ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, N.Y. — Bard SummerScape’s 2026 season, ambitious even by its own standards, may well have been undermined by accidental outside circumstances. Yet it nearly triumphed.
The long-planned operatic adaptation of Suddenly Last Summer, its inciting character a sexual predator, happened to arrive (June 25-July 19 at the LUMA Theater) amid Bard College president and festival co-artistic director Leon Botstein stepping down (temporarily, it seems) as a consequence of his fundraising associations with Jeffrey Epstein. But this potentially volatile Tennessee Williams property was presented as such a deft music-theater hybrid that it eluded the cancellation police.
The also long-planned production of Strauss’ rarely heard The Egyptian Helen (July 24-Aug. 2 at the Fisher Center Sosnoff Theater) coincided with the opening of Christopher Nolan’s much-lauded film The Odyssey. How can Strauss not be dwarfed? But the film mostly has one-dimensional characters and limited screen time for Helen of Troy. Strauss’ counterparts may have too many dimensions, compounded by plot-twisting lotus potions, anti-potions, an avatar, and, in Bard’s production, multiple onstage mirrors. The opera no doubt made some new friends. But so much of it didn’t sink in that (for me) it’s Strauss’ amnesia opera, an unlikely conclusion that warrants being discussed first.
Botstein’s long history with Die ägyptische Helena includes previous concert performances and a well-circulated Telarc-label recording. Now 79, Botstein gave a typically entertaining pre-performance lecture and conducted the opera, having been rehired with a five-year contract (confirmed by a senior staff member, with details to be announced), but he suggested that this Christian Rath production may be his last shot at rehabilitating librettist Hugo Von Hofmannsthal’s fantastical foray into a lesser-known thread in the myth: The Troy version of Helen was a phantom, while the real Helen was waiting out the decade-long war in Egypt.
Clearly, the authors counted on their audiences knowing Greek mythology deeply enough to enjoy their mercurial narrative and poetic symbolism, which explains the brief vogue the opera enjoyed following its 1928 premiere. But even the most sophisticated 21st-century Americans are often baffled. Beyond baffled.
The story’s magical events drift about with little inner logic. Especially in Act II, characters come and go arbitrarily, having a big aria in one scene and dying in the next. Strauss’ lyrical but hardly melodic vocal lines fail to add up to anything I want to hear repeatedly. Much storytelling lies in the orchestral writing, with foreground singing heard amid floods of shifting instrumentation. That element is effective, if not essential. The lean, imposing brass writing heard in the Die Frau ohne Schatten emperor-turns-to-stone passages telegraphs a level of importance that might otherwise be lost, along with many psychological details.
One possible explanation: Though accused of repeating himself after Elektra, Strauss fashioned every subsequent opera with its own kind of relationship to the theater that, as time went on, took eccentric turns. As encountered at the July 26 matinee, challenges in The Egyptian Helen staging start with the opening scene, where the sorceress Aithra communes with an omniscient singing seashell (Deborah Nansteel). That part went well: The shell was represented onstage by a female figure similar to Das Rheingold‘s Erda. Digital imagery created ocean storms and flocks of birds.
From there, nearly everything and everybody onstage tried too hard to sell this glittering but confused confection of an opera. The singers oversang the theater in Act I. As Helen, Hailey Clark pushed her voice so hard that her tone bleached out her diction. In the lighter-voiced but Zerbinetta-like role of Aithra, Jana McIntyre at least made accuracy a priority. John Matthew Myers as Menelaus pulled back enough to reveal him as a potentially fine Lohengrin. Everybody pulled back in Act II, but not enough in this wonderfully smallish 900-seat theater.
In the grayish palette of the Act I set, the stage became a dense nest of shadows, many of themselves, who are Aithra helpers. And why have four when the stage can be crowded with what looked like 24? Dancers invaded with minimal motivation, leaving so little room for physical expression that the stage sometimes resembled a sports-team huddle. The more bluish-colored Act II took place with the Atlas Mountains in the background — nice for Helen’s great “Zweite Brautnacht!” aria — though throughout the act, shadowy figures held up letters that spelled “Helena,” resembling the famous Hollywood sign in Los Angeles.
The opera does have a satirical streak, though projecting that visually is tough. But both the opera and its production had a final-scene payoff: Strauss here is at his most musically exalted, and the production didn’t get in the way. Whether or not you apprehended the piece, there was much substance to account for one’s time spent in the theater.
And now Suddenly Last Summer:
With words such as “gothic” and “hysterical” already applied to the eponymous 1958 Tennessee Williams play, raising the emotional temperature in an operatic treatment wasn’t exactly an idea waiting to happen. With music by Courtney Bryan and direction by Daniel Fish, the piece is already headed for Opera Philadelphia in the 2026-27 season. In recent years, the play has had pushback by the LGBTQ community for indulging in gay stereotypes.
Idolized by his mother as a great poet, Sebastian used women to procure young men for his own private consumption, until he was savagely consumed by a swarm of those he had abused. With Chekhovian elegance, the play maps out the southern matriarch‘s plan to silence — through a frontal lobotomy — cousin Catherine’s grisly account of her son’s death on that fatal vacation. But that’s not the only theme here. The play also deals with conspiracies of silence around abuse, class privilege that overrides morality, and the ruthless Darwinian cycle of life and death.
With directives from the Williams estate to maintain the original language, Fish and co-librettist Gideon Lester deftly trimmed the play, making way for music, creating what might be called a semi-opera. All characters speak except Catherine, who spends much of her stage time singing under the influence of truth serum. Words can manipulate, but music tells the truth. Intentionally annoying secondary characters out to protect their inheritance appear on video screen, which further streamlines the narrative.
Composer Bryan was an unlikely choice: Though she has written an appealing piano concerto, House of Pianos, much of her work is in more popular genres. For this assignment, she recorded vocal improvisations, chose the best parts, and fashioned them to Catherine’s recounting of Sebastian’s death. It worked, the often-gentle lyricism capturing Catherine’s fear, horror, and dreamy vulnerability. Instrumental underscoring heard throughout allowed the singing to organically emerge at the right times. Tasteful amplification and Nathan Koci’s musical direction and allowed the spoken and sung dialogue to co-exist fluidly.
My main point of references for the play is not the 1959 film (starring Elizabeth Taylor, with script input from Gore Vidal) but the 1993 TV adaptation with Maggie Smith that follows the play more closely. But the non-singing members of the Bard cast did not suffer in comparison, with Tina Benko projecting all necessary malevolent gravitas as the genteel but scheming Mrs. Venable and Branden Lindsay as the eager-to-please but still morally grounded Dr. Sugar.
In the performance I heard July 12, the main star, in the singing role of Catherine, was the mesmerizing Mikaela Bennett. Having straddled the line between Broadway and classical, she was vocally magnetic, theatrically alert to everything, and an essential galvanizing catalyst in the many moving parts of this adaptation. On to Philadelphia!
