It’s hard to believe that Washington National Opera is celebrating its 70th anniversary. For its season opening, Artistic Director Francesca Zambello has brought back her 2017 production of arguably the grandest of grand operas — Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida, best known for its triumphal scene often staged with live elephants. No elephants in this production, folks, but with its massive chorus, a children’s chorus, and integrated ballet numbers by choreographer Jessica Lang, there is plenty of spectacle. Yet Zambello insists the work is a chamber opera, and, truly, its best moments feel as if a camera has zoomed in to capture the inner turmoil of the three main characters, caught in an eternal triangle and torn between passion and duty.

Conceived by Verdi and with the help of librettist Antonio Ghislanzoni, Aida tells the story of an imagined war between Egypt and its neighbor, Nubia, in an unspecified reign during the time of the pharaohs. The work, which premiered in 1871, was fueled by the recent conquests of Napoleon pushing into Egypt and setting off a frenzy of archaeological and artistic interest in Egyptology across Europe.

Zambello has pushed the temporal unspecificity further with this production, and with her creative team and casting has created a vaguely modern world background that could be about any two multicultural nations at war. In this world, there are two kings insisting on their right. One, simply named “The King,” gains the power advantage and wants to keep undesirable foreigners from entering what he sees as his territory. Amonasro, also a king, rules over a poorer people desperately fighting to exist.

Against this background, Amonasro’s daughter, Aida, has become a captive and slave to Egyptian Princess Amneris. Both women are in love with Radamès, an ambitious, patriotic soldier who is soon tapped by the intermediaries of the gods to lead the Egyptian war efforts. Aida tries to hide her feelings from her powerful rival Amneris and is torn between her love for Radamès, her devotion to her father, and love for her people and homeland. Radamès is also torn between his love for Aida and his duty as a soldier. Meanwhile, Amneris uses everything in her power to ensnare the man she loves and humiliate Aida.

In 2017, the contemporary artist known as RETNA got top billing for his contributions to the opera’s overall design, and his calligraphic projections with their nod to Egyptian hieroglyphics seemed bold and innovative. In this rerun, they seemed somewhat arbitrary and finally tiresome. Some shifts in the panel projections and lighting, happening in the middle of a duet or trio, even distracted from the emotional storytelling.

Michael Yeargan’s less flashy scenic design contributions serve the story and have stood the test of time, as have Anita Yavich’s costume designs and Mark McCullough’s original lighting design, repurposed for this revival by Peter W. Mitchell.

The performances are strong and compelling. From the first utterance by Morris Robinson as the High Priest, this superb bass commanded the Kennedy Center’s Opera House. He and Kevin Short, as The King, are DC regulars who have blessedly anchored several WNO productions. Shenyang invests his portrayal of Amonasro with powerful dignity, and his confrontation with Rowley, rejecting her and pushing her to the floor, is a dramatic highlight.

The three leads are double cast, appearing on alternate nights. Jennifer Rowley sang the title role on opening night. Rowley is a true singer-actor, especially gifted in embodying the frailty and emotional vulnerability of the captive slave girl Aida. Her beautiful soprano was both elegant and full of pathos, and her control while singing softly was especially effective, while her physical freedom and full-bodied gestural expressiveness made for a most memorable performance.

Adam Smith’s Radamès is also a most satisfying cast choice. Smith is the epitome of a disciplined military leader, with ramrod physique and steely focus as when he’s poring over maps and plans with his soldiers. He even communicates a soldier’s awkwardness around court functions, especially when pressed into an uneasy and arranged romantic alliance with the King’s daughter, Amneris. But when he is with his love Aida, the depths of his emotional gentleness and passion are revealed through voice and body. Smith has created a most moving emotional arc, and there are many moments, as in the final duet between Radamès and Aida, that are exquisite vocally and emotionally heartbreaking.

Raehann Bryce-Davis has a powerhouse stage presence and a rich mezzo to fill the role of the calculating and sometimes cruel Princess Amneris, who is used to getting her own way. Occasionally, her voice, placed far back, lacks articulation and even gets muffled by the orchestra and other voices. But she, too, has created a most satisfying emotional arc, and when her breaking point comes in the final act, she stoops, legs splayed, as if she would dig and bury herself in the earth. This is the moment she realizes the irreversible, tragic ending she has condemned her love Radamès to, and her sound and physicality combined make for one of the great dramatic moments in this opera or any in my experience.

The Washington National Opera Chorus and orchestra produce a great sound under Conductor Kwamé Ryan. However, gathering this many people on stage at once sometimes feels static and blocky, especially with a simultaneously staged ballet in place of the iconic triumphant march (with elephants).The opera speaks to our times in several ways. Bringing the production of Aida to the Kennedy Center Opera House might signal, intentionally or not, that respect should be given to other sovereign states and that kings wielding power are likely to have tragic consequences in their collateral damage. Its message might also suggest that we should all work for peace through love. After all, what is life without love — or opera?

Running Time: Three hours with a 25-minute intermission.

Aida plays through November 2, 2025, in the Opera House at The Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, 2700 F St NW, Washington, DC. Purchase tickets (starting at $65.55) online or by calling (202) 467-4600 or toll-free at (800) 444-1324. Box office hours are Monday-Saturday, 10 am-9 pm, and Sunday, 12 pm-9 pm. A limited number of $39 Rush tickets will be available for every performance at the Kennedy Center Box Office the day of the performance. Rush tickets become available 2 hours prior to each performance.

The program is online here.

Directed by Francesca Zambelo. Conducted by Kwamé Ryan. Artistic Design: RETNA, Scenic Designer: Michael Yeargan. Original Lighting Designer: Mark McCullough. Revival Lighting Designer: Peter W. Mitchell. Costume Designer: Anita Yavich. Choreographer: Jessica Lang. Fight Master: Casey Kaleba.

Cast for opening night: Jennifer Rowley, Raehann Bryce-Davis, Adam Smith, Shenyang, Morris Robinson, Kevin Short, Dwayne Brown, Jenelle Figgins, Lauren Carroll, Nicholas Huff, and the Choruses and Orchestra of the Washington National Opera.

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October brings a rare and remarkable production to Washington, DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company: The Wild Duck by Henrik Ibsen. Directed by Artistic Director Simon Godwin and performed by a tight-knit ensemble, the production balances humor and tenderness, bringing both avian and human follies into sharp focus.

Coincidentally, across town this month, Ibsen’s The Enemy of the People opens at Theatre J. What is in the air inspiring this twin revival of the playwright’s late-19th-century works, and how might they speak to us today?

Often called the father of modern drama and considered second only to Shakespeare, Ibsen was a fearless innovator who moved from mythic folk tales to psychological portraits (Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House) to sweeping social critique. Then, in one creative surge during the summer of 1883, he wrote The Wild Duck — a smaller, symbolist play wrapped in domestic realism. Early audiences were baffled: the plot seemed to wander, the characters were unlikeable, and their choices unsettling. 

Here, adaptor David Eldridge and Godwin streamline the text, revealing its emotional power and cutting extraneous business. Scenic designer Andrew Boyce and lighting designer Stacey Derosier create a world where the domestic meets the symbolic and both take flight. Gone is the Act I dinner party of businessman Håkon Werle. Instead, offstage laughter and clinking glasses frame a brief prologue that quickly leads us to the heart of the story — the home and studio of photographer Hjalmer Ekdal and his family. A large dining/worktable anchors the space beneath a raked glass ceiling, where Derosier’s lighting shifts mood and time. An upstairs door hints at the aviary beyond — home to the wounded wild duck that becomes the play’s haunting central symbol.

Godwin directs the work with precision and restraint, eschewing gimmicks in favor of rich, natural performances that showcase ensemble acting at its best. Alexander Hurt and Nick Westrate inhabit the central characters of Gregers Werle and photographer Hjalmer Ekdal, friends since childhood who discover in adulthood that they’ve become ill-suited to each other’s entrenched habits. Westrate’s Hjalmer is a generous, affable friend and devoted father; a dreamer sustained by comforting illusions. Hurt’s Gregers, wounded by his father’s corruption and dalliances, is rigid in his ideals and determined to expose deception no matter the cost. Both men, in their own ways, resemble the wild duck: “diving down to the bottom of the deep blue sea” and clinging to what they believe keeps them alive.

The women in the play are grounded and practical. Melanie Field as Gina Ekdal is a strong and capable woman who runs both home and the photography studio. Gina carries a dark secret from her past but has moved beyond to build a relationship and home with Hjalmer and daughter Hedvig. We grow to sympathize and love this woman and also admire her persistence, industry, and resilience. Mahira Kakkar’s Mrs. Sørby, once entangled with two of the men, wields her charm and intelligence to her advantage. Both these characters have made their lives happy enough, though not without scars.

As the Ekdals’ teenage daughter, Hedvig, Maaike Laanstra-Corn is luminous — her restless energy and trembling vulnerability capturing a young girl facing the unthinkable. Robert Stanton (Håkon Werle), David Patrick Kelly (Old Ekdal), Matthew Saldivar (Relling), and indeed the whole cast, make for an exceptional whole. 

Sound designer Darren L. West and music director Alexander Sovronsky serve up music, and particularly violin solos, much like sherbet breaks between courses. 

The show was a feast and showed this generation the lasting legacy of Ibsen’s dramatic powers.

Running Time: Approximately two hours and 30 minutes with one 15-minute intermission.

The Wild Duck plays through November 16, 2025, in the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Klein Theatre, 450 7th St NW, Washington, DC. Tickets (starting at $39) can be purchased online, by calling the Box Office at 202-547-1122, or through TodayTix.

The Asides program is online here.

The Wild Duck
By Henrik Ibsen
Adapted by David Eldridge
Directed by Simon Godwin
Produced in Association with Theatre for a New Audience

CAST
Katie Broad, Melanie Field, Alexander Hurt, Mahira Kakkar, David Patrick Kelly, Maaike Laanstra-Corn, Bobby Plasencia, Matthew Saldivar, Alexander Sovronsky, Robert Stanton, Nick Westrate

CREATIVE
Scenic Designer: Andrew Boyce, Costume Designer: Heather C. Freedman, Lighting Designer: Stacey Derosier, Sound Designer: Darron L West, Music Director: Alexander Sovronsky, Movement and Fight Director: Jacob Grigolia-Rosenbaum

SEE ALSO:
STC announces cast and creatives for Ibsen’s ‘The Wild Duck’ (news story, August 11, 2025)

The post STC’s exceptional ‘Wild Duck’ gives wing to Ibsen’s emotional power appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

This is a Tosca to die for. Opera aficionados who have seen this production, part of Glimmerglass’ 50th Anniversary season, are already comparing it to other productions — that is what opera lovers do, after all — and several who spoke to me said this is the best they’ve seen. I concur.

