CHARLESTON, S.C. — Founded in 1977, a year after the American Bicentennial, Spoleto Festival USA is celebrating the country’s 250th anniversary with 17 days of opera, dance, theater, and music. This season’s programming included Menotti’s The Old Maid and the Thief, Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, and the Scottish Ballet’s Mary, Queen of Scots.
The comic highlight was Daisy Evans’ imaginative, engaging, and touching production of Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Old Maid and the Thief. Menotti, founder of the festival’s Italian and American editions, composed more than 25 operas during his seven-decade career. In the mid-20th century, he was the most-performed contemporary opera composer in the world, but then musical tastes changed. His 1951 television opera Amahl and the Night Visitors, however, remains a Christmas classic.
Menotti composed The Old Maid and the Thief in 1939, while still a student at the Curtis Institute of Music. It was commissioned by NBC for radio, just as the network would later commission Amahl for television. The plot was inspired by a visit to the family of his fellow student and longtime partner Samuel Barber, in which he discovered the urban follies that consumed a seemingly placid and innocent small American town. Menotti’s stage adaptation of the opera premiered in Philadelphia in 1941.
Evans reverted to the original radio version, which called for a narrator, but she added a twist or two. Off to the side was a glass booth where Foley engineer Amelia Hawke created real-time side effects ranging from bird calls to opening doors and breaking glass. The narrator was Charleston’s living legend, the drag queen Patti O’Furniture. In classy male finery, the debonnaire O’Furniture delivered the narrative with a delicious wink and a nod, and the occasional appreciative leer at the muscled physique of Efraín Solís’ Bob, who for long stretches wore nothing but white boxer shorts.
Katharine Goeldner’s Miss Todd was the epitome of respectability until Bob tumbled into her life and released her pent-up longings for romance. With her expert comic timing, Goeldner captured Miss Todd’s foibles and delusions in broad strokes as she turned to crime to keep Bob from leaving. Goeldner revealed the spinster’s vulnerability not only through her acting and the warmth of her voice, but also the yearning in her eyes.
Her foil was Chrystal E. Williams’ Miss Pinkerton, a whirlwind in green, sweeping through town, ever alert to the slightest whiff of intrigue or scandal. The busybody knows something is up at the Todd residence, but can’t quite put her finger on what.
Rachel Blaustein was Miss Todd’s maid Laetitia, as thirsty for love and adventure as her employer. The opera’s best-known aria is “Steal Me, Sweet Thief,” in which Laetitia expresses her hopes to be whisked away by Bob so that, come what may, she has tasted romance before time erases her youth and beauty. Blaustein captured Laetitia’s longings to perfection with her creamy, radiant soprano. She is also a wonderful comedian, zestfully engaging in Miss Todd’s crime spree and then robbing her blind to finance her life on the run with Bob.
Besides muscles, Solís brought a winning charm and naiveté to Bob. He’s just a ne’er-do-well with no desire to be tied down, not the hardened criminal and prison escapee whom Miss Todd and Laetitia believe him to be. Bob gets the opera’s other well-known aria, “When the Air Sings of Summer,” which Solís sang with appealing warmth of voice and requisite yearning. He also delivered the opera’s best line, with wide-eyed, incredulous wonder: ”The devil couldn’t do what a woman can — Make a thief out of an honest man.”
Timothy Myers, the festival’s music director, led the Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra in a performance that captured all the sweep and melodic richness of Menotti’s verismo-inspired score. The orchestra was seated behind the small dais where the action took place, but Myers maintained proper balance throughout and had a deft hand with timing, ensuring that each sound effect and comic zinger landed.
Light-hearted melodrama yielded to the intense physicality of Yaron Lifschitz’s astounding 2024 production of Baroque composer Henry Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas for Opera Queensland with the Australian circus troupe Circa. Lifschitz founded the Brisbane-based contemporary circus ensemble in 2004 with the intent of bringing deeply emotive and athletic physicality to dance, theater, and opera. Through thrilling acrobatic feats and a powerful musical performance, Lifschitz sculpted a devastating depiction of betrayal and grief in Purcell’s opera.
Lifschitz created a prologue with Benjamin Bayl, who conducted the Queensland performances and is noted for his historically informed approach to Baroque, Classical, and Romantic repertoire. The brief prologue did no damage to the integrity of Purcell’s opera, while providing more time to marvel at the precision and power of Circa’s acrobatic feats and the superb singing of the Spoleto Festival Opera USA Chorus, prepared by Amanda Quist.
On purely musical terms, the performance was dominated by Megan Moore’s magnificent Dido and Patrick Dupré Quigley’s total command of Baroque style in the pit.
Quigley elicited a nuanced, richly colored performance from the Spoleto Festival Orchestra. Though not a period ensemble, the orchestra’s style, sensitivity, and finesse of playing were impressive. The sighs Quigley drew from the orchestra were as heart-rending as Moore’s devastating account of Dido’s Lament. The potential for Circa to overwhelm the performance was real, but the balance between music and movement was constantly maintained.
Moore commanded the stage, her Dido gowned in shimmering black sequins and crowned by a jarring, severely styled red wig. She employed her richly textured mezzo-soprano to instill the tragic queen’s every utterance with nobility. Another of Lifschitz’s innovative touches was to have Dido morph into the Sorceress. Shorn of her wig and dress, Moore was transformed into a bald, hollowed-out Sorceress who conjured Dido’s doom with tragic profundity rather than the usual glee.
