Review | Night at the Opera, Postmodern Puzzle Division 

In Santa Barbara at present, grand opera comes around only a handful of times each year, but the art form is well represented here. Opera Santa Barbara (OSB) has settled into the pattern of presenting a few operas each season at the Lobero Theatre, with generally impressive results. And there is a thankfully predictable midsummer tradition in motion, when the Music Academy of the West (MAW) shows off its impressive wares with a fully produced opera.

Once again, the operatic stars aligned last week — with performances at The Granada Theatre on Friday night and Sunday afternoon — for the MAW moment at the opera, with an important point of distinction. Whereas the repertorial choice often veers, naturally for an educational facility, to standard operatic fare, the focus this time around was a contemporary American opera, Kevin Puts’s 2017 one-act Elizabeth Cree. 

All the pieces came together beautifully, from the high and already professional caliber of singing and acting to a sparkling clean delivery from the orchestra in the pit, and opera-specific degrees of melodic lyricism and sinister storytelling intentions. Spoiler alert: Murder is involved, and not always in the degrees we expect, eventually all leading down a deviously entertaining postmodern rabbit hole.

Working with unusual themes and materials is nothing new for Puts, whose opera career highlights include winning a Pulitzer for his 2012 Silent Night and scoring a literary hit at the Met with The Hours in 2022. Here, Puts gleefully digs into what has been marketed as a “Victorian Gothic thriller,” loosely based on a true story in 19th century England, and worked into a libretto by Mark Campbell (from the Peter Ackroyd book The Trial of Elizabeth Cree).

But the frame of musical and historical reference in the work shifts from the Victorian to more modern models, including the world of Stephen Sondheim, with its musical and narrative echoes of Sondheim’s murderous satire Sweeney Todd.

The anti-heroic Elizabeth Cree (sensitively embodied in the magnetic performance of mezzo-soprano Ashlyn Brown) is an unreliable narrator in the tale. At a trial, awaiting a hanging noose, Cree slowly and sneakily reveals the sordid details of her past leading up to this moment — including life in the Music Hall culture of 19th-century England (which gives Puts a ripe chance to relish that vintage musical language). 

More tellingly, she relates the story of her complicated life with her husband (now belated husband, by her poisoning hand) John, a presumably serial murdering man (aptly and artfully realized by baritone Geoffrey Schmelzer). His suspicious character traits also include work as an aspiring playwright and, gasp, a critic. Storylines become more tangled than we expect by opera’s end.

Meeting the inherent challenge of budget and production limitations, Stage Director Louisa Muller and Scenic Designer Timothy Mackabee resourcefully steered the opera’s complex maze-like design around a vast structure filling the stage, a grandstand turned courtroom gallery and all-purpose staging armature. Sturdy and inspired singing and orchestral work, conducted by Benjamin Manis, kept the production running hot. Vocal standouts, aside from Brown and Schmelzer, included tenor Christopher Leimgruber, soprano Kate Fogg, and baritone Tyler Middleton.

Just when you thought it was safe to type cast the opera as a satisfying, lightweight-yet-sinister diversion, things get edgy, strange, occasionally dissonant and altogether more interesting in the “third act.” As the plot and ulterior character motives thicken, Puts’s musical scheme accordingly grows more complex and fascinating, to match the narrative twists. We’re left in a happy state of “what just happened?” perplexity and sated by the sense of getting our fill of grandly operatic substance.

With Elizabeth Cree, MAW has once again triumphed in its ongoing mission to bring serious — and in this case, seriously satirical — opera to what would be otherwise be a mid-summer lull.