Bartlett Sher's "L'Elisir d'Amore" Is Revived at the Met L'Elisir d'Amore Andriana Chuchman, center, and Ramón Vargas, far right, star in this revival at the Metropolitan Opera. It's unusual for a tragedy-obsessed art form, but for the last month or so, the fare at the Metropolitan Opera has been dominated by works that end happily and without too many bodies piled up. There have been runs of Strauss's elegant "Der Rosenkavalier" and Mozart's sublime "The Magic Flute," as well as new productions of Verdi's merry "Falstaff" and Johann Strauss Jr."s frothy "Die Fledermaus." If you really needed death, "Tosca" and "Eugene Onegin" were there, too. The lightheartedness continued on Thursday evening with Donizetti's sweet yet cleareyed "L'Elisir d'Amore," my favorite comedy of all, in a revival of the Bartlett Sher production that opened the Met's 2012-13 season. The star then was Anna Netrebko, who was scheduled to sing Adina again, until the company announced this week that she was ill with the flu and would miss at least the first two performances. Her cover, the Canadian soprano Andriana Chuchman, stepped up and had an assured, sparkling success in her Met debut. Moving with grinning confidence through Mr. Sher's conventional, cheesy show, she sang the headstrong Adina with light, bright accuracy, her voice slender but precise and expressive. She had an irresistibly lively way with words, joyfully digging into the crackling consonants in a word like "scaccia." Ms. Chuchman, who is making her Met debut, and Nicola Alaimo in "L'Elisir d'Amore." Ms. Chuchman's highest notes aren't her strongest, with a sometimes dry and chalky quality, and she sounded tired by the end of Adina's longest and most demanding numbers. But in her second-act duet with Dr. Dulcamara, the genial charlatan who has come to town trying to pass off cheap wine as an all-purpose elixir, her voice took on a melting fullness, shifting with exuberant vigor from long, lyrical phrases to glittering little tumbles of notes. The bass Erwin Schrott sang Dulcamara with agility in the role's quick patter and rich yet focused tone. He gave the quack doctor a twitchy, dandyish persona reminiscent of Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow, whose spindly goatee and stringy hair Mr. Schrott also borrowed. There was some wear around the edges of Ramón Vargas's warm tenor, but as Nemorino, the hapless country bumpkin who longs for Adina and gets wasted on the would-be elixir, he sang with clarity and kept the mugging at a blessed minimum. His account of the aching showstopper "Una furtiva lagrima" was unassuming and intimate: less grand aria than simple, sincere confession. As Belcore, the arrogant army sergeant who decides that Adina is his, the baritone Nicola Alaimo was gruff and often nearly inaudible. This is one of the few "Elisir" productions you'll ever see in which Dulcamara is a more glamorous presence than Belcore. Maurizio Benini, who conducted the production when it opened in 2012, returned and once again kept the mood peppy, even a little frenetic, with some abrupt transitions between joviality and reflection. Even when Michael Yeargan's sets were new last season, they looked as if they'd been exhumed after decades in storage: faded-paint flats that wouldn't have been out of place in the 1950s. The show, on the whole, remains so stolidly unimaginative that Mr. Sher's trickle of interpolations feels discordant, from Belcore's physically abusive streak - a jarring bit of darkness that disappears before the second act - to the extras who wear putty-colored clothes and move in slow motion, cluttering scenes. The production seems to posit Adina as part tomboy, part tart: hence her unflattering combination of bosom-baring blouse with top hat and blazer with tails, as if she were the ringleader of a Risorgimento circus. It speaks to Ms. Chuchman's talent that she was able to pull it off, convincingly creating a character who's caring under a wary shell of cool.