The rest of the cast was equally strong. As Aeneas, baritone Leroy Yoshuro Davis cut an elegant figure in black tie, at one with the velvety richness of his voice. His compassionate Trojan prince was devoid of arrogance but consumed with regret as his destiny compelled him to abandon Dido. Maya Mor Mitrani brightened Belinda’s lighter musical lines with the sparkle of her lovely lyric soprano. Tenor Opal Clyburn-Miller seized the spotlight with his fresh-voiced, salty young sailor.
The driving force behind the production, however, was the visceral thrills the acrobats brought to the performance. Their strength and precision astonished as they climbed and leapt over one another to create towering human pyramids. As they toppled out of one death-defying formation, the reason for projecting the opening line of Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” on the otherwise bare stage became evident. Tyler’s words were the crucial link between the visual and the emotional: “Once upon a time, I was falling in love. Now I′m only falling apart.”
The Scottish Ballet made its American debut at the Spoleto Festival in 1986 and has repeatedly used the festival to introduce its boundary-pushing productions to U.S. audiences. It did so again this year with choreographer Sophie Laplane and director James Bonas’ bold, gripping Mary, Queen of Scots, which premiered at the 2025 Edinburgh International Festival.
Mikael Karlsson and Michael P Atkinson’s score features a mix of Scottish folk tunes and Elizabethan jigs, energized by heavily amplified effects and prerecorded backtracks. The result is over-energized Riverdance meets an equally hard-driven, punk-infused, surrealistic aesthetic. Martin Yates led the Spoleto USA Orchestra in an often ear-splitting, fast-paced performance. Their energy was matched only by the fierce athleticism of the male dancers.
The ballet opens with a spotlight on an old woman with a balding pate wearing little more than rags, marveling at the gently falling snow. The woman is Queen Elizabeth I, Mary’s cousin, who is nearing the end of her life. Elizabeth’s glee is cut short by spasms shooting through her body, and her demeanor is transformed by fear and anguish as she begins to relive the tragedy of Mary, whom she never met, but whose destiny ultimately rested in her hands.
The Scottish queen’s life then plays out in episodes that unfold with a respectable degree of historical accuracy and cinematic exactness. Mary was just six when she ascended to the Scottish throne, reigned as queen consort of France for 17 months, and, after a scandal-filled reign as Queen of Scotland, fled to England, where she was a prisoner for the rest of her life. Ensnared in a web of plots to dethrone Elizabeth, Mary was beheaded at the age of 44.
Soutra Gilmour designed the straightforward gray set, as well as the costumes. Bonnie Beecher’s lighting transforms the stage into the various locales where the action unfolds, from the grandeur of the French court to the bleak room where Mary is beheaded. Apart from the dancing, Gilmour’s costumes provide the visual interest, despite a palette largely restricted to cream and black.
The most magnificent attire is for Elizabeth, especially Harvey Littlefield’s towering, aloof younger queen with long flowing red hair, who is often seen walking an enormous dog. The older Elizabeth, performed by Charlotta Öfverholm, is a shrunken shell of her younger self. Whether wearing a few bits of cloth or clad in Tudor finery, Öfverholm’s every twitch, gesture, and pose revealed the aging monarch’s inner turmoils.
In contrast, Roseanna Leney’s Mary is lithe and sexy, more often than not dressed in a little black velvet dress. Mary’s pregnancy is made real by her wearing a white belt with a bump. The ballet’s wittiest moment has her newborn son appearing as a white balloon with the name James scrawled upon it. Mary saw him for the last time when he was 10 months old, 20 years before her death. He became James VI of Scotland and inherited the English crown after Elizabeth’s death.
Nicol Edmonds’ Darnley is also attired in white, in contrast to the black of Bruno Micchiardi’s dashing Rizzio. The courtier is Mary’s favorite and confidant, who for a while seems to enjoy Darnley’s attentions as well. Out of favor with the power brokers at Mary’s court, Rizzio is murdered before her eyes. Thomas Edwards’ Walsingham, Elizabeth’s spymaster, brings dramatic depth and incisiveness to every scene in which he appears with his sharp, energetic movements.
James Garrington’s Dauphin shines in silver, while his mother Catherine de Medici, danced by Madeline Squire, is implausibly encased in an imposing metal framework. The latter exemplifies power dressing at its most outlandish, as few women in history so eagerly courted power or clung to it with such tenacity. Kayla-Maree Tarantolo’s Jester darts across the stage in electric lime green, mocking one and all. The character is an intrusion that adds nothing to the story, least of all comic relief.
The standout numbers were Darnley and Rizzio’s steamy pas de deux and the tender scene, entirely fictional, where Mary and Elizabeth meet and show affection and support for each other. The terrific ensemble work combined classical ballet, acrobatics, and Scottish country dances. Walsingham and his network of insect-like spies sent shivers up the spine as they crawled across the stage.
In the final scene, Mary walks to her death in a black robe, which she doffs to reveal sexy red lingerie. It’s rooted in fact, as the real-life Mary did the same, albeit perhaps with far less display of flesh. It was a powerful statement of political theater through which the real Mary Queen of Scots proclaimed herself a martyr rather than a victim — an act that resonated just as profoundly in this terrific balletic dive into history.