The world in this opera by the great Italian composer Giacomo Puccini is on fire. Civil war has broken out. Bullies and thugs have seized power. The rule of law is gone. It is a world where children are bullied and women are compromised and forced to submit to depraved, insatiable lechers. It is a world where even the church can offer no sanctuary but where terrified people are dragged from their hiding places and “disappeared.” The love of power has all but replaced the power of love, and empathy for our fellow man is scorned. As our great contemporary historian Jon Meacham has addressed the precarious situation we find ourselves in today, which offers some parallels, “We are in a battle for the soul of our country.”

Against a backdrop of political terror and chaos, a painter paints and a singer sings.

Director Louisa Proske, who hails from Berlin, knows well the scarred history of her own country’s not-so-distant past and has brought her considerable forces together to get a bead on questions at the heart of this opera. What do we do in the face of chaos and evil? What should artists do so as not to collude? And what role can they play to resist, help lead us through, and, to quote Meacham again, find “our better angels”?

Set Designer John Conklin, who designed the productions for the entire Glimmerglass Anniversary season, in Tosca continues his visual linkage of the works so that they might resonate and “be in conversation” with one another by threading through all his choice of thematic red. It put me in mind of another show’s anthem for young men in a time of revolution: “Red, the blood of angry men… Red, the color of desire…,” etc.  With Conklin’s passing just before the season opened, the Festival has dedicated the season to him.

What would a grand opera be without grand voices? In the case of this Tosca, the three leads are at the top of their game, and all three have been featured this past season at the Met. Yongzhao Yu is our hero, Mario Cavaradossi, a painter commissioned to paint a penitent Mary Magdalena for the cathedral. Yu embodies opera’s heroic tenor with his ardent vocal power giving full expression to some of the most beautiful melodic writing Puccini composed for a tenor. Yu also rises to the acting challenges of the role, demonstrating in turn the loyal revolutionary comrade and friend to Angelotti, the disciplined artist who continues to work under enormously stressful conditions of wartime, the tender and reassuring wooer to a jealous and high-maintenance diva, then a most courageous hero enduring torture and facing his own execution.

As the Diva that Mario adores, Michelle Bradley is, if anything, even more glorious vocally. Bradley possesses the power of a world-class soprano with seemingly that extra gear that enables her to soar out and above an entire orchestra. But she also shows the control to reel everything into a gossamer yet expressive pianissimo as she does throughout, but particularly in that most beautiful of Puccini’s arias, “Visi d’arte.”

There is a quintessential third role in the story, that of Scarpia, perhaps the greatest, most unscrupulous and rapacious villain in all of opera. Greer Grimsley seems born to have portrayed his darkness. It is the role of Scarpia that makes for the tight dramatic structure that builds to the thrilling climactic showdown in the second act. Grimsley portrays the oily unctuousness that changes in a moment to steely cruelty.

Proske prepares us for the big, dramatic payoff in her radical approach to the setting of Act II. Gone is any traditional office for Scarpia in the grand Farnese Palace with an ornate wooden desk and accoutrements of wealth and power associated with Scarpia’s world. Instead, we find ourselves in a military camp barracks made of cinder block and crenelated metal walls. At the top of the act, a young woman lies on a narrow bed in the office, exhausted or passed out, one is left to imagine, by only the latest forced sex by Scarpia. Stage right in full view of the audience is a tiled institutional bathroom, its walls slightly moldy. One of Scarpia’s henchmen is taking a piss. Later, another Blackshirt comes in and vomits from the horror of witnessing Mario being tortured. Even the final act of violence is staged in this most ignominious of settings. Spoiler alert: the opera  doesn’t end well.

Glimmerglass productions are always marked by rich collaborations between top-notch design teams. The designers for Tosca have wrought something that surpasses anything I’ve seen there in the almost 13 or 14 seasons I’ve been coming. Conklin’s set design was greatly aided by his associate, James Rotondo. Robert Wierzel, lighting designer, did a bang-up job for The Rake’s Progress this season, but his painting with light for this magnificent Tosca, especially Act I, which glows like a burnished Old Master’s painting, surpassed all. Kaye Voyce designed the costumes, and they too glowed as grand opera should. Tom Watson, hair and make-up designer for all the shows, is a stalwart member of the Glimmerglass design team and enhanced each character’s definition from the emaciated look and ragged locks of the battle-fatigued Angelotti to the glamorous tresses for the star, Floria Tosca.

Presiding over all for this production is Conductor Joseph Colaneri, who seemingly breathes Italian opera. His acute understanding of Puccini makes this Tosca a most fully realized and life-affirming experience of the power of great art.

Tosca (plays through August 16, 2025)

Running Time: Two hours and 21 minutes with a 25-minute intermission.

Conductor – Joseph Colaneri
Stage Director – Louisa Proske
Set Designer – John Conklin
Associate Set Designer – James Rotondo
Costume Designer – Kaye Voyce
Lighting Designer – Robert Wierzel
Projected Titles – Kelley Rourke
Fight Director – Thomas Schall
Sound Designer – Joel T. Moran
Hair & Makeup Designer – Tom Watson

Floria Tosca – Michelle Bradley
Mario Cavaradossi – Yongzhao Yu
Scarpia – Greer Grimsley
Cesare Angelotti – Donghoon Kang
Sacristan – Sergio Martinez
Spoletta – Kellan Dunlap
Sciarrone – Luke Harnish
Treble Solo – Ian Clark
Jailer – Jeremy Harr

Tickets are available at glimmerglass.org.

SEE ALSO:
2025 Glimmerglass Festival Review: ‘Sunday in the Park with George’ and ‘The House on Mango Street’
2025 Glimmerglass Festival Review: ‘The Rake’s Progress’
(reviews by Susan Galbreaith)

The post 2025 Glimmerglass Festival Review: ‘Tosca’ appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

Glorious music! Wonderful musicianship! The inclusion of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in this their 50th Anniversary Season shows Glimmerglass Festival at its best, taking audiences for a pleasure ride through some great works of opera and music-theater. Glimmerglass also has become a proven model removed from the pressures of big metropolitan centers where economics of “the biz” all too often propel producing organizations to engage in transactional art-making and relationships. Instead, I believe here that artists are encouraged to take the time to nurture each other and nourish themselves and to re-imagine a work like The Rake’s Progress for today’s audience on a stage that draws everyone close so that when the side walls of the Alice Busch Theater slide open at the end, we find ourselves still cradled in a most bucolic setting.

Stravinsky’s opera pays tribute to the long tradition of this multi-disciplinary art form and celebrates music especially, which Conductor Joseph Colaneri most triumphantly realizes in leading the Glimmerglass Orchestra. Right from the start, with Stravinsky’s nod to Monteverdi, there’s a “Listen up” fanfare, and, under Colaneri’s baton, we’re off and running. The composer has also borrowed from Mozart in his orchestral composition and structure. At the same time, using a little theme that repeats, oscillating between major and minor, and by employing dissonance at times even in what is a tonal composition, Stravinsky places his music squarely in the camp of modernism.

Set Designer John Conklin picked up on the composer’s modernist intentionality and, rather than providing the setting called for at the story’s beginning — a garden on an 18th-century English country estate — he created a 20th-century painterly-and-sculpture “garden” of curved steel and discs and neon rods that change color from fiery red to magenta and blue during the course of the show. Conklin places all this against the reveal of the theater’s backstage, all pipes and mechanics exposed and everything sprayed red. It’s a 20th-century urban hell, make no mistake, and the production design telegraphs that man will have to pay for his greed, ambition, and carelessness.

The opera follows a Faustian tale of a fellow, Tom Rakewell, making a pact with the devil, selling his soul for power or pleasure or both. The devil in this opera comes in the character of Nick Shadow. Nick is a charmer, part worldly gentleman and part genie obsequiously promising to grant Tom three wishes, all the while reeling in his victim.

The Rake’s Progress is not an entirely easy piece, not on the listener’s ear, neither for the orchestra players to play nor for the singers to sing. It is a particularly Herculean task presented to the lead who, as the character of Tom Rakewell, must have the acuity and vocal stamina equivalent to a runner’s marathon. However, Adrian Kramer as Tom is more than up to the task and displays not just vocal alacrity and expression, but a certain acrobatic agility in expressing Tom’s irrepressible character and engages in some downright, cartoon-like physical clowning.

This muscular production highlights the physical genius of Eric Sean Fogel. Fogel, who has been associated with Glimmerglass for many seasons as Choreographer and Co-Director, steps up to fully direct and choreograph this show and has found in Kramer the perfect opera performer to realize his physicalized style of music-theater. In fact, the whole ensemble rises to the Fogelian challenge and plunges the hero into a teeming, roiling nightmarish world of lust and sadistic debauchery. The scene when Nick Shadow escorts the still naïve Tom to a London brothel is sin-sational! Kudos to the talented resident artists, led by Dance Captain Peter Murphy, a kinetic wonder!

As Nick Shadow, Aleksey Bogdanov is a fascinating performer to watch and a wonderful suave foil to the so-easily duped Tom. His velvety tones disarm and will lead on his man to doom or madness. Another marvelously drawn character is the bearded lady, Baba the Turk, with whom Tom, in his debauched delirium, is pressed into marriage. Deborah Nansteel, formerly in WNO’s Cafritz Young Artists’ Program, uses her beautifully supple voice and heartfelt sensibilities to present a complex, sympathetic portrait of a character today we might be wise to recognize as a non-gender conforming individual. (How did Stravinsky envision this character?) As Trulove, Anne’s father, Mark Webster represents the world of moral decency and ramrod societal norms. He’s a formidable old-world presence, who takes his daughter back into his sheltered world after her hopes for redemption through love unravel.

