From training in costume and set design, the Munich native Philipp Stölzl graduated to music videos for the likes of Mick Jagger and Madonna and then branched out into movie and opera direction. His sensibility, it has struck us, is that of a graphic novelist, keen on bold contours, off-kilter angles, and jagged poses. In his debut at Covent Garden, he stages Giuseppe Verdi’s Un Ballo in Maschera, wherein giddy sparkle and tragic gloom pirouette around each other on the head of a pin. Poster art for Stölzl’s “playfully surreal” production skews macabre if not Goreyesque. Charles Castronovo sings Sweden’s king Gustavo III, enamored of Amelia (Malin Byström), the wife of the king’s great friend and ally Count Anckarstroem (Aleksei Isaev). Decent to a fault, Gustavo and Amelia try independently to force erotic attraction into a Platonic straitjacket. But in the dead of night, at the foot of the gallows, with assassins swirling in the shadows, their cover is blown. What a hoot—for some. (As in Rigoletto, laughter in song is a keynote of the score.) Anita Rachvelishvili and Ksenia Nikolaeva share the part of an ICE-bait mixed-race fortune teller who reads people like books. Katharina Konradi twinkles as the king’s pageboy Oscar, the palace Cherubino. Jakub Hrůša conducts. —Matthew Gurewitsch