A Vancouver Opera production. At the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on Saturday, January 27. Continues until February 8

The buzz at Vancouver Opera’s opening of its hugely ambitious, First Nations–inspired The Magic Flute was palpable. Socialites had pulled their best Dorothy Grant designs out of the closet, Musqueam chief Ian Campbell wore his full regalia for a traditional welcome song, and the overture was accompanied by video artist Sean Nieuwenhuis’s inspiring projected montage of Vancouver high-rises and bridges giving way to the lush evergreens of our West Coast ancestors. The concept had clearly captured everyone’s imagination, and for good reason: our local Native history seems a perfect fit for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s tale of fantastical creatures and mystical shores. At a time when so many productions come with borrowed sets and costumes, here was a way to make a masterpiece truly our own—adding up to the biggest investment ever for this city’s opera company.

Aside from the challenges of creating such a brand-new take on The Magic Flute, Mozart’s complex singspiel carries its own special problems. It’s a long, delicate dance between folk humour and philosophy, silly antics and serious Masonic rituals. This Flute boasts scenes of inspired imagery, some strong performances, and conductor Derrick Inouye’s sparkling rendition of the music, but it lacks the singular sweep—the sustained magic—to propel it through three-plus hours.

The story follows young Tamino, who finds himself in a strange land where the Queen of the Night sends him to rescue her beautiful daughter, Pamina, from imprisonment. But when Tamino and his comical bird-catcher sidekick, Papageno, track her down, he finds that her captor, the ruler Sarastro, is not as evil as he has been made out to be.

Here, the setting is a mysterious coastal forest, depicted via a simple screen that jags up like mountains, transparent burlap “pillars” that resemble tree trunks, a central shoreline rock, and projected fern and cedar foliage. Native drawings depict some of the animals encountered, Sarastro’s people dress in the ceremonial garb of 10 different Nations, and select words have been translated into the Halq’eméylem language. Some of the sets are impressive: a golden canoe arrives to sail Papageno and Tamino away on their journey, and there’s a giant, metal abstraction of an arbutus tree. But much of the second act puts the specially created costumes against sparse scenery, with little more than an elevated walkway for visual interest. (Proving you can never totally trust technology, on opening night a glitch in the computerized projection system found the main screen bearing a software information page for a minute.)

The Magic Flute’s colourful characters do their best to liven up the stark staging. Hwang Sin Nyung’s Queen, despite her sketchy English, is ferocious enough in her metallic-frond gown to steal each scene, and though her lower register sometimes gets lost, her “rage aria” is a climax of coloratura, as she fires off her aerial notes and detonates the elusive high F. Bass-baritone Kevin Short’s Sarastro is stiff, but he’s nonetheless majestic in his bare feet and animal skins, regally reaching down to his low Fs. As Pamina, soprano Nathalie Paulin has a gleaming voice, but she and her Tamino (effortless tenor Philippe Castagner) lack charisma, especially in director Robert McQueen’s colloquial spoken translations. On the other end of the spectrum is baritone Etienne Dupuis’s Papageno, who occasionally veers toward clownish cliché. Michel Corbeil’s menacing Monostatos is more cleverly funny. Still, his and his henchmen’s 18th-century Euro-style garb contributes to a costume mishmash that includes Tamino and Pamina’s present-day leathers, Sarastro’s people’s ceremonial costumes, Papageno’s suit of Steller’s jay feathers, a quartet of dancers’ gold spandex unitards, and the Star Trek–silver bald heads of the Queen and her crew.

Like so many other aspects of this production, the costumes are more striking individually than they are put together as a whole. One reason may be that so many First Nations consultants worked alongside the usual Vancouver Opera designers that there were simply too many cooks in the potlatch to create a unified vision. Yet it’s impossible to fault VO for trying to extend its reach—it’s just that this time, it reached a little too far.