For Stravinsky to realize such an endeavor as this opera, it seems like destiny that he would share the task with a man who would become his friend and sometime philosophical sparring partner, W.H. Auden, the poet, who readily agreed to serve as Librettist. They were later joined by American poet and Auden’s lifelong lover Chester Kallman on the creative team. Although Auden as a man could be darkly complicated, his poetic sensibilities ran the gamut from philosophical, moral, and political — all which color this story — to romantic where he can even be delicate. This last side of Auden is best represented by the character of Anne Trulove, a morally good woman who forgives and follows her man to London to try and rescue him from his own weakness and growing moral bankruptcy.

As Anne, Lydia Grindatto gives a subdued and nuanced performance against the riot of more boisterously colorful characters, but this makes her role only more affecting, and her voice shines with a purity and strength that define her character. Auden’s writing for her character spins pure gold in places, providing a text imminently singable.

It was a great privilege to see and hear this work, so artfully realized. Sad to think there are only five performances left.

The Rake’s Progress (plays through August 15, 2025)

Running Time: Two hours and 44 minutes plus a 25-minute intermission.

Conductor – Joseph Colaneri
Director and Choreographer – Eric Sean Fogel
Set Designer – John Conklin
Costume Designer – Lynly A. Saunders
Lighting Designer – Robert Wierzel
Projection Designer – Greg Emetaz
With Adrian Kramer, Lydia Grindatto, Aleksey Bogdanov, Deborah Nansteel, Mark Webster, Tzytle Steinman, and Kellan Dunlap plus the Glimmerglass Ensemble and Orchestra

Tickets are available at glimmerglass.org.

SEE ALSO:
2025 Glimmerglass Festival Review: ‘Sunday in the Park with George’ and ‘The House on Mango Street’
2025 Glimmerglass Festival Review: ‘Tosca’
(reviews by Susan Galbreaith)

The post 2025 Glimmerglass Festival Review: ‘The Rake’s Progress’ appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

 It was 50 years ago that Glimmerglass Opera Festival first opened and helped ignite a movement that would redefine what was to be American opera and music-theater. Nestled on the north end of Otsego Lake, better known as Glimmerglass, just outside of Cooperstown, New York, the ideal setting draws in world-class artists and provides a summer program for emerging singer-actors and dancers to gain professional credits and work beside luminaries across the spectrum of music-theater.

Robert Ainsley began his tenure as Artistic and General Director in September 2022 when, after 12 years, the previous AD Francesca Zambello turned it over to her esteemed colleague to devote her energies fulltime at the helm of the Washington National Opera. Ainsley, with his youthful effervescent energy and welcoming grin, is just the ticket to overcome any doubts or naysaying regarding the future of opera and the arts. “Hello, Glimmerglammers! My GlimGlam Fam!” he bounds onto the stage before every performance and greets the audience, seeming genuinely glad to see us all. His is a winning strategy; to date he has surpassed the festival’s anniversary goal of raising five million dollars by almost two million, so he has just raised the bar.

More than anything, Glimmerglass means community.

Artistically, this important anniversary season serves as a tribute to legendary Scene Designer John Conklin, who as Associate Artistic Director Emeritus was part of the Glimmerglass familia for many years. He returned this season to design all four big productions, and it was said that the man was never happier than hunched over his design desk at Glimmerglass, most recently with Glimmerglass Director of Productions Abby Rodd. It is such a shame he did not make it this summer to even one opening but died while everything was still in rehearsal. But one has to believe John is still hanging out, smiling down on the art and his fellow art makers.

Conklin took an integrated approach to designing the season’s shows in both color palette, where he chose to explore the many symbolic meanings of the color red, and by incorporating a series of reveals where, in cloths being pulled down or away, something startling and new is discovered. Nowhere was his genius more in evidence than in the bold, colorful neighborhood he created for the world premiere production of The House on Mango Street. Three-story bright red scaffolding units served as fire escapes of an urban universe defined by one neighborhood block. Wheeled in and out as needed, the set pieces also provided surfaces for colorful projections including sequined bespangled events as you might find spilling out across a crowded street during a Hispanic street festival. Visual elements also include gigantes, the giant Mexican puppets, mixing realistic street scenes with pure theatrical magic.

There is an interesting pairing going on this season with a show about another neighborhood “across the pond.” Ethan Heard directed this new production of Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s iconic musical about the Parisian painter Georges Seurat, Sunday in the Park with George, and both staging and design took a pared-down, minimalist approach. Heard had the cast sitting in straight chairs lining the sides of the stage and only stepping in and out of the “frame” as needed, and the space was marked by a central rectangular platform in Conklin’s signature red (natch). But when the red cover was pulled off, the green baize-form, smaller than a putting green, served symbolically as La Jatte, the island in the middle of the Seine where Seurat imaginatively captured ordinary people on their ordinary Sundays taking their promenades. The artist placed them forever together in a dancing field of light, using painted dots and specks of commas in a technique which became known as pointillism.

To capture Seurat’s large ensemble of characters in his painting, Sondheim writes for multiple voices, giving many resident members and guest artists of the Glimmerglass company cameo moments in which to shine. Taylor-Alexis DuPont etches a most memorable character as the much put-upon companion Nurse to the Old Lady, played with comic perfection by Luretta Bybee, and I was tickled mightily by the American couple from the South, Betty and Bob Greenberg (Claire McCahan and Marc Webste), who no sooner arrive in Paris than they want to go home. There’s much playful silliness between Angela Yam and SarahAnn Duffy as the two mademoiselles, following their flirtation with two young soldiers, one of them made out of cardboard. And who can resist Erik Nordstrom as the lounging, grouchy Boatman who prefers the company of his dog to humans? Indeed, there are a lot of recognizable types on the island.

John Riddle is a singer-actor who is able to give us the thorny complexity of a singularly-focused “genius,” who can break down and reel off the elements in art-making but emotionally is not able to connect to people, not even Dot, the woman he loves, nor his daughter as she’s coming into this world, whom he can’t acknowledge nor make room for in his cerebral-channeled life. It is left to Dot, model and muse, to provide human connectivity and emotion, and Marina Pires gives us all that and more in a beautiful portrait of a woman who can also teach us how to “move on.”

One other powerful aspect of this production is how Act II — which has often, sadly, received much criticism, with its “hundred years later” conceit and shuffling of characters — really works in this production. Heard makes a case for the possibility of generational maturing and healing. Even the initially chromelume-fixated, society/success-chasing George gets an aha moment, and we are led to believe he will mend his ways and work to find balance between art and life that his great-grandfather and namesake never could by going for saying what is true and heartfelt.

When we turn to the slot for a truly contemporary work in this season’s lineup, we can cheer the choice at this time in our country’s struggle to define who we are and want to be that Glimmerglass would commission and feature the world premiere of Sandra Cisneros’ coming-of-age story of about a young Chicana! “I like to tell stories,” sings the protagonist Esperanza, mouthpiece for Cisneros’ revisiting of her childhood and the struggle to claim her own voice through her writing.

Cisneros co-wrote the libretto for her story with Composer/Librettist Derek Bermel. She has indeed captured much of the strength, layering, and complexity of emotions found in the novel, in not only the psychology of her fiercely independent protagonist but by bringing in all the quirky neighbors in this their shared universe bound by one city block.

The music in the opera takes its wide-ranging cues from many cultural sounds in play today, from opera to Broadway, and from Latin dance rhythms and norteño to pop and hip hop. One thing the team hadn’t got quite right yet opening night was the balance between the orchestra and the changing sound worlds displayed by the singers, and, sadly, thus much of the sung text got lost. It’s a tricky mix with the powerful acoustic vocal music associated with opera and the mix of spoken word and rhythmically produced pop-belt-and-screlting mix explored in much of today’s electronic music amplification. Although I can certainly appreciate the premise of the creative team to capture accurately the diversity and constantly “changing channels” of our urban soundscapes, it was sometimes a challenge to re-tune one’s ears to the different musical genres and vocal styles coming at us veritably simultaneously. I would advocate a second and even a third viewing and listening to Mango Street as the production settles into itself. Every new work, after all, deserves our attention, working to meet it where it lives.

There were indeed moments of power and beauty. Angelo Silva as Geraldo, pushing a shopping cart on and off the stage, represents the most marginalized in the community, in his case an undocumented street vendor. Silva’s glorious voice is set beautifully by Bermel in a show-stopping number, and Geraldo’s story breaks open our hearts in the way only opera can. The violence that so suddenly ends the character’s life ripped me apart. Taylor Alexis-Dupont, as Sally, an adolescent girl with a terrible secret in her family and someone who wants to run with the wild boys and “take her cake and eat it too,” has a powerful instrument and knows how to fill and shape emotions to full advantage. There is also a gorgeous adult quintet (sextet?) by the adults in the beginning of Act II when they sing “Once” (when I was beautiful), comparing their individual dreams of what their lives would be but dreams always deferred. Amanda Castro has choreographed some cool street dancing.

Mikaela Bennet as the central character possesses genuine vocal warmth and clarity, especially in her upper range, but just because she can land strong notes at the bottom doesn’t mean that composers like Bermel need to make songs Olympic events in terms of degrees of difficulty. (There’s too much of this kind of vocal composition going on these days, to my mind.) Such vocal gymnastic displays can distract from the emotional impact of what’s happening at any moment in the story.

Nonetheless, these two shows really do serve as a pair, scenically and musically being in conversation, thanks not only to Conklin’s savvy, resonating designs but also to the conducting. Micael Ellis Ingram for the Sondheim brings out the “minimalist grooves” in the school of John Adams/Phillip Glass as well as “achingly beautiful” Fauré like harmonies. For Mango Street, Nicole Paiement is fearless in her approach. She reminds us that we are all shaped and enriched by our neighborhoods, its sounds and rhythms.

I left both shows thinking about neighborhoods as community. Neighborhoods feed images and stories to their artists — in one case George the Parisian painter and in the other a young Chicana who is in the process of becoming a writer and storyteller for her people. And we need our artists to show us who we are and what we can be. Yes, surely, sometimes in the process we get bruised or broken but only broken open, and if we can learn and forgive, so we can grow. Neighborhoods remind us that we must embrace new stories and new voices all around us, stories that have much to teach and entertain us if, like Dot, we care enough to connect.

