Opera San Jose / Рецензии

There’s a moment during Opera San Jose’s sparkling new production of “Die Fledermaus” when this musical farce goes brilliantly, nuttily, over the top. It’s at the end of the second act, when all the principals on stage — friends and lovers, strivers and cheaters — are tipsy with champagne. They’re waltzing about, falling into one another’s arms, forgetting their rivalries — and suddenly form a conga line, circling the ballroom. It’s madness in old Vienna. This can’t be what Johann Strauss II, the “Waltz King,” intended. But his operetta — or opera or musical comedy or whatever you choose to call it — has proven endlessly update-able for 140 years. It’s a work that’s pliable and magical, about infidelities that give way to felicity and fraternity — and Opera San Jose has captured the magic in this production, which opened Saturday at the California Theatre. It’s as if the company is playing Tinker Bell, sprinkling all of us with fairy dust.

The last two one-acts of Puccini's 1918 Il Trittico make an effective combination: a tragic opera about death, followed by an hilarious opera about death (a wound followed by a salve for the wound). This particular twosome also gave stage director Lorna Haywood a chance to show some range: a tasteful, carefully choreographed Angelica (the black and white of the nuns operating almost as elements of a canvas), followed by the barely contained riot of Schicchi.

Stubb, Flask, Daggoo, Gardiner shored up the cast with ample and forthright performances, along with the Chorus, under the leadership of Christopher James Ray.