Throughout its short but eventful history the Opera Theatre of St. Louis never has lacked for things to celebrate, since its summer seasons really constitute festivals in all but name.
But this year brought a significant milestone, the company’s 20th anniversary, and so the Opera Theatre found itself uncorking a great many more champagne bottles than usual. The Missouri-made bubbly sat crisply on the palate. So did the opera.
Central to the anniversary festivities was the world premiere of Stephen Paulus’ “The Woman at Otowi Crossing,” its third commissioned work from the 45-year-old New Jersey-born composer. There also was an anniversary gala concert reuniting several of the young American singers–including Sylvia McNair, Kallen Esperian and Mark Oswald–for whom St. Louis served as an important launching pad.
Other repertory–a typically eclectic OTSL mix–included Haydn’s “Armida,” Offenbach’s “La Belle Helene” and Puccini’s “Tosca.” Although nobody set out to produce a feminist season, it turned out that each of the four works featured a strong woman as protagonist.
The 70-odd operas OTSL has produced since 1976 provide a telling glimpse into the artistic motives that launched the company under its adventuresome founder and former director, Richard Gaddes, and that guide the company on its present successful course, with artistic director Colin Graham, general director Charles MacKay and music director Stephen Lord sharing the helm in what appears to be perfect three-part harmony.
Seasons of new operas, unfamiliar works and standard operas–presented in ways that honor the “theater” in OTSL’s title–have made the company a magnet for fiercely loyal audiences. So has its performance space, the 900-seat Loretto-Hilton Center at Webster University, its thrust stage drawing all spectators close to the dramatic action. Chicago’s smaller opera companies, alas, have nothing comparable as yet.
Partly because it’s the only world-class opera St. Louis gets to see and hear during the year, St. Louisans take the Opera Theatre very seriously; in fact, they can be downright proprietary about it. Lively debates as to the merits of this or that emerging young singer animate post-performance soirees in the hospitality tent outside the theater.
Just don’t remind these patrons that other companies sing Puccini in Italian and Offenbach in French. Here everything is done in English–and that sits just fine with Opera Theatre audiences, who like to think of opera as an immediate, involving theatrical experience rather than an “exotic and irrational entertainment,” as Samuel Johnson famously described the art form back in 18th Century London.
The Opera Theatre has produced its share of new operas that vanished without a trace as soon as they had been performed. (Which company hasn’t?) But with “Otowi Crossing” St. Louis came up with a piece that deserves to have a respectable shelf-life–and just may, once the wrinkles are ironed out.
Joan Vail Thorne’s libretto, based on a novel by the late Frank Waters, takes as its protagonist a figure from real life: Edith Warner (here, Helen Chalmers), a transplanted Philadelphian who operated a tearoom near Santa Fe during the Second World War.
Helen moves between two worlds without fully inhabiting either. She befriends the Native Americans of the nearby San Ildefonso Pueblo as well as the scientists, including Niels Bohr and Enrico Fermi, who are involved in the top-secret Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, where the first atomic bomb was developed. Because of her spiritual kinship with her Indian neighbors and their land, she regards the coming atomic age with increasing alarm even as she obligingly serves meals to the modern Prometheuses who will bring it about.
Nothing overtly dramatic occurs during the course of the opera’s two acts. Helen settles into a platonic friendship with the retired newspaper editor with whom she is in love, insisting she “belongs to the earth”; is reunited with her long-estranged daughter, Emily, whom she had left behind to make a new life for herself in New Mexico; helps a young Indian war vet, psychically scarred by his experiences in battle, regain his pride and inner peace. At the opera’s climax she has a terrifying vision of the first nuclear blast that will forever change the world. With her death (of cancer) we sense that a part of life, certainly innocence, has died along with her.
Although the creators of “Otowi Crossing” are pro-earth and pro-ecology, they don’t push their sentiments into polemic. The closest they come to pointing an accusing finger at science’s heedless tampering with the power of the atom is a choral elegy for the despoiled planet: “You have parched our rivers! You have poisoned all our streams! The Land cries out in shame!” Indeed, it is in these powerful choral scenes, representing the spirits of Indian legend, where the opera musters its true moments of passion. Otherwise, Paulus’ neo-romantic score seems as passive as Helen herself.
