Arizona Opera’s Susannah – A Naive Story Dilutes an Impressive Production

Arizona Opera ended its 2006/07 season with a tightly-knit, well-tuned presentation of Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah, his best known opera that has enjoyed numerous productions since its New York City Opera debut in 1956. The work is based on the Biblical account of Susannah and her Elders from the Book of Daniel, as it appears in certain Bibles. From that account we learn the Elders, who steadfastly lust after Susannah, spy on her while she is bathing and soon realize that the young beauty will never give in to their lascivious advances, so they accuse her of fornicating with a young man. This charge is eventually proven false, and Susannah is saved from death. Floyd, using a librettist’s poetic license, simplified the storyline by relocating the bathing Susannah to an isolated community called New Hope Valley in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee. There, she is observed by her own church Elders who are repelled by her audacity to bath in a small stream which is supposed to be used for baptism.

Obviously Floyd felt very comfortable with this regional setting which is reminiscent of his own upbringing as a minister’s son and uses what he thought was a natural reaction by folks who live in such a stark rural setting to Susannah’s spontaneous and frivolous behavior. Even in the 1950s, in the United States, with the McCarthy witchhunters combing the country looking for those with perhaps the slightest connection to the Communist Party, Floyd’s characters might have appeared a tad too quick to condemn what was perceived as Susannah’s immoral conduct and now, over 50 years later, with all the dramatic and diverse social changes that have occurred in American life, the pivotal situation of the plot does seem too pat.

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U of A’s Tartuffe-A Lively Musical Romp

L to R Ken Ryals, Angeline Klein and Nathan Krueger

When Charles Roe, the artistic director of the University of Arizona’s Opera Theater looked around for an opera to produce for the school’s 2007 spring production, he decided on Kirke Mechem’s 1982 work, Tartuffe. The director had heard the opera a number of years ago and was impressed by Mechem’s varied musical score and recognized he had a good singing troupe of graduate and undergraduate students that could give the eclectic score the justice it was due. And as an extra added incentive, Roe wanted a work that would equal if not surpass his successful and moving production of Mark Adamo’s modern adaptation of Little Women which the opera theater presented last year. So Tartuffe it was, and happily for the audiences who attended, the production turned out to be quite an artistic success for the University’s opera department.

Mechem, who also wrote the libretto, pared down Jean Baptiste Moliere’s long, wordy but beautifully elocuted 17th-Century satire of religious pomposity written in verse and came up with a shorter three-act version that better accomodated his bouncy, rythmic and at times plaintive score. This way, Roe and his musical director, Adam Boyles were easily able to channel their resources to effectively meet any of the composer’s vocal challenges in order to give the production a stately professional sheen.

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U of A’s Little Women Leaves a Warm Afterglow

© University of Arizona

When Charles Roe, the voice professor and director at the University of Arizona’s Opera Department decided to mount Mark Adamo’s Little Women, a piece Roe readily admits to having fallen in love with on first hearing, he may have had some second thoughts about producing the opera but certainly not with Adamo’s lucid, lyrical arcs of tender melodies the composer dotted throughout his score. And since Adamo also wrote the text, the composer was able to connect the many threads of emotion thereby making more substantial character studies of the four young women growing into maturity during the American Civil War, than Louisa May Alcott was able to do in her very poular novel. Perhaps it was just these two artistic accomplishments that had given Roe pause, for he recognized the opera would not only need singers who could handle Adamo’s challenging vocal leaps but they needed to cope with the quick emotional changes the composer expects from his characters. Well, the director needn’t have reflected too long for he struck gold with the vocal talents he had on hand. In fact, if there was one quality that came to the forefront of this production, it was the singing. Even in roles that might be considered secondary to the principals, Meg, Amy, Beth and Jo, there was plenty of vocal strength and beauty to go around fulfilling Adamo’s intented musical warmth.
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