Russ Rowland
Sara Holdren’s Grasp and Margarita-inspired trendy gown manufacturing deftly carries us throughout Goethe’s story—from Faust’s fall to Marguerite’s ascension—with sharp pacing, intelligent staging, and rakish, fun-sized new preparations. The manufacturing consists of recitative in trendy English that thunders the story ahead by a rating that may typically lack in emotional vary.
Shot by with thick lashings of contemporary sass, even whereas a lot of the music expresses the identical (typically squishy and dated) sentiments again and again with barely discernable distinction, this subtly tongue-in-cheek manufacturing demanded and acquired my sharpest consideration.
Bass-baritone John Taylor Ward as Mephistopheles stole the present in his tight crimson swimsuit and corset, an extended feather quill (for consigning one’s soul to hell) dangling suggestively out of his cap. Emanating friskiness and good cheer, his heat, wealthy voice and springy, peakockish actions put me firmly within the satan’s nook.
Between Taylor Ward and Orson Van Homosexual II’s weepy, moon-eyed Faust, we’re handled to a demi-monde buddy comedy within the first Act that sadly offers method to a drippy, moralizing romance. Happily, Rachel Kobernick as Marguerite blasted the home down with a number of the present’s solely moments of operatic frisson.
It was unlucky that this manufacturing relied so closely on singers’ appearing expertise, the restricted vary of which made for some lengthy and wood spoken scenes, although the wood appearing of her co-stars was a great foil to Eliza Bonet’s Martha, carried out as a bawdy, gum-snapping Fran Advantageous kind. Whereas the caricature is overbroad by a mile for this manufacturing, I’m at all times for feminine satyr characters, whether or not it’s Bonet’s Martha from Queens or Connie the Hormone Monstress in Massive Mouth.
Mezzo soprano AddieRose Brown as Siebel (carried out as a feminine character slightly than a trouser function) had a vivid and vibrant voice and her appearing was soulful and context-appropriate. Alex DeSocio gave a stubbornly offended Valentin and Brandon Bell introduced the ensemble collectively as Wagner, the slaphappy drunken soldier.
Russ Rowland
As on this season’s Salome at Heartbeat, there’s a through-current of urgency; Heartbeat makes a case for the miniaturizing of grand opera, by edits and avant gardism, to maintain the artform intact for future generations. As an alternative of lavish units and thunderous choruses we get shadow puppets, a paper dollhouse aglow and whirling, and broad, trendy characterizations.
Holdren’s manufacturing throws all the things in there and the quirky additions, whereas hit and miss, are so earnestly tried and so innocently introduced it’s arduous to evaluate them too harshly. Who else goes to placed on a manufacturing of Faust as an opera about poisonous masculinity? The present creators have tried very arduous to modernize Gounod and preserve our consideration and, regardless of some clumsy additions, they’re principally profitable.