Sunday in the Park with George (plays through August 17, 2025)

Running Time: Two hours and 47 minutes with a 25-minute intermission.

George – John Riddle
Dot/Marie – Marina Pires
Old Lady – Luretta Bybee
Nurse – Taylor-Alexis Dupont
Boatman – Erik Nordstrom
Celeste #1 – Angela Yam
Celeste # 2 – SarahAnn Duffy

Conductor – Michael Ellis Ingram
Director – Ethan Heard
Set Designer– John Conklin
Costume Designer – Beth Goldenberg
Lighting Designer – Amith Chandrashaker
Movement Director – Madison Hertel
Projections Designer – Greg Emetaz
Sound Designer – Joel Morain
Hair & Makeup Designer – Tom Watson

The House on Mango Street (plays through August 16, 2025)

Running Time: Two hours and 17 minutes with a 25-minute intermission.

Esperanza – Mikaela Bennett
Geraldo – Angelo Silva
Sally –Taylor-Alexis DuPont
Lucy –Samantha Sosa
Rachel – Kaylen Hernandez
Mama Cordero – Deborah Nansteel
Papa Cordero – Sergio Martinez
and for the complete cast list go to the Glimmerglass website

Conductor – Nicole Paiement
Director – Chía Patiño
Set Designer – John Conklin
Costume Designer – Erik Teague
Lighting Designer – Amith Chandrashaker
Choreographer – Amanda Castro
Dramaturg – Kelley Rourke
Projections Designer – Greg Emetaz
Hair & Make-Up – Tom Watson

Tickets are available at glimmerglass.org.

SEE ALSO:
2025 Glimmerglass Festival Review: ‘The Rake’s Progress’
2025 Glimmerglass Festival Review: ‘Tosca’
(reviews by Susan Galbreaith)

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So much has happened in this year at the Kennedy Center, and perhaps most seismically with the giant resident company, Washington National Opera. It is “still standing,” and delivered its season finale with what, in ordinary times, might have been a safe and familiar classic, the Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess. But these are no ordinary times, and, in bringing the original production, with sets and all from the Glimmerglass Festival/Seattle Opera, Artistic Director Francesca Zambello has made a radical and joyful declaration of the power and resiliency of community.

What a beautiful world Peter J. Davison (set) and Mark McCullough (lighting, along with A.J. Guban for the revival) have created for the storytelling. The three-storied façade, representing the tenement dwelling, first appears in a full display of rich colors, but as the opera progresses, the walls begin to peel and become more skeletal, emphasizing the pressures and hardships the community has endured. The world of the bright southern sun grows dark and turns into eerie green-blue hurricane country.

The Gershwins’ work has had a rich but not always easy history. The story, based on a real character in Charleston’s Catfish Row, was penned in 1925 by local white author Dubose Heyward. When he collaborated with brothers George and Ira and transformed the story into an “American folk opera” in 1935, it upset many white audience members, who found much in the content and the subject of a poor Black community objectionable for the “high art” of opera. There has been a considerable period, still lingering, when there was a very vocal backlash from the Black community, which felt burned by the appropriation of their history, and people have bristled at what they see as the work’s perpetuating ugly racial stereotypes. Over the years, many Black artists have also felt confined, limited in their careers by being cast only in roles in this opera.

This production shows us a community that both cares for and polices itself as needs be against the callous treatment by white officials who periodically swoop in to haul off “material witnesses.” The stage is filled with life so rich and uplifting that the air in the Opera House seemed blissfully clear of any contentious dialectic. A welcome, unusually diverse audience on opening night at the Opera House erupted in enthusiasm throughout the almost three hours of opera.

This was due in part to the generosity of Zambello sharing the stage direction with Associate Director and Choreographer Eric Sean Fogel. The two have collaborated often before. This time, however, took their collaboration to another level and proved a most seamless affair. The whole production might well be called music-DANCE-theater because of Fogel’s contributions. From the very first scene, everyone is moving. Above, women on three-storied balconies shaking out and folding laundry, while below men engage in full-bodied good-luck rituals before rolling dice in a Saturday night craps game. Mothers rock and pass babies back and forth to each other (proving it does indeed take a village). A young boy grabs a baling hook and for a moment is caught playfully triumphant in private celebration. These daily activities are heightened just enough through exquisite choreographic sequences to become a continuous whole. It is a story of rolling, mesmerizing beauty, but also one that encompasses the full spectrum of humanity, including loss, mourning, and, yes, even eruptions of violence, yet brought back together when taking shelter against cataclysmic nature.

There is a great ensemble of talent assembled on the Opera House stage, and richly etched characters who together make up the Catfish Row community. Big and cameo roles are filled to just about perfection. The scene on Kittiwah Island explodes into an extended ballet, deliciously carnal in the best sense of that word: folks liberating themselves and expressing spirit and sheer physical joy in a church of the body.

In traditional teaching of opera, convention has it that singers sing in situations where their characters themselves would not. But in this production, such conventional wisdom has been upended. From the first scene and the beautiful singing of Viviana Goodwin as Clara in the all-time favorite “Summertime,” she delivers the lullaby completely rooted in character. Of course, this woman would sing so to pacify and bond with her infant. Soon into the storytelling, there is a death in the community. After her husband is killed in a fight by Crown, at his funeral Serena (Amber R Monroe) leads the assembled mourners in prayer — as she would. I was particularly taken by Benjamin Taylor, who as Jake sang one of the lesser-known songs from the opera, the working song “It Takes a Long Pull,” with such believability and depth as a man who makes his living off the sea and must face daily hardships and death just to keep food on the table for his family.

The central drama is carried by the relationships between Crown, Sportin’ Life, and Porgy, and the woman entwined in the three men’s lives, Bess.

You just know that when Bess enters, she is not just “a sometime thing”; she is trouble. Brittany Renee is a drop-dead gorgeous performer in voice, body, and soul, and in this her debut with WNO, she pulls off a performance that goes from A to Z and reveals her triple-threat mastery of singing, dance/physicality, and emotional expression. Her Bess first appears in flame orange-red satin announcing she’s probably too hot to handle. No wonder the other women on Catfish Row initially bar their doors!

Costume Designer Paul Tazewell cleverly traces Bess’ journey, later dressing her in a sedate white dress, suggesting someone newly baptized and redeemed but also one who has been somewhat domesticated. She, along with the entire ensemble, also wears white to the summer picnic on Kittiwah Island. But, spoiler alert, that flame dress appears again.

Chauncy Packer is Sportin’ Life and embodies that weasely song-and-dance man, drug-dealing tempter to a T. He plies Bess with “angel dust” to keep her under his thumb. He wiggles and slithers all over the stage and in and out of crap games. His big numbers, “It Ain’t Necessarily So” and “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York,” are cross-genre showstoppers.

Kenneth Kellogg plays Crown. Having seen him as the lead in WNO’s Blue, where he played a loving husband, protective father, and straight-up police officer, it was initially hard to see him as the volatile bully and controlling abuser in this role. Crown is a brute. (The production leaves no doubt about that when Act I ends with his hauling Bess off and raping her after a community picnic.) Kellogg is a big guy and completely convincing as the brooding, menacing Crown. But the surprise came in this actor’s amazing ability to show also the loneliness of this outlier in a complex portrait of a tormented, self-sabotaging soul.

Amazing also is this Porgy, and I’ve seen quite a few. Michael Sumuel gives us a fully rounded character, physically and morally strong, and, despite his disability, someone fully integrated and respected in the community. I loved seeing this Porgy with Renee’s Bess; they made us believe they not only have deep affection for each other but enjoy real passion. The duets “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” and “I Loves You Porgy” made me tear up. I loved hearing the familiar tunes “I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’ and “I’m On My Way” in his sonorous voice. When he crosses the stage determinedly heading off to New York City to find Bess, we not only root for him but believe he will succeed in his quest.

The music is just so fine and tuneful, and most ably conducted by Kwamé Ryan in this his first appearance on the WNO podium. Notably, Ryan is one of three artists of color on the creative team, alongside Costume Designer Tazewell and Associate Choreographer Eboni Adams.

I’ll let Francesca Zambello have the last word, which you’ll find as part of a most interesting exhibit of the women in this opera (and some of the singers who portrayed them) in the Hall of the States as you enter the Kennedy Center:

I consider this the greatest of all American operas, setting the standard for all American musical-theatre works to follow. It is rooted in the American tradition; it conjures a world long forgotten yet one rife with potential for contemporary times.

This “greatest of all American operas” plays through May 31.

Running time: Two hours and 50 minutes, including one intermission.

Porgy and Bess plays through May 31, 2025, presented by Washington National Opera, performing in The Opera House at the John F. Kennedy Center, 2700 F St. NW, Washington, DC. For the schedule and to purchase tickets ($45–$299), go online or contact the Box Office at (202) 467-4600.

In English with Projected English Titles.

The program for Porgy and Bess is online here.

Porgy and Bess
MUSIC by George Gershwin
LIBRETTO by DuBose and Dorothy Heyward and Ira Gershwin

CAST
Porgy – Michael Sumuel, Bess – Brittany Renee, Clara – Vivianna Goodwin, Serena – Amber R. Monroe, Maria – Denyce Graves, Sportin’ Life – Chauncey Packer, Crown – Kenneth Kellogg, Jake – Benjamin Taylor, Strawberry Woman – Marquita Raley-Cooper, Lily – Alexandia Crichlow, Annie – Brittani McNeill, Mingo – Jonathan Pierce Rhodes, Robbins – Daniel Sampson, Peter the Honeyman – Keith Craig, Nelson – Ernest Jackson, Crabman – Anthony P. Ballard, Jim – Nicholas LaGesse, Undertaker – Jarrod Lee, Detective – Scott Ward Abernethy, Coroner – James Whalen

CREATIVE TEAM
Conductor – Kwamé Ryan, Director – Francesca Zambello, Associate Director and Choreographer – Eric Sean Fogel, Set Designer – Peter J. Davison, Costume Designer – Paul Tazewell, Lighting Designer – Mark McCoullough, Revival Lighting Designer – A.J. Guban

COVID Safety: Masks are optional in all Kennedy Center spaces for visitors and staff. If you prefer to wear a mask, you are welcome to do so.

