‘The Lord of Cries,’ ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,’ ‘The Marriage of Figaro’ and ‘Eugene Onegin’ Reviews: Al Fresco Arias

The Sante Fe Opera’s scaled-down summer season includes one world premiere and three classics, performed and produced to varying degrees of success. 

By Heidi Waleson

Aug. 10, 2021 4:46 pm ET

Santa Fe, N.M.

With its open-air theater, Santa Fe Opera had a big advantage in the return to in-person performance this summer. Still, evolving pandemic restrictions and related international travel issues meant this season featured four operas instead of the usual five; last-minute cast changes; production adaptations, including offstage choruses for two shows; reduced audience capacity; and masks required on the theater grounds. Under the circumstances, it was commendable that the company produced a relatively normal-looking opera festival. 

Composer John Corigliano and librettist Mark Adamo labored for a decade over “The Lord of Cries,” this season’s world premiere, and it showed—though not in a good way. Mr. Adamo’s mash-up makes Bram Stoker’s Count Dracula a 19th-century manifestation of Dionysus in Euripides ’ “The Bacchae”; he is on a mission to force the repressed Victorians to acknowledge and embrace their deepest, most forbidden desires—“the beast within.” Plenty of juicy potential, one would think. But with its didactic, convoluted libretto, full of annoying rhymes and repetitions; its stock characters; and its music that never rises above pastiche, the opera was overworked and inert.

The only sparks in the evening came from countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo (Dionysus/Dracula), who commanded attention at every appearance with his insinuating, chromatic vocal line and some spectacular costumes by Chrisi Karvonides-Dushenko. But there wasn’t enough of him. Dionysus/Dracula has been wreaking havoc in London with the aid of three witchy attendants ( Leah Brzyski, Rachel Blaustein, Megan Moore ). He claims ownership of the ruined Carfax Abbey, but John Seward ( Jarrett Ott ), the moral and upright head of the Carfax Asylum, resists him. Jonathan Harker ( David Portillo ) has already been driven mad; Harker’s wife, Lucy ( Kathryn Henry ), and Seward harbor suppressed passion for each other. Lucy and Seward each have long, explanatory arias about why duty trumps desire, but the opera doesn’t make us feel their urges or their connection. And when Seward finally surrenders to his inner beast—tricked into thinking he is killing the Count, he murders Lucy—it seems, to the modern viewer, like a high price to pay for loving someone else’s spouse.

Dionysus’ attendants had an arresting musical signature—a dissonant trio with one very high voice and one very low. Other characters were generic. As Seward, Mr. Ott’s attractive lyric baritone was forced into less congenial stentorian territory; as Lucy, Ms. Henry popped out some disconnected high notes and sang a lullaby to her demented husband (a nod to “The Rake’s Progress,” perhaps). Mr. Corigliano relied on instrumental flourishes for effect: In Harker’s mad scene, for example, the orchestra mirrored his scattered mind with a skittering piccolo, followed by Wagnerian brass, and a syrupy violin solo. Numerous moments invoked other pieces—the opening chorus of frightened Londoners recalled “Sweeney Todd.” Showy dramaturgical devices fell flat: The spoken role of a newspaper correspondent felt like an expository shortcut, and a scene that layered multiple stories, including the arrival of a haunted ship, was incomprehensibly chaotic. Mark Grey supplied a sound design for the amplified voices, as specified by the composer.

Adam Rigg’s set—walls plus rows of Victorian lampposts, lighted in shades of pink and red by Pablo Santiago —was bland and claustrophobic. James Darrah’s directing mirrored the static quality of the opera. In the culminating scene of Act I, supposedly a Dionysian ritual, the possessed women of London just pawed demurely at a couple of animal carcasses. They didn’t even pull out any entrails. Johannes Debus was the valiant conductor.

Benjamin Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” deals more coherently with the supernatural, and director Netia Jones, who also designed the sets, costumes and projections for Santa Fe’s production, effectively conjured a shadowy black-and-white world with help from lighting designer D.M. Wood. Pandemic precautions meant no boys’ chorus for the fairies, but her solution—an unseen adult female chorus, and masked dancers with elaborate headdresses (rabbit ears, branches, a top hat) who popped up through holes in the raked platform—was almost as creepy. Tytania’s bed was a midcentury-modern leather chaise; a grand piano was wedged against a large, leafy tree, suggesting the closeness of the mortal and fairy worlds. The tree, alas, blocked the view from my house-left seat of some crucial projections on a giant black disc. https://tpc.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html

Iestyn Davies and Erin Morely faced off fiercely as Oberon and Tytania; of the solid quartet of Athenian lovers, the mellow soprano of Teresa Perrotta (Helena) stood out. Nicholas Brownlee was an amiable, less-pompous-than-usual Bottom; Kevin Burdette was an amusingly long-suffering Quince. His oversize striped suit was also funny; the costumes were generally splendid, from the English school uniforms for the lovers to Tytania’s black-flecked white gown. Reed Luplau, an acrobatic Puck, also did the athletic fairy choreography. The orchestra sounded elegant, sculpted by conductor Harry Bicket, who brought out every detail and musical joke in the opera’s diaphanous sound world. 

Mr. Bicket’s work also stood out in Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” —other than “Deh vieni, non tardar,” sung with ardor by Ying Fang (Susanna), the buoyant ensembles were that evening’s most satisfying vocal moments. The staging, devised by Laurent Pelly but directed by Laurie Feldman, was pedestrian, and I didn’t get the point of Chantal Thomas’s set, which had a clockwork theme, or the dull 1930s period costumes by Mr. Pelly and Jean-Jacques Delmotte.

Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin” is naturalistic, but director Alessandro Talevi, set and costume designer Gary McCann, and lighting designer Rick Fisher, seemingly taking their cue from its “dreamy” heroine, Tatyana—who falls in love with the proud Onegin—staged her story as a series of nightmares. The large, masked chorus sang convincingly from risers outside the audience area, while on stage their dancing avatars sported animal-themed Venetian carnival masks. They were benign in the harvest dance of the first act, entering the Larin country house (which had a few trees inside). But for Tatyana’s name-day party they became aggressive, and in Act III, as a glittering high-society clique, they tormented Onegin, who has returned from years abroad after killing his best friend, Lensky, in a duel. The effect, while striking (Athol Farmer did the evocative choreography), took the focus off the sad and very human tale of the ruin of several lives. 

Sara Jakubiak was a serviceable, if rather depressed, Tatyana; her “Letter” aria was short on temperament. Lucas Meachem made a forbidding, repressed Onegin. His opulent baritone exploded imposingly in the last act, when Onegin decides—too late—that he adores Tatyana after all. Tenor Dovlet Nurgeldiyev was a lively, poignant Lensky; James Creswell was a warm Prince Gremin. Conductor Nicholas Carter settled down after some early coordination issues with the stage. His interpretation lacked emotional depth, but so did the production.

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).