OPERA THEATRE OF ST. LOUIS DESERVES MORE NATIONAL ATTENTION IN ITS 50TH YEAR

The Opera Theatre of St. Louis, an underrated gem that gets -- but deserves more -- national attention, celebrated its 50^th anniversary this month with four solid operas that outshine the offerings of larger opera companies in many ways. The Opera Theatre received advance features from The New York Times and the Associated Press for its world premiere this summer of This House, a Harlem-set tale of ghosts and gentrification from composer Ricky Ian Gordon and librettists Lynn Nottage, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, and her daughter Ruby Aiyo Gerber. But the reviews this summer were mostly local, and I always end up wondering whether St. Louisans realize quite how special an asset this annual festival of four operas really is.

It was my second trip to the city to see the offerings there, having been drawn in 2023 by a new production of Treemonisha by Scott Joplin and two other operas. Most of the operas this year beat that year’s selections, which impressed at the time. The fact that the Opera Theatre’s selections are always in English takes some getting used to, and at first on that trip it wasn’t clear Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte benefitted from the change. But both Donizetti’s Don Pasquale and Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus did this time out, from adapted librettos that were often funnier than the originals. I am not in the camp of John McWhorter, who recently wrote an op-ed in The New York Times advocating that the Metropolitan Opera should translate all its operas to English (he shouts out St. Louis as one of two houses that already do that), but it adds to the originality of the company. The thrust stage at the Loretto-Hilton Center for the Performing Arts, where OTSL mounts its operas, is one of the most intimate in American opera. In his book A New Philosophy of Opera, opera's new "it" auteur Yuval Sharon complains that opera has long been too tied up by mammoth proscenium opera houses, with a "fourth wall" structure. This house, with seating on three sides of the stage in a room that houses only a few hundred, would seem to be close to Sharon's ideal. Fifty of those seats are given away every night under an amazing free ticket program called "Phyllis' Tickets," which helped me see all four of this year's operas.

This House

A line in the intriguing and engaging if ultimately somewhat disappointing This House libretto describes the fingers of a character as “lingering on a a piano key," "roaming for a melody that remains elusive.” That is what much of Ricky Ian Gordon’s score sounds like: roaming for a melody that remains elusive. While it is stoked with influences that are great fun to hear float in and out, including jazz, ragtime and American popular song, most of the reviews agree the sort of melodies that blend would seem to invite rarely coalesce out of the mix. It’s the second collaboration by Nottage and Gordon, who wrote a well-reviewed opera version of Nottage’s acclaimed play Intimate Apparel at the Lincoln Center. That opera used only two pianos, and I would love to see it remounted somewhere. Any new play by Lynn Nottage is a national event – she is the only woman to win two Pulitzers in the century of the award’s existence – and this opera is exciting to watch. However, the libretto does somewhat betray its origins in a play Gerber wrote in college, lacking the focus of Nottage's other work and relying on a genuinely stunning twist that doesn’t quite stand up to closer examination even as it moves the audience. This House tells the story of a haunted Harlem brownstone, occupied by several generations of the Walker family, as the house comes up against the threat of gentrification. As such it joins a recently burgeoning literature about neighborhood change that most notably includes Bruce Norris’ Pulitzer- and Tony-winning Clybourne Park. Like that play, This House manages an eerie collision of past and present with a ghost story. In this opera that collision culminates in a moment that drew gasps (and maybe a shocked guffaw) from the audience Friday night June 12. As evocative as the poetry is, the best writing of the evening on the subject of gentrification might be in the program’s notes by Nottage and Gerber:

“Outside, the surrounding neighborhood is being devoured by gentrification and Black displacement, Black homes and histories erased - lost to gut renovations, the sterile chill of central A.C., and the disappearance of traditions that once defined Harlem's heartbeat. Yet, this house refuses to surrender. As such, the house has become a form of resistance; a repository of family history and memories. The occupants, the Walker family, are tethered to the brownstone, but at times they are not sure whether they are prisoners or protectors.”

The last curtain call was reserved for Adrienne Danrich, whose role as the mother of the protagonist is not necessarily the largest but produced my favorite performance of the evening. Also outstanding is Justin Austin as her son Lindon, so memorable in his dual role in Treemonisha two years ago. The lead, Zoe, was sung with dramatic urgency by Briana Hunter.

On the left side of house, we worried at the opening of the play that we wouldn’t be able to see much of the house, as the opening view was of a white side wall that filled the stage. But Allen Moyer’s evocative set, with the house on a turntable, did end up giving us a great view of the brownstone’s interior as well as its exterior.  