Since everyone around this woman is sketchily presented, we are left with an opera that is essentially about her path to spiritual self-realization. But that leaves us with two problems. Paulus’ score, while well-made, cannot grant his protagonist–part mystical healer, part earth mother, part visionary–the dimensions suggested in Thorne’s libretto. I found it incredible that the composer did not give soprano Sheri Greenawald, one of our finest singing actresses, a full-fledged operatic scena. For all that, she brought an inner intensity to her portrayal of Helen that was never less than riveting; I cannot recall having heard anything finer from Greenawald in the two decades she has been singing with OTSL.
Graham has staged Paulus’ three previous operas, “The Village Singer,” “The Postman Always Rings Twice” and “The Woodlanders,” in St. Louis. This may be his finest staging of all. The OTSL production, with simple, stylized designs by Derek McLane and Martin Pakledinaz, and evocative lighting by Christopher Akerlind, approached the work as magical realism, which seemed just right. The theater’s confiding intimacy was kind to voices and words. (Ironically, Greenawald had the most trouble projecting the text clearly.)
Of the other principals, Kimm Julian as Helen’s persistent suitor, Christine Abraham as her daughter and Grant Youngblood as the shell-shocked soldier were especially good.
The second of the season’s two “Helen” operas was Offenbach’s “La Belle Helene.” The composer’s operettas are not usually thought to translate very well into English, nor is their period satire usually thought to make much sense when subjected to the inevitable updatings of clever modern directors. But everything worked with buckets of charm here, thanks to the really inventive, not overly campy staging by Michael Patrick Albano.
Here we had the familiar tale of Paris’ pursuit of Helen of Troy, recast as a boudoir romp parodying the antics of Napoleon III’s court. It’s inspired silliness, and Offenbach’s score–filled with tunes one instantly recognizes from their use in the ballet “Gaite Parisienne”–is one of his very best. Albano set the frothy plot roughly around the time the opera was written (1864), turning the Greeks and Trojans into libidinous Frenchmen.
St. Louis came up with a cast that was not only vocally and comedically adept but well integrated racially. I especially enjoyed the Paris of Gordon Gietz, whose healthy, well-knit lyric tenor and good stage instincts should carry him far. Pamela Dillard looked and acted suitably seductive in the title role even if her dusky mezzo-soprano timbre took some getting used to. All the singers delivered the dialogue as if they were making it up themselves. Yves Abel presided with effortless, tongue-in-cheeky elan. The English translation was by Geoffrey Dunn.
From Gallic opera bouffe to Italian opera seria: Haydn’s “Armida” turned out to be one of those surprises OTSL likes to spring on its patrons from time to time. In so doing the company demolished the received notion that Haydn’s operas are creaky, unstageworthy bores. Agreed, next to nothing happens on stage until the third and final act, when the Christian warrior Rinaldo, having been seduced from the Crusaders’ forces by the sorceress Armida (who falls in love with him), finally chooses duty over passion. But if one sticks with it, there is much glorious music that–never mind the archaic conventions of “serious opera”–conveys a range of emotions no less credible for being mostly interior.
With the Lyric Opera’s Daniel Beckwith infusing the drama with decisive energy as well as crisp finesse in the pit, a forgotten rarity was handsomely served. Christine Brewer created a sensation in the title role. Her big, rich, firm dramatic-coloratura soprano would have rattled rafters in a theater twice the size of St. Louis’; the ornate vocal writing held no terrors for her. Why, I kept wondering, haven’t our major opera companies beaten a path to her door?
Aside from “Madama Butterfly” in 1984 and 1992, St. Louis has never had much luck with Puccini, so I am at a loss to understand why Graham would want to tackle “Tosca,”aside from its obvious value to the box office. His staging tried hard to put an intimate face on the Italianate melodrama, but I’m afraid Puccini’s little shocker looked and sounded, well, shabby.
Pamela South, the Tosca, pushed her raw soprano sometimes wildly off pitch. Her Cavaradossi, Donald Braswell II, had the macho physique of a Chippendale dancer (the director contrived to have him nearly shirtless in the torture scene) but pumped up his narrow-bore tenor without regard for Puccini’s dynamics. Gerald Dolter revealed a good baritone but had an uphill battle suggesting Scarpia’s aristocratic evil. Lord’s conducting was sometimes over-indulgent, the orchestra sometimes ragged and ill-tuned.
