REVIEW: of the Glimmerglass 2023 Season, including:
Roméo et Juliette, the 1867 opera composed by Charles Gounod, with a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré adapting Shakespeare; viewed August 4, 2023;
Candide, with a musical score by Leonard Bernstein and book and lyrics by an assortment of heavy-hitters; viewed August 5, 2023; and
Rinaldo, composed by George Frideric Handel, with a libretto by Giacomo Rossi; viewed August 6, 2023.
Passing the Baton…
Alice Busch Opera Theater at the Glimmerglass Festival
The Glimmerglass Festival, with the arcadian charm of its lakeside setting and the surrounding splendor of its central New York “Leatherstocking Region” setting – not to mention the inveterate intelligence of its thematic programming – is always and easily among summer’s most sumptuous and soigné operatic and musical theater pilgrim places.
And this year – the festival’s first under newly-appointed artistic and general director Robert Ainsley, who succeeds the redoubtable and long-serving Francesca Zambello – proves no exception.
(Zambello’s presence is still powerfully projected this season by way of a splashy remount of her bang-up 2015 directing stint at the helm of Leonard Bernstein’s controversial musical theater magnum opus, Candide, here ably overseen by Eric Sean Fogel. More on that production below.)
Star-Crossed…
Magdalena Kuźma as Juliet in the 2023 Glimmerglass festival production of Romeo and Juliet. Photo Credit: Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festival
Viewed here in sequence, three of 2023’s Glimmerglass premiere productions might be thought of as a sort of multi-case anamnesis probing the interplay of love, hatred and violence – with, first up, a new examination of Charles Gounod’s 1867 Roméo et Juliette, here given a beautifully sung, quirkily staged new production directed by veteran Shakespeare hand Simon Godwin.
Strange and dark, Godwin serves up his eclectic and period-defying take on the oft-told tale of Verona’s marquee lovers with overtly mantic and stylized previsions of impending death.
The choral prologue is staged as a lurid Halloween harlequinade (is that the skeletal figure of Baron Samedi stalking the rear of the stage?), leading seamlessly into a garish carnival-like reworking of the usually glamorous Capulet ball, with a mise en scène suggestive in equal parts of Nightmare Alley and “Masque of the Red Death.”
Juliette, decked out as a human bluebird, makes her social debut after the fashion of a road-company burlesque diva or a trick show-pony, emerging through an oversized vertical drumhead; while Roméo, disguised as a pink-clad Pierrot, prowls the festivities’ periphery with his party-crashing confreres,
The cast of the 2023 Glimmerglass Festival production of Romeo and Juliet celebrate at the Capulets’ party. Photo Credit: Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festival
The settings of the opera’s ensuing four acts are equally offbeat.
Particularly arresting is the more or less 1950s look of Act III’s street scene, which features a rousing and heart-pounding staging of the opera’s fateful double-homicide duel.
The performances are uniformly admirable. Duke Kim as Roméo is a winningly earnest and active romantic hero, consistently showcasing a rich and full-bodied tenor voice that belies his youth, effortlessly transiting from throbbing anguish to delicate messa di voce in a performance of impressively contoured tragic insight.
Soprano Magdalena Kuźma is an engaging and unusual embodiment of Juliette – lusty, decisive and assertive, possessed of a sure fioritura technique and impressive acting chops. Of particular note is Kuźma’s expert handling of the psychological and vocal modulations of what amounts to an extended “mad scene” as she angsts over the prospect of imbibing poison. Fascinating and terrifying.
Duke Kim as Romeo in the 2023 Glimmerglass Festival production of Romeo and Juliet. Photo Credit: Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festival
Members of the supporting cast (many of whom are members of Glimmerglass’s highly regarded Young Artists Program) are equally impressive. Baritone Olivier Zerouali offers a Mercutio of engaging vocal flourish, while bass Sergio Martinez offers a sympathetic, conflicted, warm-voiced performance in the role of Friar Laurence. Tenor Hayden Smith lends appropriately ominous presence to the role of Juliette’s ill-fated cousin Tybalt.
Mezzo-soprano Lisa Marie Rogali makes a memorable impression in a “trousers role” take on Roméo’s pageboy Stéphano in her rendering of the exquisitely ironic Act III chanson “Que fais-tu blanche tourterelle?”.
Other notable performances are offered by contralto Meredith Arwady as Juliet’s Nurse (here named Gertrude); bass-baritone Stefano de Peppo as Count Capulet; baritone Jonathan Patton as Juliette’s jilted lover Paris; tenor Will Upham as Roméo’s buddy Benvolio; bass-baritone Darren Drone as his retainer, Gregorio; and bass John Mburu as the Duke of Verona.
