Operatic double bill united in excellence
If you were dead set on finding a connective thread between the disparate parts of the operatic double bill that had a brief and dazzling run over the weekend at Walnut Creek’s Festival Opera, you could maybe say that both “The Seven Deadly Sins” — Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s dark morality tale set to song and dance — and Leoncavallo’s more familiar “Pagliacci” concern people traipsing across the country in search of a livelihood.
Yeah, I don’t buy it either. So instead let’s just posit that both halves of this enterprise, which opened a two-performance stand at the Lesher Center for the Arts on Saturday night,
June 24, featured some of the finest theatrical and musical work this scrappy company has put on the stage in years. And if the result felt more like two separate offerings yoked together than a seamless evening of opera — well, a little thematic inconsistency seemed a small price to pay.
Certainly it’s been a long time since I’ve witnessed an artistic reclamation job as thorough and thrilling as the one that was worked on “The Seven Deadly Sins.” It’s a piece that gets performed pretty regularly, but rarely in a way that turns Weill and Brecht’s tart cynicism into something fully stage worthy.
This time around, though — in a vivid and imaginative stage production directed and choreographed by Mark Foehringer, and featuring a superb cast under the musical leadership of conductor Bryan Nies — the piece sparkled and shone afresh.
“Sins” tracks a Candide-like female protagonist through a septet of mythic American metropolises in search of a nest egg with which she can return to her home and family in Louisiana. The main character is represented onstage by two performers — the singing Anna I (the brilliant and physically intense soprano Laura Bohn) and the speaking and dancing Anna II (Sonja Dale, in a performance of beautifully compact kinetic energy) — and a four-voice male chorus represents the family back home, watching over her with fretful, pious homilies.
Too often, this construct yields either confusion or simply a string of alluring but indistinguishable set pieces. But Foehringer, with a few deft strokes, made each vignette — a new sin, a new city — into something distinctive and surprising.
Peter Crompton’s spare but vivid set design played out under a large roadside billboard like something out of a 1930s historical drama, its message and decor changing to reflect the moral situation of each scene. And a corps of five lithe, responsive dancers used Foehringer’s ideas — by turns winningly abstract and directly narrative — to create a new dramatic vista each time.
Next to the revelatory charge of “Sins,” the production of “Pagliacci” that followed intermission felt comparatively traditional. The tale of a traveling theatrical company in rural Italy, beset by sexual jealousy to the point of murder, played out as usual, with all its hot-blooded emotion and metatheatrical commentary intact.
But a conventional approach is often just what a piece like this needs, and conductor Michael Morgan, taking the baton handoff from Nies, led a performance that was at once lush and urgent, moving from scene to scene with the assurance of a master.
Tenor Alex Boyer, in his company debut, mustered a large, potent sound that brought a welcome measure of anguish and dark menace to the role of Canio; his delivery of the famous showpiece “Vesti la giubba” lacked nothing in the way of grit and vocal power.
Just as fine was baritone Roberto Perlas Gomez, whose turn as the malicious Tonio — and before that, the witty embodiment of the Prologue — was marked by warm vocal tone and a robust theatrical presence. As Nedda, soprano Hope Briggs sang with full-voiced glamour, even if her stage demeanor was a bit stiff, and there were good contributions from Zachary Gordin (Tonio) and Robert Norman (Beppe).
Festival Opera continues to make its way — tirelessly, intrepidly, optimistically — through a tangle of financial and organizational challenges. A production like this, which constituted the company’s entire summer season, is a reminder of just how invaluable it is to the local artistic scene.