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Twenty-five years into this century, the opera world is still (albeit sometimes tentatively) exploring what exactly are the stories and musical languages to speak eloquently and with passion to our times. Nowhere in America is this gambit felt more than with WNO and Artistic Director Francesca Zambello, where next to classics passed down from the likes of Verdi, Puccini, Wagner, and the upcoming American chestnut from the Gershwin Brothers, Porgy and Bess, the company develops and presents new American talent and perspectives, including performers and creative team collaborations. In 2023, WNO presented the premiere of Grounded, an opera that explored the moral and psychological implications of drone warfare. This month, they bring to Washington audiences The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, in a music-theater portrait of a complicated man very much at the center of a technology that revolutionized our world, but whose evolution as a man connecting to himself and fellow humans was an even more arduous journey and ultimately moving breakthrough.

Mark Campbell, one of America’s most successful contemporary librettists, collaborated with composer Mason Bates, who won a Grammy Award for the recording of this opera when it premiered in Santa Fe in 2017. They have created an important and, I believe, lasting opera in the repertoire. There are two productions of this opera thus far, co-owned and produced in rotation among a handful of regional companies.

At first, it seemed an unlikely subject for Campbell to tackle — he doesn’t seem a “techy geek” kind of guy. But he has found his way into the psychological heart of a man tormented in many ways by his own genius and cruel to his collaborators, employees, and girlfriends alike, but who, in struggling with a diagnosis of terminal cancer, finally comes to terms with his own mortality and admits his need for human connection. Campbell brilliantly eschewed a straightforward chronological storytelling and instead has created both a structure and embedded philosophy of circularity.

This circularity resonates with our understanding of the human side of the often barefoot, vegan Jobs, who was obsessed with Buddhism. In fact, his sensei, the character Kōbun Chino Otogawa, is one of two heroes in the opera. Sung masterfully by bass Wei Wu, Kōbun is a cross between a spiritual guide from on high (and sometimes from beyond the grave) and a perched-on-his-shoulder Jiminy Cricket conscience who can kick Jobs in the ass from time to time or joke, “Yeah, karma sucks.”

The opera opens with the vast stage filled floor to ceiling with a bank of file drawers representing the old world before the tech revolution. With the push of a button, the projected images soon change to banks of screen monitors flanking the stage. Other than this, the stage is unadorned but for a few straight benches where ensemble members give witness and can step into a scene as needed. Stage Director Tomer Zvulun has created elegance in simplicity itself with a very lean chorus by opera standards but very able-bodied physical as well as vocal presence of its members.

From the very start, we get stage pictures filled with life. There, downstage center, sits the cross-legged and barefoot Jobs in meditation. Simultaneously, a scene comes to life on a small high platform of Steve as a young boy (Stone Stensrud) when his father (Justin Burgess) presents the ten-year-old with a worktable he has made for him on his birthday to spur on his mechanical aptitude.

The classically trained composer Bates clearly signals his interest in popular music and specifically his experience as a dance music DJ. In the first ensemble number, the pulsing electronic beat all but transports to a club, while the words “One device has it all” convince us of the inevitability of the Apple Revolution to change the world. And so, with electronic sound used in conjunction with the full orchestra led by conductor Lidiya Yankovskaya, the opera is unapologetic about these opera singers being mic’d. Get over it, Opera Aficionados!

Let’s be clear, Jobs and his buddy and early partner Steve Wozniak (“Woz”) were indeed radical bad boys who wanted to “stick it to the man.” In an early scene, John Moore as Jobs and Jonathan Burton as “the Woz” figure out how to mimic Ma Bell tones and famously ring up the Vatican impersonating Henry Kissinger. The duets by these two singers are some of the most fun and compelling compositions, and the singers displayed great stage chemistry. But the “bromance” doesn’t end well when these two latter-day Davids later spar over who’s brought down Goliath, and the egotistical Jobs, grabbing all the power, pushes Woz to quit the company.

Campbell doesn’t sugarcoat it, and neither does Baritone Moore: Steve Jobs was not a nice guy. His relationship with lover Chrisann gets particularly ugly when he abandons the pregnant woman and denies paternity responsibility for their child. Two very vocal female members of the audience shouted their extreme displeasure across the auditorium at Steve Jobs’ reaction. Coloratura Kresley Figueroa as Chrisann, with her ultra-fast vibrato, gets short shrift by the creators.

Moore gives an exciting, emotional performance throughout without ever overblowing notes and turning into a walrus baritone. His approach is to offer a clean, contemporary sound, one I think Steve Jobs with his emphasis on elegant perfection and simplicity would approve.

But in addition to Kōbun, the other real hero in the piece is Jobs’ partner and later wife, Laurene, who stays by him through it all. Mezzo-soprano Winona Martin brings warmth and intelligence to the role, and Bates gives her beautiful melodic lines to accent her strength and genuine love and compassion for this man.

The production is jointly owned by the Atlanta Opera, Austin Opera, Lyric Opera of Kansas City, Utah Symphony & Opera, and Calgary Opera Association. In these precarious times, look for more of these alliances if opera is to stay alive. And contemporary opera, like all arts, must be free to respond to their times.

The creators have successfully compressed the action to what is acceptable to 21st-century audiences. The opera runs one hour and 40 minutes with no intermission.

P.S. I will admit mixed feelings attending the Kennedy Center as it has been seized as prize and become a political hot potato. I understand how many of my friends have decided not to attend events there under its current cloud. But I will ask people to consider also the many artists and crew members who bravely put on good work like the Steve Jobs opera. They depend upon audience members to support them in the exercise of their craft.

Addendum

The opera’s conductor weighs in on supporting the Kennedy Center, and ‘stars of tomorrow’ shine in the cast.

By John Stoltenberg (May 11, 2025)

No sooner had my colleague Susan Galbraith added to her glowing review of The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs a last paragraph urging people not to boycott the Kennedy Center than the opera’s conductor, Lidiya Yankovskaya, published a full-throated op-ed in the Washington Post explaining, despite her “displeasure with the White House’s approach to the arts,” “Why I’ll still perform at Trump’s Kennedy Center.” It’s a serious and thoughtful argument:

Choosing not to perform deprives artists and art of power, and it aids regimes that fear being culturally challenged. Choosing not to attend performances of content we support will only ensure that this content is not presented in the future….

If we want to fight censorship and ensure a diverse range of programming options, we must continue to support the art that we want to see on the Kennedy Center stage for as long as we can.

On Friday evening, May 9, the Kennedy Center Opera House was the scene of two remarkable events. One was the full-on Secret Service security in the lobby — magnetometers, bag searches — occasioned by the presence of someone (or someones) whose identity was never publicly revealed. (I asked a few officers; none would divulge.)

But the more important remarkable event — the one I’d come for — was the presence that night of Cafritz Young Artists of Washington National Opera in the (R)evolution of Steve Jobs cast. In Artistic Director Francesca Zambello’s pre-show welcome, she called them “stars of tomorrow.”

The sound reason for that praise soon became clear. In performance, each of these young artists met every vocal challenge, commanded our attention, portrayed their character with credibility, and propelled the story convincingly.

Here they are, each one a standout:

Steve Jobs: Jonathan Patton (baritone)
Laurene Powell Jobs: Winona Martin (mezzo-soprano)
Steve (“Woz”) Wozniak: Nicholas Huff (tenor)
Chrisann Brennan: Anneliese Klenetsky (soprano)
Caligraphy teacher: MichelleMariposa (mezzo-soprano)

Plus two Cafritz Young Artists program alumni:

Kōbun Chino Otogawa: Wei Wu (bass)
Paul Jobs: Justin Burgess (baritone)

Though vocally each of these singers was in superb professional form, I did observe on this night what felt like learning-still-in-progress: Some of the performers’ movement onstage seemed tentative and uncertain — as if their role and blocking had not yet become solidly embodied with the confidence and muscle memory that can come with a longer run. This  minor need for improvement was, in a way, another major argument for Kennedy Center support: It’s not only a place that shows great art; it’s a place that grows great future artists.

The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs played May 2 through 10, 2025, presented by Washington National Opera performing in The Opera House at the John F. Kennedy Center, 2700 F St. NW, Washington, DC. For the schedule and to purchase tickets ($45–$269), go online or contact the Box Office at (202) 467-4600.

In English with Projected English Titles

The program for The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs is online here.

Composer: Mason Bates
Librettist: Mark Campbell
Conductor: Lidiya Yankovskaya
Stage Director: Tomer Zvulun

Steve Jobs: John Moore
Laurene Powell Jobs: Winona Martin
Kōbun Chino Otogawa: Wei Wu
Steve (“Woz”) Wozniak: Jonathan Burton
Chrisann Brennan: Kresley Figueroa
Paul Jobs: Justin Burgess
Young Steve: Stone Stensrud

COVID Safety: Masks are optional in all Kennedy Center spaces for visitors and staff. If you prefer to wear a mask, you are welcome to do so.

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GALA Hispanic Theatre’s annual Flamenco Festival is always at treat for the eyes and ears — but perhaps especially for the heart. This year was the 20th anniversary of the Festival, and its three programs, each produced a week apart, demonstrated a rich variety of expression and narratives.

SER.RANA (November 7–10, 2024)

This year’s program opened with Spanish dancer Sonia Franco from Spain, who also directed and choreographed herself, sharing the stage with only two singers (Rosa Linero and Cristina Soler), guitarist Alejandro Peralta, and percussionist Jonatan Pacheco (“El Pepi”) From her first entrance, she announced that we were in for something radical and boundary-breaking.

Franco blends wide-legged pliés and sharp low diagonals taken from modern dance and minimalist modern performance art with footwork and the fluid arm and wrist movements of traditional flamenco. Every gesture seemed to have been etched with a softer, less hiked-up line and intention than what is often served up in traditional intimate settings of tablaos. The program noted themes inspired by water, and indeed, this dancer’s lithe and curving body seemed to be redefining a new vocabulary and silhouette, like life-giving water itself.

