoff (Manrico), Roberto Frontali (Count de Luna), Dimitri Kavrakos (Ferrando), Jane Shaulis (Inez), Ronald Naldi (Ruiz), John Shelhart (Gypsy) and David Lowe (Messenger).