Nights at the Opera

Opera is in the air again, and not a moment too soon. When we last engaged with the multi-sensory — and logistically challenging — medium, the Music Academy of the West presented a vibrant version of Don Giovanni in July. Opera Santa Barbara (OSB) to the rescue, with the first of its three productions this season, Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (“Rustic chivalry” in English), at the Lobero Theatre on Friday night, November 7, and Sunday afternoon, November 9.

Now in its 31st season and an important piece of Santa Barbara’s classical music puzzle, OSB was founded by Marilyn Gilbert and Nathan Rundlett and has been courageously run by multi-hatted director/conductor/bon vivant Kostis Protopapas for the past decade. Officially, Protopapas started out as artistic director and moved upward and outward in duties in 2017. He and the company weathered the storms of COVID and landed in a happy groove with productions at the Lobero. 

The 19th-century Cavalleria rusticana, which premiered in 1890, is a relatively compact (by opera standards) 90-minute piece, often paired with Ruggero Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci — the opening production of last year’s OSB season, and a memorable, Italian cinema-referential outing. Tragedy, jealousy, vengeance, seduction, and fateful Easter bells are ingredients in the tale of a returning soldier with a score to settle, in classic operatic fashion.

OSB’s fall season opener is a new production directed by Layna Chianakas and starring Santa Barbaran Max Potter, seen in last season’s Marriage of Figaro; Xavier Prado, the Zorro in the 2024 season; and Todd Thomas.

Mascagni’s Sicilian-set opera has snuck its way into pop culture and especially cinema, and in some lofty places, including the soundtracks of the, yes, operatic Raging Bull and The Godfather Part III. In Francis Ford Coppola’s conclusion to the Godfather trilogy, the opera was granted a critical close-up in an opera performance during the film’s final “movement.”

While the OSB company has leaned heavily on the kindness and crowd appeal of Italian opera in years past, this season’s trio of offerings make up an ideal and diverse sampler plate of the history and GPS of opera. Next up on the list is Handel’s Baroque classic Caesar and Cleopatra (Feb. 27 and Mar. 1) and the season closes with a contemporary American piece based on a very American tale, Elmer Gantry (May 1 and 3). 

An evergreen favorite in the Baroque opera canon, Caesar and Cleopatra returns to Santa Barbara by popular demand, in its abridged two-hour version, down from the original four-hour epic.

With Elmer Gantry, composer Robert Aldridge and librettist Herschel Garfein have brought Sinclair Lewis’s inherently operatic novel — made more generally popular with the 1960 film starring Burt Lancaster— to the opera stage. As a point of deserved civic and organizational pride, the opera premiered in 2007 and is receiving its California premiere here at the Lobero.

Three centuries, three operas, three ripe opportunities to bask in the presence of what opera can bring, by a company with a solid track record and will to thrive.

For more information and tickets, see operasb.org.