The dancer knows her stuff. On the program, Franco displayed her command of the different subgenres of the traditional flamenco style, including braceo (arm port de bras), floreo (wrist and hand movements), zapateado (rapid staccato footwork), and, of course, bata de cola, the elegant manipulation involved in the very feminine form of dancing in a long ruffly dress with a long train.

Rosa Linero is an experienced and much sought-after singer from Spain who excels in the throaty earthiness of flamenco cante. Cristina Soler, with a slightly higher and lighter-placed voice, made for lovely duet singing between the two singers. Alejandro Peralta, longtime collaborator with Franco, added rich dimension with his Cadiz-influenced flamenco. Jonatan Pacheco is a most intuitive and exceptional crossover percussionist, comfortable in many genres of music and bringing the exploration of new aural textures to flamenco, much to the delight of the audience.

LO MEJOR DE EDWIN (November 15–17, 2024)

Last week we were welcomed into the DC “familia” of hometown favorite Edwin Aparicio in a program rightly entitled Lo Mejor de Edwin (The Best of Edwin). His huge local fan base was on hand to clap and shout out their appreciation.

His local company joined him, including a good chorus of women, some long-time students. The real strength of this company, to my mind, however, is the male dancing. Edwin clearly supports the individual development and style of male dancing, as evidenced by the three men featured in this year’s program.

Edwin’s inspiration for making dances almost always is tied to his autobiography and specifically his journey as a refugee who escaped the poverty and violence of his native El Salvador to journey north and land in Mount Pleasant in the 1980s, only to be faced with fears, loneliness, and violence of a different kind.

Jonathan Pacheco is a young and fearless dancer and, in one of the most memorable choreographed dances of the festival, plays Edwin as a young street kid newly arrived in what was then a rough neighborhood during a time of upheaval in DC’s Hispanic community. Instead of clichés about gangs and bad kids, Aparicio approaches the subject with great compassion. He humanizes the gang experience to show it is often about survival and bonding to find identity. Instead of elegant, tight flamenco costuming, company dancers wore dark, relaxed street gear and shrouded themselves in hoodies. It perfectly fit the signature style of Pacheco, whose head snaps with sharp changes of focus conveyed the ever-alert wariness of an outsider trying to find his way in a new world. The narrative in the choreography is bold and sharp, and, even having seen it before, I found the work courageous and both heartbreaking and triumphant when, at the end, the young Edwin removes his hoodie to signify he leaves that life behind.

Principal dancer Norberto Chamizo Garrido is a willowy, graceful performer blessed with a classical male flamenco physique. But what I found even more extraordinary is how he and Edwin didn’t go down the road of dueling males strutting like macho roosters. Instead, the choreographer was interested in exploring male friendship and celebrating the special bonding that comes when old friends meet up after pursuing separate paths and genuinely can pick up from wherever they left off. All this was done in the language of classical flamenco. When the two men exit in a long diagonal upstage, their arms un-self-consciously around each other, I found that I had tears streaming down my cheeks.

Edwin’s pedigree as a master practitioner and teacher of flamenco is undeniable. He exudes confidence with every gesture and step. Even as a mature “statesman” of this style of dance, his zapateado is clean and rapid — dazzlingly so. But his two superpowers are in being able to express something personal and intimate and at the same time universal about the human condition through dance and his blend of the masculine and feminine aspects of flamenco.

INTIMATE FRIENDS OF FLAMENCO (November 22–23, 2024)

The third program for this year’s special was sponsored and curated by the Embassy of Spain. Intimate Friends of Flamenco featured three performers: a dancer, a female singer, and primarily a guitarist who also sang. While each of these artists was certainly accomplished technically, instead of the economy of means creating the desired effect of greater intimacy to bring us audience members in, the evening seemed more like a recital in a cavernous hall.

Singer Ana Brenes and guitarist Marc López have been friends since their teen years in the Catalan region of Spain and as university classmates. However, the narrative of their friendship was never clear in the telling. The blending of classical flamenco with a hip vibe of electronic music and even pop influences, especially by López on guitar, was interesting , but their approaches were not evenly matched. His was more introverted, even tentative, at the start, while hers was more blast and bluster. López grew more confident as the evening went on; in the second act especially, he performed some astonishing guitar licks, blending guitar styles.

Joining them was Flamenco dancer Montserrat Martinez, who hails originally from Cuba and is a gorgeous statuesque performer with strong arms, sinuous back, and zapateo-clacking footwork. I especially reveled in a dance that started with her completely shrouded in a long dark mantilla looking like an old woman or perhaps even a wraith-like figure of death until she flipped the great long-fringed shawl and began twirling it.

All was fine until solo became duet and Martinez transferred the shawl onto Brenes’ shoulders, whereupon the singer stepped into a dancer’s role, but I kept thinking she was about to trip on the long fringe dragging on the ground. Instead of “Ole!” I wanted to shout, “Beware! Stay in your swim lane!”

That being said, the festival in its 20th year had much to recommend it, and if you have not experienced the art of flamenco, you must get GALA’s next year’s festival on your calendar. It’s an art form being transformed because of the wide diaspora that now represents the world of flamenco. GALA’s commitment to celebrate annually its different permutations and syntheses of the flamenco world is a great cultural contribution to our region. Aplauso!

As Edwin Aparicio is often quoted saying, “Flamenco saved me.” Maybe flamenco can save all of us. Indeed, we need its passion, courage, compassion, and its sense of holding each other in community. The world is a dangerous mess, y’all.

The 20th Annual International Fuego Flamenco Festival played November 7 to 23, 2024, at GALA Hispanic Theatre, 3333 14th Street NW, Washington, DC.

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The rains abated and the clouds parted for the opening of Silent Night at Wolf Trap. The opera by Composer Kevin Puts and Librettist Mark Campbell had been reimagined from previous major opera house productions to fit into the much smaller venue of The Barns. It was a good thing. It reframed the story of three armies meeting (Scottish, French, and German) on Christmas Eve in World War I and demonstrated conclusively trench warfare to be a cramped and messy business. Many of us in the audience felt we were in the trenches with them, and it brought the intertwining human stories into sharp focus. In experiencing the realities of a most un-glorious war, we become drawn into a truly glorious Puts-Campbell opera that sheds light on the power of art to uplift the human spirit in dangerous times.

Based on a historical event and a 2005 French screenplay, Joyeux Noel by Christian Carion, Campbell’s libretto of the 1914 Christmas truce focuses on a handful of characters who get caught up in a fight that upends their lives. In a brief prologue, an operatic performance is interrupted by the German declaration of war, and, shortly after, Anna, the Swedish star soprano (Keely Futterer), insists on following her singing partner and lover when he’s conscripted and must report to the battlefield. On the Scottish side, there’s William Dale (Kyle White), who, seeing the war as an opportunity for valor and adventure, talks his brother Jonathan (Martin Luther Clark) into enlisting with him — then William is killed early on, leaving Jonathan to mourn his brother and regret their enlistment. There’s French Lieutenant Audebert (Jacob Scharfman), who from the front writes a letter to his pregnant wife Madeleine (Tivoli Treloar), hoping fervently to see the birth of their child. There’s also Ponchel (Charles H. Eaton), aide de camp to Audebert, who injects much humanity and even humor into the proceedings by rhapsodizing over good coffee in true French fashion.

The famous event of the combatting armies declaring a truce Christmas Eve and singing to each other across the trenches in the dark has been turned into what appears to be a more than 24-hour bash. The Germans carry into the shared space miniature decorated Christmas trees; the French manage to scrounge up food and champagne; and the Scotts bring to the party whiskey they have just received in care packages. We get another wonderful duet from our opera singers, “Come Spring.” Even in war companionship and good times are snatched and show us our common humanity.

Co-directors Ryan and Tonya McKinny have made the most of this theme and bring out the importance of ordinary human activity, but especially song, to deepen the connection between war and art, and show us a nexus where perhaps the greatest human need can be met in the most meaningful way. The courage and boldness of their vision have made for a wonderful production.

It all started with the structuring of a marvelous libretto by Campbell, which moves the story forward in an emotionally satisfying way even while intertwining perspectives of multiple characters from three different worlds. The libretto is also commendably trilingual, and the opera is sung in the three languages of the nationalities represented.

Puts’ music is drop-dead gorgeous — sadly somewhat of a rarity in contemporary opera — from stirring military anthems (“The Glory of Battle”) to haunting melodies such as “Sleep” (“Alles ist stille”) sung by the entire male chorus. There is wonderful aria writing: show-off stuff for Soprano Miss Futterer, in which she excels, and heartrending pathos for Tenor Garcia, Baritone Jacob Scharfman, and others. Most importantly, he gets the loneliness, fear, and sheer exhaustion of war while managing to gift us with moments of joy and insist on the resilience of the human spirit. Conductor Geoffrey McDonald conducts the orchestra admirably, bringing both musicians and the worlds the opera represents together.

The young cast of singers is very fine, and this opera provides artists with good practice in singing in three of inherited opera’s “languages of choice.” (Well, maybe Scottish is pushing it.) All do admirably well with the different accents. It also allows the audience to receive many of the numbers in almost simultaneous translation without getting whiplash from resorting to the surtitles (a nasty aspect of being part of Team Opera).

The design team of Lawrence Moten (scenery), Lynly Saunders (costumes), Adam Larsen (video), and, in this case, the divine Colin K. Bills (whose lighting design just about knocked me out) have made some magic in this space. Moten maximized the use of the stage, dividing the stage proper into playing planes representing a No Man’s Land where the different sides meet, divided by a row of scorched trees (reminding me of the environmental “dead zones” of Paintball terrain), and crammed behind that the full orchestra positioned upstage. The other playing space, on a lowered apron of sorts extreme downstage, represented the different trenches, though it must be said this solution was perhaps less successful because of problematic sightlines beyond the first few rows.

Two other features are a far-upstage cyc onto which are projected historic newsreels among other images and downstage a screen that slides the full stage width where periodically mostly videos of close-up faces of the singer-actors appear. This allowed the audience to “zoom in” à la The Met’s HD performances and take advantage of “the best seat in the house.”

Silent Night resonates today as we think of countries such as Ukraine struggling on against Russian aggression. This opera can be viewed as a great anti-war piece. I would like it produced all over the country — and not just with professional companies but conservatories and universities. Silent Night deserves a place in the canon.

