NEW YORK — Amahl and the Night Visitors, Gian Carlo Menotti’s beloved and once omnipresent Christmas opera, has made a welcome reappearance in a touching, effective production by Kenny Leon at Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. Like the comet that figured in this tale of the Three Kings en route to Bethlehem, it passes quickly — in two senses. The opera, heard in a chamber version, lasts but 50 minutes, and it will only run through Jan. 3. Act quickly: It’s a delightful experience.
Star mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato and a strong, diverse ensemble drawn from both the classical and music theater worlds bring the simple plot but musically rich opera to vivid life. On Dec. 17, my only regret was a sound design far too loud for the largely experienced cast in this small space. Turn those dials down, please!
Menotti — aided in the orchestration of the full, televised version by his life partner, Samuel Barber — crafted Amahl at the height of his fame as the genius composer/librettist behind seminal “Broadway operas” The Telephone, The Medium, and The Consul. Its libretto has none of the lapses in taste or idiomatic diction of some of his other most famous works and packs a surprising amount of variety into its short length. The overarching messages about societal compassion and the plight of the destitute ignored by the wealthy could not be more timely.
NBC-TV offered the world premiere, directed by Kirk Browning, on Christmas Eve 1951; it was the first American opera commissioned specifically for television. The lovely Juilliard-trained, Broadway-tested mezzo-soprano Rosemary Kuhlmann and the gifted though sadly ill-fated boy soprano Chet Allen (he died by suicide at 45) appeared as the work’s leads under the baton of wunderkind conductor Thomas Schippers, then 21. Five million viewers tuned in, breaking all records for classical music, and the opera, performed live, became a yearly staple.
Menotti had always intended the piece for stage use, and within a few months it appeared as such in Bloomington, Ind., and Boston on its way to becoming, for several decades, the most-performed American opera. In April 1952, Amahl entered the New York City Opera repertoire under the composer’s direction, paired with his 1939 The Old Maid and the Thief (originally written for another broadcast medium, radio). This staging gave NYCO debuts to Kuhlmann and Allen, and it played through 1954, though Allen, evidently better suited to the TV studio, only lasted one performance, with the Mother’s role also rotating to two other important Menotti interpreters and role creators, Gloria Lane and Patricia Neway.
Signally, the part of King Melchior was taken by Lawrence Winters, a qualified Escamillo and Rigoletto and one of NYCO’s early Black stars, who also sang major roles at San Francisco Opera and in Hamburg. Throughout art history, Balthazar has been depicted among the Three Kings as African, but NYCO — since 1945 the first racially inclusive major U.S. opera company in having (among others) Winters, Todd Duncan, Camilla Williams, and Robert McFerrin aboard — perhaps wanted to justify Amahl’s comment in the libretto that one of the Kings is Black. NBC-TV — doubtless nervous about Southern affiliates (which later in the decade balked at broadcasting Leontyne Price opposite white tenors in The Magic Flute and Tosca) — deployed a singer in blackface in all the Amahl telecasts until 1963.
Leon’s production nicely parries this conflicted legacy both in casting and by having Amahl (Lion King alumnus Albert Rhodes Jr., himself Black) register surprise that one of the Kings (Todd Thomas’ genial Melchior) is white. On the work’s 20th anniversary, Menotti staged a 1970-71 holiday season revival at Broadway’s ANTA Theater (now the August Wilson Theatre) paired with his sci-fi opera Help, Help, the Globolinks! (premiered in Hamburg in 1968). This run, led by Christopher Keene and cast with Metropolitan Opera and NYCO artists — Robert Puleo, Nancy Williams, Douglas Perry, Edward Pierson, and David Clatworthy — incorporated four free performances for children.
At Lincoln Center, as also sometimes happens with much more experienced singers, Rhodes took a scene to warm up vocally, growing stronger and more communicative as the show wore on, making infectious Amahl’s joy at the ornate, unexpected visitors and his eventual miraculous healing from a leg disability. He and DiDonato — whose program bio proclaims the Mother a lifetime dream role — found credible chemistry in their interaction. Her voice rich, plaintively expressive, and keenly attuned to tone color and dynamics, she conveyed her character’s hopes and fears in every bar and syllable of the text.
The singers playing the Kings, whom Leon had enter into their own entertainment more actively than Menotti’s direction, seemed to be having a ball. Phillip Boykin, a classically trained bass who’s scored in several choice Broadway gigs (most recently as Hadestown‘s presiding deity), sounded duly rumbustious and authoritative as Balthazar. Thomas, for years an accomplished if underutilized Verdi baritone throughout North America, was his equal as Melchior. Of a younger generation but with varied experience ranging from television to music theater to supporting roles at Lyric Opera of Chicago and the Met, agile-voiced tenor Bernard Holcomb etched an amusing Kaspar. Johnathan McCullough (the understudy Melchior) sounded fine in The Page’s limited duties.
The dancers in 1951’s telecast were major ballet legends: Melissa Hayden, Nicholas Magallanes, and Glen Tetley. Ioana Alfonso’s choreography in the 2025 production aptly combines fluid group movement plausible for an improvised entertainment by a bunch of shepherding families with more specialized and daring steps for the very gifted and disarmingly charming lead dancers Bryanna Strickland and Manuel Palazzo. Emilio Sosa’s costuming ranges from mismatched hand-me-downs for the central mother and son to richly caparisoned robes for their trio of royal visitors. The prime design element by Derek McLane (sets) and Adam Honoré (lighting) is a wonderful, glowing-with-stars blue sky. Only the front door and a central sleeping platform of the house are solid.
Behind the set one sees the fine conductor Steven Osgood coordinating the two eloquent pianists, Nathaniel LaNasa and Riko Higuma. Jesse Barrett multitasks as a charismatic oboist (whose cheerful pipings, heard by Amahl, reflect the magpie composer’s knowledge of a shepherd-adjacent passage from Gounod’s 1864 Mireille that Tchaikovsky copied in Eugene Onegin) and a tenor in the youthful, fresh ensemble. Their choral work, not least in the a cappella passages, proved well rehearsed and seamless. Met mezzo-soprano Olivia Vote — an Academy of Vocal Arts graduate, like DiDonato — figures in the ensemble and sings the Mother on Dec. 23, and 30.
This very pleasing and timely Amahl suits the 299-seat Mitzi E. Newhouse, considered an off-Broadway venue. The production appears in association with the Metropolitan Opera. One hopes the larger organization next door will make use of this space again, perhaps for intimate works it has (rightly) never produced in its vast auditorium like Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mozart and Salieri, Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, or Poulenc’s La voix humaine.
Such an experiment took place, with little financial success, more than five decades ago with 1973’s “Mini-Met” upstairs at the Broadway-sized Vivian Beaumont Theater, showcasing a double-bill of Maurice Ohana’s Syllabaire pour Phèdre and Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas with the married couple of Evelyn Lear and Thomas Stewart and the nonpareil Virgil Thomson/Gertrude Stein opera Four Saints in Three Acts, the first Met assignment for Hilda Harris, Barbara Hendricks, and Arthur Thompson and the only one for Betty Allen and Clamma Dale. Ventures in such smaller venues might also be profitably shown via HD. Would that Leon and DiDonato’s Amahl appears over our nation’s embattled airwaves today.