Magdalena Kuźma as Juliet in the 2023 Glimmerglass festival production of Romeo and Juliet. Photo Credit: Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festival
The production team includes the festival’s ever-impressive music director Joseph Colaneri conducting the Glimmerglass orchestra, elegantly eliciting all the swell and romanticism of Gounod’s score and mining for full dramatic effect both the delicately embroidered woodwind, string and harp figurations with which Gounod often entwines the vocal lines, as well as the composer’s spicy and evocative deployment of piquant brass dissonances.
Choreography is by Jonathan Goddard; set design by Dan Soule; costume design by Loren Shaw; lighting by Robert Wierzel; and hair and makeup design is by Tom Watson.
Roméo et Juliette plays a final performance this season on August 19 at 1 p.m.
All for the Best…
Leonard Bernstein pulled out all the stops for Candide, certainly the biggest and most ambitious of the maestro’s musical theater scores. In fact, he pulled those stops out again and again. While this sui generis Broadway musical-cum-operetta premiered in 1956 (directed by the legendary Tyrone Guthrie), it has subsequently undergone at least five reworkings. Bernstein himself conducted his own “Final Revised Version” in 1989, shortly before his 1990 passing.
The 2023 Glimmerglass Festival production of Candide: Ensemble cast with (center) Katrina Gulka as Cunegonde and Brian Vu as Candide. Photo credit: Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festival
Based on the most famous work by 17th/18th-Century French philosopher, wit and social satirist Voltaire, Candide the musical was adapted for the stage by no less than a cavalcade of top-shelf American literary operatives, including Lillian Hellman, John La Touche, Hugh Wheeler, Dorothy Parker, Richard Wilbur and Stephen Sondheim. Plus, Bernstein himself is credited with some of the lyrics.
Voltaire’s improvisatory, episodic plot turns on the picaresque adventures of the naïve young Candide, the illegitimate son of a Westphalian nobleman, reared under the tutelage of an irrepressible philosopher of universal optimism, Dr. Pangloss, for whom any social blight or existential discomfort can be justified and reasoned away as a sum positive in this “best of all possible worlds!”
All is thus sunshine and Santa Claus as Candide makes plans for his forthcoming marriage to the enchanting Mademoiselle Cunégonde – until war, disaster and displacement strike.
The tale that ensues – of optimism challenged via myriad stress tests – is a salmagundi of hazards and hair’s-breadth escapes (oh, that Spanish Inquisition!), credulity-defying reversals of fortune and barely avoided mishaps, all punctuated liberally by incidents of treachery, piracy, infidelity, heartbreak and ultimate disillusionment, before arriving at stoic resolve. And all of it musicalized by Bernstein in a gloriously overstuffed score that emulates and parodies musical styles from Mozart to Rossini to Gilbert & Sullivan to the ballad operas of Johann Christoph Pepusch and John Gay.
2023 Glimmerglass Festival production of Candide featuring (L to R) Bradley Dean as Pangloss/Voltaire and Brian Vu as Candide. Photo credit: Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festival
Director Francesca Zambello and remount choreographer/director Eric Sean Fogel have flawlessly captured the whiplash transitions of the work’s challenging structure with a constant swirl of color, action and crafty stage legerdemain.
The sterling cast includes Bradley Dean as both Voltaire and his in-story alter-ego, Dr. Pangloss; tenor Brian Vu as a touching and velvet-voiced Candide; soprano Katrina Galka as a powerhouse, adorably manic Cunegonde; contralto Meredith Arwady, hilarious as Cunegonde’s “easily assimilated” and mono-buttocked (yep) sidekick, referred to as the “Old Lady”; tenor Ryan Johnson as both the Grand Inquisitor and the lubricious Governor of Montevideo; baritone Schyler Vargas as Cunegonde’s brother, Maximilian; baritone Jonathan Patton as the street-sweeper pessimist Martin; tenor Jonathan Pierce Rhodes as Candide’s hapless valet, Cacambo; mezzo-soprano Lisa Marie Rogali as the servant girl Paquette; soprano Keely Futterer as the piratical slaver Vanderdendur; tenor Carlos Ahrens as the King of Eldorado; and Alicia Russell Tagert as his Queen.
Katrina Gulka as Cunegonde in the 2023 Glimmerglass Festival production of Candide. Photo credit: Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festival
Conductor and festival music director Joseph Colaneri gets Bernstein’s score so right, right from the get-go, ratcheting forth all the brio of the overture’s wacky and wonderful opening brass fanfare, then seizing with undaunted precision all of Bernstein’s ruthless syncopations and meter changes.
Choreographer Eric Sean Fogel contributes inestimably to the consistent rhythmic propulsion of the production, while set designer James Noone, costume designer Jennifer Moeller, lighting designer Mark Mccullough; hair and makeup designer Tom Watson, and sound effects designer Joel Morain have all harmonized their contributions to make for a charming, idiosyncratic and unforgettable romp through Voltaire’s and Bernstein’s best of all possible collaborations.