Running Time: Three hours with one intermission.

Silent Night plays again Thursday, August 15, 2024, 2 p.m, and Saturday, August 17, 7:30 p.m., presented by Wolf Trap Opera performing at The Barns at Wolf Trap, 1635 Trap Road, Vienna, VA. Tickets (sttarting at $45) can be purchased by calling 703-255-1800 or online.

The artistic and cast credits can be found here.

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There is a theory that the ear, like the heart, is most happily satisfied moving between the known and the unknown then back to the known. Hence, music that returns to a familiar refrain is considered food for the soul. Does programming an opera season also bring an opportunity for pairing such complementarity? The old and the new — two operas in production in this year’s Glimmerglass Festival season, Pagliacci and Elizabeth Cree — would they somehow speak to each other, though separated by more than 150 years in conception, and resonate with an audience today?

Both operas are wrapped in stories of domestic tension, revenge, and murder. Both have memorable central characters compelled by dark psychological motivations. Both use a framing device as a kind of prologue, where the audience is made privy to the end of the story so that we might better revisit the series of events leading up to their tragic endings. Perhaps, of greatest relevance to today’s conversation, at the center of both these stories is a female character stuck in a loveless marriage. One is led to ask, even plea, “Why don’t you get out? Run away?!”

What makes Pagliacci such a mainstay in the opera canon is the music by Ruggero Leoncavallo, who also penned his own libretto. In particular, there is the heartbreaking refrain the composer returns to again and again. “Ridi, Pagliaccio,” the clown Canio sobs. “Laugh, First Clown!” he commands, or as some children have made themselves familiar with the ad version of the central musical motif, by singing, “No more Rice Krispies! We’ve run out of Rice Krispies!”

The Pagliacci story refers to a traveling acting troupe of clowns, putting the work in the genre of play-within-a-play as the characters perform classical commedia del’arte. The opera opens with a festive chorus as the troupe arrives in a village busily celebrating Assumption Day.

For the production, Glimmerglass has brought together its entire Community and Children Choruses, and dozens of players swarm onto the stage, threatening to topple off the narrow wooden steps of the crowded group of stage wagons. Art mirrors life, and we are shown by this teeming mass that this is a large but tightly-knit community and an extended family that bonds because of a shared life on the road.

Joseph Colaneri conducts the Glimmerglass Orchestra masterfully, bringing his deep understanding of the classical Italian operatic tradition to bear. Brenna Corner has directed the staging and bought much verismo (real-life doings onstage), including giving the character of Canio’s wife Nedda a young child, played sweetly by Ethan Chen.

Robert Stahley sings the role of the brooding, tightly wound husband Canio, and we search to find a few moments to sympathize with his character, while we deplore his brutish violence. Amber R. Monroe plays Nedda, and we fall in love with her voice from her first notes of “O che bel sole” leading into the most beautiful soprano aria, Ballatella, where the character imagines how birds are free to fly away (as she never is). Troy Cook makes a fine, slightly creepy Tonio. Jonathan Patton has returned to Glimmerglass and as Nedda’s lover Silvio sings with ardor as his character offers to whisk her away from a life of poverty and insecurity.

Lighting Designer Robert Wierzel bathes the stage in a kind of dusty glow, conjuring for the audience a faded world, long gone. Scenery Designer James Rotondo and Costume Designer Erik Teague have worked hand in hand to create the world of a traveling performing troupe living hand-to-mouth out of trunks and pulled wagons. There are nice touches of clown and commedia work supplied by members of the ensemble, although at times the stage picture becomes so crowded, some of the choreography gets missed

Through it all and despite an ending fueled by passionate violence, the opera remains a compelling and popular work, beloved for its focused-written drama taking place in the sunny countryside of Italy and featuring some drop-dead gorgeous music

Running Time: One hour and 45 minutes.

Elizabeth Cree is altogether another matter. Set in London of the late 19th century, a dark, cold, and scary world meets the audience right from the start. The first scene is a staged hanging of a woman convicted of killing her husband. The second scene features the same character in flashback as a little girl, where the main event is her being abused and tortured by her unhinged mother upon discovering her daughter has experienced her first menses.

The opera by the creative team of Librettist Mark Campbell and Composer Kevin Puts was created in 2017. Based on a novel by Peter Ackroyd, it is part whodunit crime story, part gothic thriller, part psychological drama, and all intentionally a confounding mystery. It’s set against the backdrop of London as a city at the time in the throes of a spate of serial killings.

Campbell has ingeniously woven four different narrative strands into a nonlinear structure, a structure not altogether unfamiliar in contemporary opera, but this one challenges us at almost every turn to choose what is fact or fiction. And he does it all in the rolling out of 29 scenes compressed into little over a 100-minute opera. Talk about adventuring out into the unknown!

Musically, Puts has built his compositional structure on a motif of unresolved fourths, which build tension throughout the work. The tradition of an operatic overture to get the audience situated and emotionally immersed is compressed to three notes. The fragmentation of both music and story stirs up both anxiety and confusion as, I believe, is the intention. But Puts admittedly puts sprinkles here and there, music hall numbers, taking us back briefly into a comfortable “known” musical world.

But back to the story of the little girl (as I can make out), who, recently orphaned, has run away and reinvents herself — twice, first as a music hall performer and then as a wife to an upper-class London journalist-playwright who purportedly spends his days in the Reading Room of the British Museum. John Cree is writing a play about a serial killer, or maybe it’s a diary confessing his very real grisly exploits in the murdering of strangers. Meanwhile, his wife Elizabeth has taken to cross-dressing and going out for long walks. Is she stalking her nefarious husband, or does she plan grisliness of her own?

Curiously, both husband and wife sing confessions. His is the most compelling, using Puts’ repeated descending melodic line. “Lovingly, so lovingly,” he repeatedly sings and then proceeds to detail various dismemberments he used in murdering to “release” his victims from their lives of sin. Which one’s the killer or are they both implicated? Did the young Elizabeth kill her mother and years later her husband? Is she, like her mother, damaged psychologically? And who is responsible for the “disappearance” of members of her music hall company?

And what’s the function of the cast of characters found in the Reading Room of the British Museum? They include the novelist George Gissing and Karl Marx, who, mysteriously, is studying the works of Charles Dickens. The male ensemble sings, “The air itself is one vast library.”

The work also poses challenges to the singers, especially in the many passages where the conductor Kelly Kuo neglected the balance between singers and orchestra, and intelligibility of the voices was therefore drowned out by the strings. Stage Director Alison Moritz has incorporated markers to clarify the shifting sequence of space and time and even included projected dates to give the audience some handholds. But several confounded patrons left the Alice Busch Hall at the end shaking their heads in consternation.

Tara Erraught as Elizabeth and John Chest as John as well as the whole cast must be commended for their courage and vocal stamina to take us on this ride. It’s not for sissies!

The old and the new, the ride from staying with the known to pushing into the unknown, must always be attempted. But there is also the emotional courage to bring us back to the known so that we the audience can build our capacity for the unknown. This is the challenge for 21st-century opera. I believe Composer Puts and Librettist Campbell are up to the task. And so, I believe, is Glimmerglass!

Running Time: One hour and 40 minutes, no intermission.

The last performance of Pagliacci is on August 18, 2024, and of Elizabeth Cree is on August 20. For tickets and more information visit Glimmerglass.org or call 607-547-2255.

SEE ALSO:
A lovely ‘La Calisto’ at Glimmerglass Festival and a chat with Rob Ainsley
(review and interview by Susan Galbraith, August 5, 2024)

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Returning to Glimmerglass Festival, nestled on Oswego Lake in Upstate New York and a place of “innovation, creativity, and community” in music theater, felt something of a homecoming for me. There were many passages to mourn but new bright lights to celebrate. Gone was “the little Justice,” Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was treated here as something of a rock star, buzzed around in a golf cart and held court in a program she anchored on “Opera and the Law.” Gone also is former Artistic Director Francesca Zambello, who for many years juggled the formidable tasks of leading two companies, Glimmerglass and Washington National Opera. But into her shoes at Glimmerglass stepped new Artistic and General Director Rob Ainsley in 2022, and, by all accounts, he has been a successful choice, committing himself full-time to the local community and painstakingly building on the reputation and legacy of Glimmerglass as a premiere summer company to develop opera, its artists, and audiences for the 21st century.

Clearly in his element, Rob Ainsley sat down with me to speak of why this has been a good fit for him. He shared his enthusiasm for making friends in the community and, even more importantly in securing a Glimmerglass future, for cultivating donors. In the off-season, he has already established a great track record traveling coast to coast to hear auditions and scoop up impressive vocal talent to bring into the Festival’s Young Artists Program. He is equally enthusiastic about his admin and production staff. “The team is the best in the country and much of the leadership is women,” he bragged gleefully. “I couldn’t be more proud.”

Ainsley brings fresh energy and a sense of effervescent fun to the job. The first night I attended a program this past weekend, he came out to give his pre-curtain speech wearing a red clown nose and rainbow-colored wig. (Alright, so the show was Pagliacci.) Well played, Rob!

Ainsley also shares a good relationship with the Festival’s music director and principal conductor, Joseph Colaneri. Perhaps because they are both musicians, their long-standing relationship is built on mutual respect and a deep passion for the classical operatic repertoire. One feels they are in sync and imagines that they share the viewpoint that the music in opera comes first and probably should not be overlaid with the heavy mantle of a radical concept. Colaneri provided the second pre-curtain speech of the weekend as “‘Maestro’ Rob Ainsley” was moving “to the podium” in the orchestra pit to conduct La Calisto.

Ainsley had provided the new orchestration for La Calisto and further added to his leadership role by also playing harpsichord with fellow harpsichordist J. Bradley Baker and anchoring the appropriately pared-down instrumental ensemble. (I must also mention that the orchestra included the gorgeous sound of two theorbos, Baroque lute instruments played by Michael Leopold and Adam Cockerham.) To watch Ainsley conduct while playing the harpsichord, doing something of a slo-mo head-banging to indicate the downbeat and move the recitative passages forward, added to the evening’s pleasure and my admiration watching this artist at work.

