Also this issue:

Feeling the '50s
CP's theater critics go Crazy for 1812 Productions’ stellar homage to 1950s comedy.
-David Anthony Fox and Toby Zinman

Taste Treat
Kitsch and high art cohabitate at Wexler Gallery's current show.
-Susan Hagen

Dolls to Remember
-Robin Rice

Philly-Nutt-Crak-Up
-Kristina Weise

Cirque loize
-Deni Kasrel

Santa Claus is Coming Out
-Debra Auspitz

Artifacts of the Improbable
-Paul Burress

Paul Taylor Dance
-Janet Anderson

December 12-18, 2002

opera

The Consul

by Lou Camp

What can we do with Gian Carlo Menotti’s operas? Though he’s a successor to Puccini, his libretti make little sense. What to make of the suicidal motif of Magda, the main character of The Consul, in the gratuitous final scene of the opera, when she says, “I never meant to do this.” Do what? Kill herself? Stay too long at the consulate? Pay too little attention to her dead child? Many seemingly irrelevant lines are scattered throughout this and some of Menotti’s other operas, with the composer always the librettist.

Then there are those shrill endings to the arias. Some good lyrical ideas are cut off to allow a show-stopping high note. In the '50s, when we were just adjusting to the emotional excesses of Mahler, it was fashionable to regard Menotti as an unwelcome visitor at the Temple of High Art.

And yet, here he is again, collecting bravos and standing ovations at the current Curtis Opera Theatre production of The Consul. It was a fine production, as always for Curtis, with inspired singing all around, and the redoubtable Curtis orchestra alertly led by David Agler.

The Consul is really an ensemble opera, with the few parts almost equal, save for the central importance of Magda, sung on Friday night with intense, focused beauty by soprano Joslin Romphf. The production featured a revolving set for the Sorel parlor that was put to good use. The consul's office gave me chills, so aptly '50s gray-greenish and Kafka-esque in the way that officialdom never seemed to grasp -- or did it?

Menotti is a really good musician, though often derivative. We do find ourselves in Puccini Land from time to time, and he ends a few scenes with some thuds that echo Berg, just a little. But there are those melodies, and they do hang around, and come back at almost the right places. His orchestral palette is more refined than his formal sense, but above all, he is an acute man of the theater, and in that way his operas still inspire us, and we come away pleased to have heard them. Menotti (b. 1911), still with us, still composing amid heaps of scores, may yet belong in that Temple.

The Consul, Dec. 6, Haverford School, Centennial Hall