Candide has final performances this season on August 18 at 7:30 p.m. and August 20 at 1 p.m.
A Funny Thing Happened at the Siege of Jerusalem…
Themes of love and betrayal, sorcery and knightly derring-do all contend for primacy of plot in Rinaldo, George Frideric Handel’s rollicking 1711 opera seria set against the First Crusade’s clash of Crescent and Cross, offered in an ingeniously framed new production at this year’s Glimmerglass Festival.
One can well imagine director Louisa Proske pondering over the principal dramaturgical quandary posed by Rinaldo: is it just great music supporting an outlandish baroque soap-opera? Or is there some way to extract latent contemporary relevance from it?
In answer, Proske has fashioned a highly gratifying and consistently dividend-paying metatheatrical trope for her production, both moving and uplifting.
Anthony Roth Costanzo as Rinaldo in the 2023 Glimmerglass Festival production of Rinaldo. Photo Credit: Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festival
Inspired by the struggles explored in the 2006 release of the documentary A Lion in the House, which follows five young cancer patients at Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital, Proske manages to give new amplitude to Rinaldo’s color and extravagance, configuring it as the emanation of one direly ill young patient’s restorative imagination. In feints of dazzling coup de théâtre, various Crusader kingpins and colorful Saracen warlords emerge magically against the sterile clinical landscape, all clearly arising from the young man’s precocity, grit and determination to fight against disease and death.
The set proves far more versatile and modular than one at first suspects. Beautiful use is made of large picture windows through which alternations between modern cityscapes and fantasy images of storybook knights mark the turns of the boy’s unfolding inner adventure.
(L to R) Peter Murphy, Kyle Sanchez Tingzon, Madison Hertel, and Anthony Roth Costanzo in the 2023 Glimmerglass Festival production of Rinaldo. Photo Credit: Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festival
Rinaldo’s excellent cast is headlined by renowned countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo as the title hero, and silver-toned coloratura soprano Jasmine Habersham as the object of Rinaldo’s affection, Almirena. Proske has cleverly reworked the original libretto’s somewhat deficient romance plot for Rinaldo and Almirena by reimagining the latter as another young patient in the ward with whom Rinaldo develops a fantasy friendship of joyously innocent and playful mutual support and encouragement.
In the role of the opera’s villainess par excellence, the sorceress Armida, Young Artists Program soprano Keely Futterer offers a richly realized character concoction. Seductive, red-maned, a lady ogress fully worthy of weird-sisterhood with the likes of Ursula the Sea Witch of The Little Mermaid, or Sigourney Weaver’s channeling of the demon hellion Zuul in Ghostbusters, so indelible is the impression Futterer makes that, in fact, one is tempted to wonder why the opera isn’t titled Armida.
Korin Thomas-Smith as Argante in the 2023 Glimmerglass Festival production of Rinaldo. Photo Credit: Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festival
The cast is rounded out by a phenomenally talented crop of other 2023 Glimmerglass Young Artists Program members, including another countertenor, Kyle Sanchez Tingzon, as Crusader chieftain kingpin Goffredo; baritone Korin Thomas-Smith, imposing and sonorous as the swaggering Saracen Argante; countertenor Nicholas Kelliher (yes, a third countertenor!) as the Sorcerer; and the incredibly energized and spooky dance trio of Madison Hertel, Peter Murphy and Emma Sucato who, swathed in black, fascinatingly embody the swirling billows of dark energy that surge from Armida’s fulsome maleficence.
Conductor Emily Senturia gets gorgeous rhythms and colors out of her tight baroque instrumental ensemble (note the thrilling sight of that period-perfect long-necked theorbo bobbing above the lip of the orchestra pit); choreographer Jorrell Lawyer-Jefferson has fashioned wonderfully fluid arabesque lines for his performers; while set designer Matt Saunders, costume designer Montana Levi Blanco, lighting designer Amith A. Chandrashaker, and hair and makeup designer Tom Watson all make notably effective contributions.
And a special nod goes to projections designer Jorge Cousineau whose work adds immeasurably to the dream-like rises and falls of Proske’s fluid and inventive staging.
Keely Futterer as Armida in the 2023 Glimmerglass Festival production of Rinaldo. Photo Credit: Evan Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festival
Rinaldo plays one more performance on August 17, 2023 at 7:30 p.m.
Another Season Comes and Goes…
With this summer’s Glimmerglass Festival drawing to a close, it’s not too early to note the planned productions for next year, which will include: Gilbert & Sullivan’s very model of a thoroughly hilarious operetta, The Pirates of Penzance; another magical baroque masterpiece in Cavalli’s La Calisto; Leoncavallo’s laugh-clown-laugh tale of love and murder, Pagliacci; and Kevin Puts’ and Mark Campbell’s gleeful Victorian-Era penny dreadful, Elizabeth Cree.
Information and advance season tickets are available at: https://glimmerglass.org/
