CENTRAL CITY, Colo. — Central City sports one of the most picturesque opera-festival venues on the continent. Also one of its oldest: Central City Opera’s 92nd summer season found two inspiringly moving productions holding the historic mining town’s intimate stage sequentially on Aug. 2.
Street Scene began its theatrical life as a 1929 Broadway play written and staged by Elmer Rice (1892-1967), the boy wonder who wrote his first Broadway play, On Trial, at 20. Street Scene was a hit, running 601 performances. Rice got credit for the book of the 1947 “Broadway opera” by Kurt Weill, with no less than Langston Hughes as the lyricist. This production lasted 148 shows but made an impact as part of the wave of so-called “Broadway operas” including several by Gian-Carlo Menotti, of which 1950’s The Consul remains the strongest, plus Marc Blitzstein’s Regina, another Broadway-premiered work now occasionally heard at opera companies.
This new genre smudged the line between two formerly quite disparate worlds in terms of idiom and of personnel. Street Scene and Regina shared a musical director, Maurice Abravanel (1903-93), between his years (1936-8) at the Metropolitan Opera and his decades-long tenure as music director of the Utah Symphony. Abravanel had worked with Weill on Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady in the Dark, One Touch of Venus, and The Firebrand of Florence. Street Scene‘s original cast featured several Met leading singers, including Polyna Stoska (Anna Maurrant), Norman Cordon (Frank Maurrant), Brian Sullivan (Sam Kaplan), Sydney Rayner (Lippo Fiorentino), and Randolph Symonette (Marshall James Henry), plus Anne Jeffreys — the operatically trained musical-theater and (later) television star — as Rose Maurrant. New York City Opera took up Street Scene in its second “All-American Season” (1959) and played it through 1966. Jack O’Brien directed a fine new NYCO staging in 1978, with John Mauceri leading the theatrically savvy Eileen Schauler, William Chapman, and Catherine Malfitano as the Maurrants.
At Central City, conductor Adam Turner and his dynamic forces captured the work’s special blend of operatic, jazz, and musical theater elements well without letting the seams show. Weill arrived in America in 1935 conversant in the Broadway sound and listened attentively to what the score alternates: ensembles reminiscent of his rhythmically catchy Berlin songs with numbers also demonstrating his keen-eared familiarity with the distinct Broadway idioms of Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers. Despite both book and lyrics trafficking in then-accepted ethnic stereotypes and dialect, the work pushes back against the anti-immigrant (proto-MAGA) opinions Frank Maurrant voices — like other elements of the text, including references to “Harold Teen,” the concern with women smoking, and Abraham Kaplan’s Marxist rhetoric, apter to the 1920s of Rice’s play than the postwar years.
But other references (including the phrase “atom bomb”) evoke the musical’s post-World War II gestation, so production teams — especially the costumers and choreographer — have to decide in which decade to set the piece. Here, the skilled choreographer Daniel Pelzig directed and definitely opted for the ’40s, as the outfits, hairstyles, and uniforms showed. David Harwell’s suitable tenement unit set would have fit either. Impressively, the cast — including the fine child actors involved — managed to stay within “period” intonation and behavior to a degree rarely enforced on Broadway itself these days.
As many Orfeo stagings show, choreographers in the director’s chair will over-choreograph, and though Pelzig gave the singers nice steps, I felt a few less cute riffs on every dance rhythm would have strengthened the production. That said, the uproarious Kiss Me, Kate-inspired duet for Mae Jones and Dick McGann (Lauren Gemelli and Jeffrey Scott Parsons, both sensational) would have stolen the show had the four leads not been so strong. Holding the whole show together heart-breakingly as the doomed Anna Maurrant, incisive, expressive mezzo-soprano Katherine Pracht radiated longing and humanity. As her daughter Rose, Christie Conover resembled Pracht and proved utterly sympathetic and nuanced dramatically, though the music needed a more lyrical timbre. As husband-father Frank Maurrant, Kevin Burdette sounded rather hollow but used his exceptional theatrical skills to craft a scary domestic tyrant while still showing us the vulnerability beneath.
