Star-Crossed

THE WORLD OF OPERA taught us that when a couple falls into a duet, they are in some way bonding. Usually it’s love. Sometimes it’s hate. It’s a powerful device that now informs all manner of musical theater. But when you’re looking for powerful examples of the power of duet, go to Charles Gounod. He packed four of them in his “Roméo et Juliette.”

Duke Kim and Magdalena Kuźma
Photo: Evan Zimmerman/
The Glimmerglass Festival

He was driven by desperation. Gounod’s “Faust” was a huge success, but he followed it with three flops. “Roméo et Juliette,” which premiered in 1867, turned it all around for him, and when you hear these duets in the current Glimmerglass Festival production, you’ll be just as enthusiastic as those Théâtre Lyrique audiences were in Paris way back then.

You need authoritative voices that convey this sudden, time-stopping passion, and that first duet, which begins with Romeo sighing about his “adorable angel,” is something of a warm-up piece. The couple is just getting to know one another, as yet unaware that their families are caught in that wearisome feud. Duke Kim and Magdalena Kuźma engage in a childlike back-and-forth. We’ve already heard each of their voices in solo spots, but it’s here, as their voices twine and meld, that we are treated to the richness of a pair of voices – their voices – in harmony. A different approach is required of the singers, each of whom must tune in to the other to make the blend become something approaching a single voice without losing individual identity.

Their voices are blended, but their characters don’t fully surrender to this love-match until duet number two, “Ô nuit divine.” It’s the balcony scene. As the lovers grow closer, so too do their voices. Kuźma and Kim share a youthful freshness in their voices, which quickly grows into something more triumphant and frantic in duet three, as they awaken from their singular night of passion and contemplate the approaching dawn. Romeo has been ordered into exile, so the lark would signal his departure ... but Juliet assures him it’s only the nightingale he hears. (This avian emphasis also is realized in the opera’s opening party scene, where costume designer Loren Shaw has Juliet dressed as a bluebird.)

Their harmony was close in the bedroom scene, but their final duet, at Juliet’s tomb, has their grief sending them into unison. Unlike Shakespeare’s more dreadful finale, Juliet awakens in time to sing with her dying beloved, and it tears your heart out, even though you knew this was coming.

Hayden Smith and Oliver Zeroauli
Photo: Evan Zimmerman/
The Glimmerglass Festival

Director Simon Godwin is artistic director of the Washington DC-based Shakespeare Theatre Company; he has been associate director of the National Theatre of London and many other companies, but this is his first time directing an opera. He chose to set this production in a contemporary time, reflected in costumes that reflected the variety of what we now wear – especially in the masquerade ball that opens the opera.

Gounod gives us a prologue very reminiscent in manner of the one Berlioz wrote a quarter-century earlier for his choral symphony on the same topic – but there’s otherwise no comparing the two. Gounod was a true grand opera composer. Berlioz (whose music I adore) was out of his mind.

We see Tybalt (Hayden Smith) at the top of the show and the top of the stage, appropriately menacing in a death’s-head costume with skeletal hands, establishing from the start the doomed nature of our protagonists and their families. He and his buddy Paris (Jonathan Patton) were frat-boy bullies, their angry sense of place jarred by the arrival of some Montagues – particularly Olivier Zerouali as Mercutio. It’s worth noting that the three are members of the Festival’s Young Artists program, offering singers generally indistinguishable from the Guest Artists. And Zerouali made the most of his scene-stealing Queen Mab aria.

Another brilliant moment goes to Stephano, Romeo’s page, created for the opera and typically given to a mezzo. We’re in Scene Two of Act Three (just after intermission), and Lisa Marie Rogali sang and danced “Que fais-tu,” egging on the nearby Capulets, with terrific energy and excellent dance moves (thank choreographer Jonathan Goddard).

Magdalena Kuźma, Stefano de Peppo,
and Meredith Arwady; Photo: Evan
Zimmerman/The Glimmerglass Festival

Other standouts in the cast are Meredith Arwady – who is so terrific in the concurrent “Candide” – as Gertrude, Juliet’s nurse, a lively presence whenever she’s onstage, but also a key part of such ensemble work as the quartet “Ô pur bonheur!,” sung after the titular couple are married by  Friar Laurence (Sergio Martinez, himself another key player). And Stefano de Peppo is here as Count Capulet, showing his skill at drama as easily as he showed his comedic chops in the concurrent “La bohème.”

Gounod’s skill goes beyond those duets, of course, skillfully illuminating an ever-shifting undercurrent of emotion. There’s the gaiety of the opening-scene party that lapses into fury as the interlopers are discovered; there’s the fight scene in Act Three, where the sparring and eventual deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt are realized as much in the music as in what’s sung.

There are solos too, of course. Romeo’s “Ah! lève-toi, soleil!” was stunningly sung by Kim, and, of course, there’s Juliet’s waltz, “Je veux vivre,” in which Kuźma effectively shaded her joy with some foreboding.

Dan Soule’s set consisted of some large, ornate pieces that easily shifted to reconfigure the setting, and Robert Wierzel’s lighting helped adapt each look of the stage to the scene’s emotional pitch, sending us from the warm joy of Friar Laurence’s cell to the starkness of the tomb with a few shifts of color.  

As well as you think you know the play, this opera elucidates the wonder of youthful love and the futility of loving in the face of intractable differences. And this production fully realizes everything the opera has to offer. This production runs through August 19. More info at glimmerglass.org.

Roméo et Juliette
Music by Charles Gounod
Libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré
Conducted by Joseph Colaneri
Directed by Simon Godwin
The Glimmerglass Festival, July 17