La Calisto is a Baroque opera written in 1651 by composer Francesco Cavalli with libretto by Giovanni Faustini. It’s a lovely work for the Festival with its generous cast of characters, giving young singers opportunities to shine in solos in music not too heavily taxing on the voice and allowing them to practice special Baroque vocal ornamentation techniques such as the trillo (often referred to as the “goat trill,” a rapidly repeated staccato attack all on one note that sounds a little like bleating).

Set designer Charlie Corcoran framed the entire proscenium in Venetian red with heavy gold architectural ornamentation. There the nod to the past era’s glory ends. Instead, Corcoran has taken the principle of the Baroque passion for symmetry but executed it through a clean, contemporary stage design, using thin neon vertical piping, which is then incorporated into Amith Chandrashaker’s elegant lighting design, changing color throughout the evening, going from red to purple to sky blue, then orange and back to red, and using a similar neon motif in a giant isosceles triangle on the floor. Designer Carlos Soto costumed many in the cast in ravishing jewel-toned fabrics and period silhouettes. Others, such as in the gods’ world, he bedecked as if on a Hollywood red carpet or at a Met Gala.

Director Mo Zhou, recipient of an Opera America 2023 grant for Women Stage Directors, directs the opera with a sense of restraint for the arias, bringing the singers downstage center to let the vocal artistry reign. In this, she also supports a sense of intimacy between singer and audience so that nothing mars a song’s emotional expansion.

The opera is full of disguises and mistaken identities with a plot that constantly shifts focus. Jove, king of the pantheon of Roman gods, descends to earth after some unspecified catastrophe, ostensibly to bring healing, but he is soon up to his old philandering ways with mortal maidens. It seems the harder they are to get, the harder he wants them to fall. In this case, Calisto is a young girl who is dedicated to the goddess Diana and has taken a vow of chastity in her name. So, Zeus visits her in the guise of Diana and promptly seduces her. Meanwhile, the shepherd Endymion has fallen hard for the real goddess. Surprisingly, Diana falls for him and struggles mightily to maintain her celibate reputation.

Desire is a major theme in this opera, and we are shown it gets unleashed and grows exponentially as Pan and a host of nymphs and satyrs manifest their own randy bawdiness. It verges on a Baroque love-in, that is until Juno appears, coming down to earth to rein in her husband Jove’s behavior. It’s an old, hell-has-no-fury tale, and this wronged wife seeks revenge.

Craig Irvin is masterful as Jove with his rich bass notes and superb clarity of diction. Emilie Kealani and Kyle Sanchez Tingzon are the two young principal mortals, and both show they already excel in the pure, agile, and lustrous sound of Baroque opera.

There are other standout performances. Schyler Vargas nearly steals the show as Mercury, Jove’s sidekick and partner in seductions. Dressed in a copper-colored metallic jumpsuit, he carries Mercury’s identifiable caduceus, a kind of magic wand or staff, and plays it as if it were an electric guitar and he a rock star. The chemistry he displays with Irvin makes their relationship something of a boys’-night-out bromance and male predation look like fun. Taylor Raven sings the dual role of Diana and Jove-as-Diana with brilliance and moves between icy goddess and smoldering seductress.

Eve Gigliotti is perfectly cast as Juno, bringing great authority to the role, but she also delivers the pain a woman feels living with a repeated philanderer as a husband. Sadly, we watch the wrathful goddess, much like in our own society, bent on punishing the female victim. The mortal, now impregnated Calisto is cast out in the firmament, “released” as a star.

Namarea Randolf-Yosea makes a wonderful Pan. She and the cast of dancers — Kailee Reagan Brandt, Peter Murphy, Blaise Rossmann, Emma Sucato, and Truman Tinius, under the extraordinary choreographic leadership of Eric Sean Fogel — make the stage come alive with a radical blend of Baroque gesture and red-hot-and-steaming popular dance moves. They become a gorgeously androgynous team and, through a series of quick costume changes, enter the stage transformed into now female nymphs, now “grinding” male fauns and satyrs, now statuesque handmaidens of this or that goddess.

 Next year will be the 50th anniversary of the Glimmerglass Festival, which promises once again to advance the art form by programming a taste of the breadth of opera for the 21st century; combining offerings in inherited repertoire and new, crossover works; giving opportunities to young, gifted singer-actors; and mentorship by example of luminaries honing their craft of opera.

Running Time: Two hours and 25 minutes.

The 2024 Glimmerglass Festival continues through August 20, 2024. For tickets and more information visit Glimmerglass.org or call 607-547-2255.

SEE ALSO:
Old meets new in ‘Pagliacci’ and ‘Elizabeth Cree’ at Glimmerglass Festival (reviews by Susan Galbraith, August 5, 2024)

The post A lovely ‘La Calisto’ at Glimmerglass Festival and a chat with Rob Ainsley appeared first on DC Theater Arts.

Saint or whore? The world still argues the legacy of Argentina’s Eva Perón. GALA Theatre has remounted a musical that not only confronts head on the lingering national haunting by this iconic figure but more critically now speaks to our times as a warning about what can happen when thugs seize power by whatever means possible. It’s a tale so fantastic it has to be true. (Mostly.)

Gustavo Ott wrote the book through a commission from GALA back in 2009. Now, he has pulled the work out of the closet and come out swinging, making Momia en el clóset: Evita’s Return a finale to this his first season as GALA’s producing artistic director, following the death last year of Founding Artistic Director Hugo Medrano.

The show is lively, entertaining, at times chilling, and, refreshingly for a musical, deliciously transgressive.

The following are the background facts upon which the musical is based. When Argentina’s first lady Eva Perón died in 1952 at the age of 33, her husband had her embalmed. Her death triggered great civil unrest, which was already brewing, on one side an outpouring of devotion by many poor people who wished to canonize their Eva and, on the other side, increasingly fascist coalitions, including a military coup, that wanted her erased from the nation’s memory. Eva’s body went on a 20-year odyssey, including being moved and hidden multiple times and mutilated, and for a time it was lost. Argentina entered a dark chapter, its “dirty war,” as brutal and terrifying as any totalitarian society in the last 100 years.

GALA ‘s musicals are known for the mighty heart and soul put into them, despite somewhat limited resources. Little seems wanting in this production. Seven musicians are hidden somewhere up under the roof, including Music Director and pianist, the esteemed Walter “Bobby” McCoy, and the ensemble manages to produce a big pulsing sound to do justice to the original score by Argentine composer Mariano Vales. His tangos and other dance numbers are especially pleasing.

Ott shares lyric credits with Vales, and they have fashioned a most satisfying collaboration in crafting the songs, which include ballads and many upbeat numbers.

Mariano Caligaris directs with fearlessness and, as only a native Argentinian dare do, approaches the material with a sharply critical historic perspective but also a cheerfully naughty wit. He goes so far as to unmask the hypermasculinity of a fascist military government to suggest underlying homosexual drives and uses dark humor to expose the sexual exploitation and abuse of Eva’s corpse. It’s all about power.

Valeria Cossu has created energetic choreography for the ensemble throughout. The dancers explode onto the stage time again, going from hot-and-happy Latin-dance numbers to stage fights simulating Argentine military roundup and abuse of its citizens, and from gliding tangos to contemporary hip-hop. This ensemble can do it all. They push the story forward and get our hearts racing. By intermission, these dancers had more than earned their break.

At the center of the story is Eva herself. Fran Tapia embodies the bigger-than-life, ambitious, and quixotic Eva. The singer-actress, like the character she plays, is indeed a ghost returned, for she first came to GALA as the company’s Paso Nuevo Education Director, only to be snatched up and cast in the Gloria Estefan bio-musical, On Your Feet!, for which she won a Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Supporting Performer and went on to do a national tour.

In so many ways, this singer-actress is magnificent in the role, captivating us even when she stands, eyes closed, as a mummified statue. But you can’t keep this one in a closet! She flutters her eyes, tangos, flirts, and holds out her arms to embrace the world. She is most affecting taking us through the emotions of each song. Her voice is pleasing, if not fully balanced yet top and bottom, but I have no doubt this talented and hard-working professional will continue to shoot meteor-like and become an even more remarkable, much-in-demand superstar.

The array of characters in the show is richly populated by a talented supporting cast. Martín Ruiz plays President Perón. He creates a most believable arc for his character, going from powerful leader to bereft widower, then re-established tough guy with his new wife Isabel, and finally a scared and feeble old man in exile. Camila Taleisnik gives us the bubble-haired Isabel, who steps up as next wife to Perón and later to rule Argentina. She serves as an important bridge to understanding the country’s reeling as she grows tougher and more reactive. Rodrigo Pedreira blew me away with his physical control and whacko-pseudo-Dr. Frankenstein energy as the creepy Dr. Ara. Diego Mariani brings us an indelible scary Colonel Moori. Oscar Antonio Rodríguez and Luis Obed Velázquez distinguish themselves in this production as singer-actor-dancer triple threats.

Here and there production elements needed some tweaks. Specifically, the sound system still needs work. There was annoying feedback at the start, and the uneven mic’ing of performers jarred.

But the storytelling of creative team and cast is spot on. For all its high entertainment value, the show does not let us off the hook. The horrors Momia shows us is not (only) about state terrorism of the past and far away. The danger in the insistence of holding onto power by whatever means is very real in 2024.The enemy is here, a “mummy” already “out of the closet.” This is a musical must-see for DC.

Running Time: Two hours and 10 minutes, with one 15-minute intermission.

Mummy in the Closet: Evita’s Return (Momia en el Clóset) plays through June 9, 2024 (Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 pm and Sundays at 2 pm), at GALA Hispanic Theatre, 3333 14th Street NW, Washington, DC. Purchase tickets online. Regular tickets are $50 from Thursday through Sunday. Senior (65+), military, and group (10+) tickets are $35; and student (under 25) tickets are $25. For more information, visit galatheatre.org or call (202) 234-7174. Tickets are also available on Goldstar and TodayTix.

In Spanish with English surtitles.

The playbill for Mummy in the Closet is downloadable here (scroll down).

COVID Safety: All performances are mask-optional. See GALA’s complete COVID-19 Safety Policy.

Mummy in the Closet: Evita’s Return
Book & Lyrics by Gustavo Ott
Original Music & Lyrics by Mariano Vales
Directed by Mariano Caligaris

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