Though This House is not the best opera of the four here, it is exactly the kind of thing that Opera Theatre of St. Louis should be doing and has been changing the world of opera by doing. The world premieres of both of Terrence Blanchard’s hit operas, which became the first by a Black composer to be staged at the Metropolitan Opera, were originally commissioned by and staged at OTSL. They were followed by a continuing commitment to stage original African-American works, appropriate in an almost half-Black city like St. Louis. Meanwhile I found the story of This House only growing on me and lingering as a few days elapsed after the event.

Don Pasquale

The Opera Theatre of St. Louis celebrated its 50^th anniversary by mounting the same opera it started with in 1976, Donizetti’s Don Pasquale, as directed by the same director who mounted it in 1976 at age 25. Since then Christopher Alden has gone on to direct at many of the major opera houses of the world, according to an introduction before the show. I’ve seen one production of his before, a forward-thinking Flying Dutchman at the Lyric Opera of Chicago that was panned by conservative audiences online but that I rather liked. The cast of this summer’s Don Pasquale also includes the leading lady from the original OTSL production, Sheri Greenawald, this time cast in a number of non-speaking and non-singing roles that add something the opera lacked: a woman onstage who is Don Pasquale’s age. 

Age, after all, is the subject of the opera. Self-described “septuagenarian” Pasquale has arranged a marriage for his nephew Ernesto, and when he discovers that (this being an opera from the 19^th Century) Ernesto does not wish an arranged marriage, Pasquale decides to find a wife himself. That is expected to be a punchline – old man wishes to be married. It’s an interesting opera to revisit after the “Me Too” movement, which was largely about older men abusing their money and power to attempt to seduce younger women. That is exactly what Don Pasquale attempts, and for it he is made the butt of jokes by the younger characters. In the end, even he joins in pronouncing what is explicitly called the moral of the story: older men should not marry. Or, as this English translation puts it, older men should “act their age.” Pasquale does, and the presence of Greenawald on stage allows him to amend the original opera’s meaning from the ageist message that old men should never marry to the perhaps more modern idea that older men should marry women their own age. Don Pasquale closes out the opera playing cards with Greenawald’s character.

Alden’s new Don Pasquale is much funnier than the last Metropolitan Opera production of this opera, directed by the late Otto Schenck and most recently performed nine years ago, largely because this one is loaded with directorial choices. Some of the many ideas work and some don’t, but scarcely a moment goes by in which Alden has not thought through a way to highlight the humor in the scenario. Schenck’s production, by contrast, though it had excellent singers, left most of the show without specific directorial choices for comic bits or interpretation. One had the sense the actors were flailing to invent comic moments themselves.

Alden sets all of the action before a backdrop covered with what I believe are Italian Renaissance frescoes, dappled in places with Rococo cherubs. On stage in front of them at the opera’s open are a dozen actors wearing rubber old face masks. The contrast is striking because the bodies in the frescoes are largely well-shaped, young and nubile, though not so consistently so that one feels confidence in leaping to a conclusion about their raison d’etre. In the program notes Alden offers only one hint: He says his production “replaces period-specific picture postcard realism with a more open-ended fluidity, in an attempt to conjure up a psychic space in which the eternal conflict between young and old can be seen from different shifting perspectives.” When I asked an AI app to identify one of the scenes in the fresco, it told me it was Luca Signorelli’s “The Massacre of the Innocents,” which depicts the Biblical King Herod’s effort to murder all male children in Bethlehem out of fear of the town's new baby king. If that isn’t an example of the “eternal conflict between the young and the old,” I don’t know what is. Upon inspecting Signorelli’s painting, however, it wasn’t clear that AI had correctly identified the painting. Still, perhaps the set contains similar stories of the battle between the young and the old. It’s not entirely clear – one is reminded of Sharon’s edict that operas should aspire to the condition of poetry, with not all choices perfectly understandable to the audience. 

The program contains a few photos of the traditional 1976 production by Alden. He writes in the program notes “Perhaps some of you are saying to yourselves ‘Hmmmm … I kind of prefer how the ’76 production looked,’ but the heady controversy circling around tradition versus innovation has played a key role in keeping the mad art form called opera provocative, challenging and lively during these past 50 years.” These last three adjectives (provocative, challenging, lively) describe well the two productions I’ve seen by Alden.