Rose’s studious suitor, Sam Kaplan, gets some high-faluting lyrics but also the haunting ballad “Lonely house.” Christian Sanders lent his crisp, wide-ranging tenor to a winning portrayal. In keeping with the creators’ socialist slant, everyone in this well-populated piece gets their moment to shine. The entire ensemble deserved the cheers they won, but special commendations go to tangy-voiced stage animal mezzo-soprano Hilary Ginther (gossip-in-chief Emma Jones, a character Carlisle Floyd recalled in crafting Susannah‘s vicious Mrs. McLean), strikingly orotund bass Andrew Harris as Carl Olsen, the Henry Davis of exuberant tenor Bernard Holcomb (boasting with Pracht and Sanders the clearest diction in the cast), Jake Surzyn as a firm-toned George Jones, and two apprentices with clear futures: ravishing-toned soprano Ariel Andrew as the First Nursemaid and James Mancuso as ice cream vendor Lippo Fiorentino, an irresistible tenor parody character who surely hovers behind Sweeney Todd‘s Pirelli.
The evening’s opera, 1910’s Met creation La fanciulla del West, most often graces large companies, though Central City has staged it before. Puccini’s second adaptation of a David Belasco play — the first became Madama Butterfly — has in common with Street Scene thematics of multi-ethnic communities, predatory married men, deferred or dashed hopes, and recurring fights (well staged here by Matt Herndon), though, famously, this gun-filled Wild West tale involving bandits and a romantic triangle is (against expectation) the rare Puccini opera in which nobody dies. Director Fenlon Lamb moved the action from the Sierras (1849) to the Rockies (1859) to accentuate the local gold rush. Papermoon Opera Production’s creatively impressionistic set utilizing projected documents and photographs emphasized this, keenly lit by Abigail Hoke-Brady.
Characters circulated in the auditorium to augment the small stage’s spatial dimensions when the actions required it. A few place names were altered — at the end, the lovers sang “Andiam a California,” however; few lovers of Fanciulla know that, in Belasco’s brief, moving Act Five (unset by Puccini), they are actually heading to the East’s established, un-frontier world for their redemption. No harm done, and directorial blocking and motivation was shrewd and effective. Conductor Andrew Bisantz commanded his strong forces (perforce a reduced orchestration), exploiting the very fresh-sounding male chorus and sensitively nursing his three super-professional but not youthful-voiced leading players through testing passages.
Kara Shay Thomson (Minnie), Jonathan Burton (Dick Johnson, a.k.a. Ramerrez), and Grant Youngblood (Jack Rance) are all long-serving pillars of American regional opera, well suited to the Tosca-like demands Puccini places on their characters in Fanciulla. These three parts need no willowy figures or dewy pure tones, and they didn’t get them here. Thomson — who’s advanced to dramatic soprano roles from parts like Adina and Musetta — took a while to warm up, and though her high Cs remain formidable, the voice’s beauty now lies mainly in arcs of quieter sound. But she brought to her killer part absolute conviction and — like Youngblood, his dark baritone still resonant if occasionally unsteady on sustained notes — always sang responsively off the words. Good Minnies are few and far between; Thomson made you believe.
Burton made a more dashing figure in the role 10 years ago at Kentucky Opera but here brought Johnson some charm, and his highest notes pack impressive ping. They all earned their checks and audience approval. Others notable in the large cast were Matthew Cossack’s admirably legato-based Sonora, Christopher Job’s Ashby (imposing in sound and presence), Natacha Cóndor’s contralto-toned Wowkle, Ilhee Lee’s alert Trin, and Mancuso as Joe. Central City delivered in what I’m not alone in finding to be Puccini’s very greatest score.
