New Jersey Opera Theater’s SummerFest presents a season of fully staged comedies filled with trickery, temptation, love potions and ghosts.
By: Hilary Parker
Opera has been around for nearly 400 years. It’s filled with chandelier-shaking arias, bedecked with elaborate costumes and bursting with epic romances from the heart-wrenching to the side-splitting.
Given the sheer size and range of all that makes up the art form, it might seem as if it would take years decades even for an opera company to offer an education and an exposure to the breadth and depth of all that is opera. With its upcoming SummerFest, featuring a series of fully staged productions, master classes and musical concerts at various locations in Princeton throughout the month of July, New Jersey Opera Theatre plans to do it in a month.
"It’s our mission to bring accessible performances and foster the art of communicating through opera at SummerFest to create new and sustainable audiences in an intimate environment," says Scott Altman, artistic director of NJOT, who co-founded the organization with his wife, Lisa.
Last year’s sold-out SummerFest told the organizers they were "doing something right," Mr. Altman says. With that in mind, NJOT has preserved the SummerFest format of free concerts in addition to fully staged productions on a given theme. This year, all productions are comedies of love.
NJOT has retained its commitment to educating both its performers and its audiences with the spate of master classes, free and open to the public. Featuring instruction by many of the guest artists in the SummerFest, as well as Mr. Altman and Buoso’s Ghost composer Michael Ching, the master classes will provide an up-close and personal look behind-the-scenes of opera.
Audience members also will receive an education on "at least 200 years of opera," Mr. Altman says. In celebration of Mozart’s 250th birthday and in concluding NJOT’s performing of the Mozart/Da Ponte opera trilogy, SummerFest will feature a staging of Cosi fan tutte, written in the late 1700s. On the heels of a 2004 performance of Don Giovanni and a 2005 staging of Le nozze di Figaro, the comedic Cosi fan tutte The School for Lovers tells tales of trickery and temptation in the lives of two officers, Guglielmo and Ferrando, and their lovers, Fiordiligi and Dorabella. When a friend convinces the young officers to test the faithfulness of their would-be brides, the comic mix-ups and foibles that ensue kick off SummerFest’s theme with gusto.
Moving forward in time, the festival will feature a production of Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore written in the 1800s and set by stage director David Grabarkowitz in 1950s America.
" ‘Elixir of Love,’ for me, lent really well to updating," says Mr. Grabarkowitz. "The idea that alcohol would make him sexy? That’s the crux of the main character’s problem."
Noting that the 1950s marked the real start of the push by alcohol companies to market their products as love potions, Mr. Grabarkowitz says he exposed his performers to the advertising tactics and screen classics of the era, including Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant in His Girl Friday.
"The relationship is styled after those screwball comedies," Mr. Grabarkowitz says. "In other words, they hate each other so much they love each other."
Telling the story of farm boy Nemorino and his love for the well-to-do Adina, L’Elisir’s depiction of the feelings that alcohol can release and the chaos it can beget is as apropos today as it was when written or in the 1950s-era of its staging.
The marketing of love continues to this day, says Mr. Grabarkowitz, as does the disappointment the heart feels when it doesn’t get what it truly wants. Featuring a small cast of relatively young performers, many of whom are in their 20s, NJOT’s L’Elisir will offer audience members an intimate look at five different takes on love, he says.
Finally, a double bill will feature a production of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi (the opera debuted in 1918), followed by the East Coast orchestral premiere of the 1996 sequel by Michael Ching, Buoso’s Ghost.
There was no question when it came to selecting Steven Condy to play the role of Schicchi in the double bill, Mr. Altman said, having performed with the talented Mr. Condy at Wolftrap Opera Company in Vienna, Va.
"He’s perfect," Mr. Altman says. "He is Schicchi. He’s a consummate musician and performer. He has an uncanny ability to bring to life comic characters."
The upcoming production of Gianni Schicchi will mark Mr. Condy’s fifth time playing the less-than-moral but overwhelmingly likable character, based on a character in Dante’s Inferno.
"It’s complicated because the original description from Dante’s ‘Inferno’ described (Schicchi) as somebody who would actually wind up in hell," Mr. Condy says. "The complication is he’s done something bad but for good intentions. He’s a very fun character."
Playing Schicchi for the NJOT SummerFest production is made even more fun, Mr. Condy says, with the opportunity to continue to develop the character throughout Buoso’s Ghost, a production he’s never before performed. Although the piece is a contemporary work, it is set in the same time and place 1299 in Florence, Italy and the music itself often elaborates on themes found throughout the Puccini original, he says.
The two operas work together to weave the comedic tale of the fate of Buoso Donati’s fortune at the hands of his manipulative and money-hungry relatives. Seeking the help of the lowly Schicchi who only agrees to assist in the plot when begged by his daughter to help her lover’s family using the manipulative song, "O mio babino caro" the family aims to secure the money Buoso left to a monastery in his will.
Beyond the operas and the masterclasses, NJOT’s SummerFest will feature free outdoor concerts in Pettoranello Gardens June 30 and July 1 as well as two concerts of operatic selections at the Berlind.
"I think our format of free concerts in outdoor venues and presenting some lesser-known gems in a mix is both an interesting format and educational," says Mr. Altman. "The idea behind SummerFest is that a festival of opera really needs to include more than one production, more than one facet of the opera."
New Jersey Opera Theatre’s SummerFest Musical Theatre Under the Stars Concerts
will be held in Pettoranello Gardens, Mountain Avenue, Princeton, June 30-July
1, 8:30 p.m. Free admission. The remaining programs will be performed on the Berlind
Stage of McCarter Theatre, 91 University Place, Princeton. Performances: Cosi
fan tutte, July 7, 22, 8 p.m., July 9, 2 p.m., July 13, 7:30 p.m. Tickets cost
$42-$49. L’Elisir d’Amore, July 8, 14 8 p.m., July 16, 2 p.m., July 20,
7:30 p.m. Tickets cost $42-$49. Double Bill: Gianni Schicchi and Buoso’s
Ghost, July 15, 21, 8 p.m., July 23, 2 p.m. Tickets cost $42-$49. Concert:
Mozart and Friends, July 15, 2 p.m. Tickets cost $12-$16. Concert: Puccini,
Verdi and Friends, July 22, 2 p.m. Tickets cost $12-$16. Pre-performance lectures:
6:45 p.m. July 7, 8 and 15, free for those who have tickets to that night’s performance.
For information, call McCarter Theatre ticket office at (609) 258-2787 or NJOT
at (609) 799-7700. NJOT on the Web: www.njot.org.
McCarter Theatre on the Web: www.mccarter.org