SANTA CRUZ - "Elixir of Love" is a blessed opera:  it can serve as
the perfect vehicle for the greatest voices and it has enough charm,
entertainment value and infectious, memorable music to survive most school
and community-theater performances.  But here, at the UC Santa Cruz Music
Department production on Sunday, there was no question of just making do -
the singers and musicians of the department put on a fine show, sustained
throughout, in the school's splendid still-new Music Center Recital Hall.
(Can't they find a donor to change the name to something snappy?).  Besides
all those (early) Twenty-somethings, credit belonged to the slightly older
faculty husband-and-wife team of Brian Staufenbiel (stage director and
voice coach) and Nicole Paiement (music director and conductor).  But,
before listing their accomplishments, I cannot wait to rake them over the
coals about one of the silliest things I have seen in decades of being an
opera nut.  The performance began in Italian, as one would expect, with
excellent, clearly-projected English supertitles - not at all the usual
tiny letters floating in a blue haze - in Miriam Ellis's fine translation.
The young singers' Italian was clear enough, and all was well.

But then, during the first recitative, the language on stage turned
to English - and the supertitles continued.  Arias and duets went on it
Italian, dialogues switched to English, and naturally every time there was
a change, the audience noticed, interrupting attention to the action and
music.  And then, the truly silly part:  mixing Italian and English, some
arias (all of Dulcamara's, if memory serves) in English, some dialogue in
Italian instead of the expected English, and the tenor singing one line in
English, the chorus repeating in Italian.  That's dumb and dumber, without
any possible rationalization - performers and the audience were perfectly
happy with the Italian.  Don't they teach the director's first rule in
music departments anymore? "Do no harm," dammit.

Still, besides that little stepping into a wrong Concept, all was well,
even Staufenbiel's gratuitous switching of the action to a Santa Cruz-like
seaside town.  The chorus (singing with verve throughout) cast the bait
into the orchestra pit, and that was funny.  Having Belcore (sung bravely
by Michael Tevlin) appear as a naval officer but still as a sergeant (in
Italian and English) didn't make much sense, but then this is the year of
"Pearl Harbor," in which the hero leaves New York for England in a train
to allow the heroine run alongside (which would be difficult to do with a
ship).  It's called "not paying attention to details."

There was all the attention to details you'd want in the pit, where
Paiement - a small, powerful dynamo, a physical-musical double of
TheaterWorks' wonderful Lita Libaek - presided over an excellent
performance, save for the (perhaps necessary) cautious tempi.  These unusal
student musicians didn't need to play slower to be accurate, so perhaps
this happened out of consideration for the young, inexperienced singers.
Also, this was a cast with only one truly operatic voice - Elisabeth
Cernadas' Wagnerian Gianetta - the rest being potential singers of lieders
or musicals.

The approach worked, keeping errors to a minimum, but when you sing slowly
and carefully, some (all?) of that soaring, ecstatic music changes into
d-i-c-t-i-o-n and the right notes.  This is just what happened, especially
in case of the very pretty Adina, Jessica Sandidge, who used her fine voice
to produce careful and accurate notes.  Adam McLearan, as Dulcamara, turned
"careful singing" to crystal-clear Gilbert & Sullivan diction (betrayed by
the English-on-English supertitles the only time when he went blank on a
line).

The one singer who resisted the pressure to sing notes, the one who kept
singing the music - bless his heart - was Robert Kinar, the gawky, properly
awkward Nemorino.  Without a big voice or secure high notes (near-falsetto
and rarely from the chest), Kinar SANG engagingly, sincerely, impressively,
believably.  "L'Elisir" really needs that - all those references to
"Tristan" mean something:  there is infinitely less anguish in Donizetti
than in Wagner, but the same going-over-the-top in passion, in music.  For
a very young singer, possessing a limited instrument, Kinar did excellently
well in meeting that essential, difficult standard.

There were two casts for the production's five performances.  In cast A,
the current head of the music department, David Cope, played the Notary.
In cast B, performing the Sunday matinee, the role was taken by the
incoming chairman, Anatole Leikin.

Janos Gereben/SF, CA
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