Glimmerglass Festival 2024 Dept.: Our third opera this summer was a recent work, “Elizabeth Cree,” commissioned by Opera Philadelphia in 2017 and here making its Glimmerglass debut. My review is below.
A SERIAL KILLER IS STALKING LONDON. It’s 1880, just a few years before Jack the Ripper cuts his own swath through the city. Dan Leno is a rising star in the music halls, and has been the salvation of young Lambeth Marsh Lizzie, lately escaped from an abusive mother, now a stage star in her own right. How these stories intersect is the marvel at the heart of the Glimmerglass Festival’s brilliant presentation of “Elizabeth Cree,” a recent opera by Kevin Puts and Mark Campbell.
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| Rear: John Chest, Tara Erraught, and Elizabeth Sutphen. Front: Tristan Tournaud, Evan Lazdowski, and Geoffrey Schmelzer. Photo: Brent DeLanoy/The Glimmerglass Festival |
Theater, by definition, is an unreliable medium. We’re asked to believe in the memorized words of actors placed in an artificial location presenting some manner of heightened reality. Yet we’ll respond with more emotional intensity than we give to the outside world. Add music and the pipeline to the emotions is even more intense, which is why opera is the most satisfying of the performing arts.
But it’s still unreliable. We don’t usually question that aspect, because it’s part of the pact we make with ourselves before we take our seats. But “Elizabeth Cree” will put paid to that pact.Given its 19th-century setting and fascination with mass murder, it’s reminiscent of “Sweeney Todd,” including the effect of the cube-like truck that gets rotated to offer different settings. But we’re in a vastly different musical world. Puts’s orchestra shadows the singers in a way that moves the music from mere accompaniment to the role of discrete characters. Campbell’s book, adapted from Peter Ackroyd’s 1994 novel The Trial of Elizabeth Cree, effectively toys with narrative and temporal continuity. We move from a courtroom to a music-hall stage to Scotland Yard, with the British Museum Reading Room looming ever more importantly. It’s a memory play, but instead of a glass menagerie you’re left on pins and needles.
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| Tara Erraught and Schyler Vargas | Photo: Brent DeLanoy/The Glimmerglass Festival |
In an amazing contrast to his portrayal of Frederic in “Pirates of Penzance,” also being presented here this season, Christian Mark Gibbs becomes loose-limbed, charismatic Dan Leno, keeping his family of performers together even as those ranks grow thinned. His routines, appropriate to the milieu, acknowledge the outside world – but here it’s a bit too prescient, as when he presents himself as servant to a Mr. Bluebeard and sings, “What’s going on down below, Mr. B? / Meaning below the chateau, Mr. B? / According to my smeller, / Something’s rotting in the cellar ... ”
The music takes on a music-hall bounce when needed, but there’s a consistency of harmonic and instrumental language throughout, all underpinning the ominous nature of this saga. Arpeggios in the piano; flutters in the flute; a low drone that gives way to choppy ostinato.
Scotland Yard’s Inspector Kildare is going to crack this case and make a name for himself, but there’s a bit of the Clouseau about him as he pursues his suspects – all centered around that Reading Room. Schyler Vargas sings the role with the wide-eyed straightforwardness that makes for a convincing comic character. And he has to: He’s up against the likes of Karl Marx (Evan Lazdowski), a Reading-Room habitue at the time, who strides in with that impossible beard.
Elizabeth is infatuated with the theater, beginning by spending her last pennies to sit in “the gods” to enjoy a show, soon becoming part of the performing family, rising from prompter to performer when she offers to go on for the soubrette. “All for the sake of dear father,” she sings, “Resting in Heaven above, / I mind that I’m good, / And do as I should, / Guided by fatherly love.”
This innocence is reinforced by the company, where cries of “higher ground” silence any off-color chatter within Elizabeth’s hearing.
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| Christian Mark Gibbs and Tara Erraught. Photo by Brent DeLanoy/The Glimmerglass Festival |
John Cree is a critic and playwright, always an untrustworthy combination. John Chest portrays him with admirable rectitude, a man on the brink of his own success but with his own devil to struggle against.
With so much butchery intruding from without, it’s a relief to return to the music hall. Except that Leno is inspired to put Elizabeth into a macabre routine celebrating dismemberment, complete with flying costume pieces. (Kudos to costume designer Amanda Seymour.) But even Dan Leno is summoned for questioning, prompting his melancholy number “O Woeful World.” “You were good for a laugh,” it finishes. “Always good for a laugh.”
To tell you more would be to burden you with too much misdirection. This is, after all, a mystery. Good luck in solving it. It runs a mere 100 minutes, performed without intermission. It doesn’t need it. Your attention will never flag. The ingenious set was designed by Edward Morris and lighted by Kate Ashton. The versatile costumes were by Amanda Seymour.
The best stage direction melts into invisibility as the story and music and characters take over, which is all the more reason to celebrate the work of Alison Moritz. And the exceptional (as always) Glimmerglass Orchestra is conducted, for this opera, by Kelly Kuo. It’s virtuoso work all around, and it has given us a work that I hope will take its rightful place as an opera classic. Performances continue through August 20.
Elizabeth Cree
Music by Kevin Puts
Libretto by Mark Campbell
Based on “The Trial of Elizabeth Cree” by Peter Ackroyd
Kelly Kuo, conductor
Alison Moritz, director
The Glimmerglass Festival, July 28
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