This production stars, as Pasquale, Patrick Carfizzi, whom Met artistic director Peter Gelb called “the heart and soul of the Metropolitan Opera” in a New York Times feature headline last year. In 25 years at the Met, Carfizzi has sung almost entirely character roles, including Dr. Bartolo in The Marriage of Figaro, the Sacristan in performance after performance of Tosca, and Fra Melitone in Verdi’s La Forza Del Destino, which occasioned the article. Here Carfizzi gets a much-deserved opportunity at a meaty lead role that offers plenty of opportunity for his comic skill. He seizes on the chance with great zeal and is quite funny and satisfying to watch. The only problem is that 51-year-old Carfizzi, surrounded by these masked elderly faces, looks too young for the role. The punchline mentioned above, when Pasquale announces he’ll get married instead of Ernesto, doesn’t really land because it depends on our thinking him decrepit. It emphasizes the extent to which we feel the opera is sexist. I felt some nervousness in the laughter of the many septuagenarians in the audience when he announces he's a member of that club. In fact, many of the laughs at his expense seemed to me to occasion some unease from the older-skewing crowd.

Susanne Burgess, who plays the female romantic lead Norina, has several roles at the Met under her belt as well. Her strident vocal acrobatics provide many of the fireworks, particularly in the second act. The highlight is a duet with Ernesto, sung with lovely sensitivity by Charles Sy. As Dr. Malatesta, Kyle Miller tries perhaps a bit too hard at the comedy, which usually flows best by committing to the drama of the role. Trying even harder are some of the non-singing bit roles, which are overly broad even for this silly Opera Buffa, which is considered both the end of the prominence of that genre and one of its high points. This production, so much funnier than the Schenck Met production, does that high point justice.

Die Fledermaus

Director Shawna Lucey’s brilliant and colorful Die Fledermaus knocks the socks off both Metropolitan Opera productions I’ve seen of this Johann Strauss II operetta. The opening scene, during the overture, features some of the sharpest, most originally choreographed comedy I’ve seen recently from stage or film (the operetta is choreographed by Sean Curran, who will work on the long-awaited debut of composer Kevin Puts’ Silent Night at the Met in the future). Set in a New York City subway in 1959 (a year Lucey chose because it was the year the first Playboy club opened), the opening scene begins with a pair of early-morning revelers returning from a costume party, in a Batman costume and a Green Lantern costume. It’s that hour of the day when exhausted late night revelers begin to collide with morning commuters in the Manhattan subway, and that’s the source of much of the comedy, as a crowd of suited subway riders spar for space on the subway bench with the sleeping Batman. In the original libretto, the character of Dr. Falke is abandoned in a bat costume by his friend Eisenstein after a costume party. In the original libretto this all happens off-stage. Here we get to see this major plot point enacted, and brilliantly so. This inciting event, it will turn out, sets the action in motion, as much of what happens after is a revenge plot on the part of Falke. The Batman costume is a perfect 1959 equivalent for the bat costume in Karl Haffner and Richard Genee’s 1874 libretto, and it sets the tone for what is to follow, including the exceptional late 1950s Greenwich Village sets and costume design by Robert Innes Hopkins. While it is true that the operetta here fails in the end to overcome the somewhat overlong and under-substantive comedy from Strauss, it stays funnier than any production I’ve seen before. Showing great comic timing and physical comedy skill one doesn’t always get from “singingactors” (as opera singers are sometimes cumbersomely called) are Jonathan McCullough as Falke, Edward Nelson as Eisenstein, Sara Gartland as Rosalinde and Deanna Breiwick as Adele. George Mannahan conducts the score with appropriate frenzy. Lucey, who has directed multiple operas at LA Opera and San Francisco Opera, delivers an original and memorable production that may prove hard for other Fledermauses to best.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

While Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream may have become popular for its light comedy and silly gags, Benjamin Britten’s score emphasizes above all its melancholic strangeness. The Opera Theatre of St. Louis’ production explored this shadowy palette visually, to match Britten’s creeping and sliding glissandos. The production was the most polished of any of OTSL’s four this summer, a creepy delight from the first appearance of the fairies (a chorus of boy sopranos in Britten’s original score but here played by both boys and girls in green 18^th century tailed suits with white wigs that light up with white Christmas lights) to the final play-within-a-play that banks the opera’s most concentrated period of laughs. Before the tyranny of the three-act screenplay format took over dramatic writing, Shakespeare sometimes ended his plays with an unusual sort of half-hour comic denouement that relieved the tension with explosive laughs after the catharsis. (Think: King Henry woos Katharine after the war is over in the end of Henry V.) Here the theater troupe in the show, the Rude Mechanicals, begin their staging of Pyramus and Thisbe after the wooded stage floor lifts up to reveal a giant moon underneath, just one of many beautiful staging effects. The most visually striking moment of all happens when Oberon literally pulls winter out of his pocket, as the midsummer forest becomes ensconced in snow in part because the fairy king keeps pulling it out of his jacket and tossing it onto the ground. Director Tim Albery’s images are well-suited to the score, gorgeously conducted by Leonard Slatkin.