Review One:
The Crucible, adapted by composer Robert Ward and librettist Bernard Stambler in 1961 from Arthur Miller’s play, may be one of the most musically and dramatically charged contemporary operas and probably deserves far more performances than it receives. But to watch Dicapo Opera’s production is to catch the work’s potential and not quite the full effect.
Miller’s familiar story of the young girl who cried witch, prompting the Salem trials, lends itself naturally to music, and Ward does it justice. Lyrical lines, lush textures, and a heavily tonal score lend accessibility, while some unexpected rhythms and orchestration choices maintain interest and, where necessary, weirdness. Conductor Pacien Mazzagatti leads with intelligence and authority, effortlessly pulling off difficult passages and culling a clean, brilliant sound from the orchestra.
John Proctor, husband of the accused Elizabeth Proctor and one-time lover of Abigail Williams, can easily be imagined as a burly, tragic baritone, and Elizabeth, ever reasonable, a stable mezzo-soprano. Ward’s conceptions are fitting, but the music is often weighty, making vocal power a paramount concern. In this regard, Zeffin Quinn Hollis meets the role’s challenges, but otherwise he is stiff and oddly unimposing. As Elizabeth, Lisa Chavez displays a rich, plangent voice and strong connection to the music.
Abigail Williams and Mary Warren are operatic divas in the intense, mad-scene tradition. Ward takes an unusual tack in the vocal writing — instead of casting hysteria in the hyperfeminine upper limits as is typical, he relies heavily on the lower reaches, down to the chest voice. Instead of shrill and pathetic, he gets eerie and husky, made even stranger by leaps back up to the traditional soprano realm. The question of whether or not the young women are possessed gains all the more potency.
The performances of these two roles are superb. As Abigail, Marie-Adeline Henry shows off a deep, full-bodied voice with the earthiness of a contralto and a soprano’s range. She dominates the large cast, which is essential to her part but no small accomplishment. Lynne Abeles’ Mary Warren is spellbinding in her bug-eyed fear and desperation. Abeles also sings assuredly, her vocal control all the more impressive for her theatrical abandon.
The production itself seems to hold back its singers. A modern take casts both stage and characters all in black and white — a black stage with varying levels for Rev. Samuel Parris’ house, white sheets hung from a clothesline for John and Elizabeth Proctor’s first scene, long black dresses and pants with stark white faces for all. A coolness sets in, visually striking and appropriate for the Puritan ethic but occasionally taken too far by director Robert Alföldi and the cast.
Throughout, Elizabeth’s hard exterior is exaggerated to the point that it alienates the audience, not just John, and John’s temper and Abigail’s rebellious sexuality are underplayed. Also, the women believed to be possessed by the devil could be portrayed more creatively than through an Exorcist-style crab walk. In ensemble scenes, however, Alföldi’s talent shows through, particularly during Abigail’s initial “conversion,” the trial, and John and Elizabeth’s wrenching final moments.
Supporting performances range from passable character singing to glimpses of radiance that make one wish to have seen more, namely those from tenor David Gagnon as Parris and soprano Nicole Farbes-Lyons as Tituba.
Review Two:
In the 1950s and ’60s, long before opera composers began trawling the evening news, horror films, television talk shows and even spam e-mail messages for their subjects, quite a few looked to recent plays for inspiration. That was a time when serious drama was plentiful, before playwrights began recycling film comedies for the stage or staking their reputations on effects-laden high-tech extravaganzas.
“The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s searing play about the 1692 Salem witch trials — an allegory about Senator Joseph R. McCarthy and anti-Communist witch hunts — was only eight years old when Robert Ward completed his Pulitzer Prize-winning operatic setting, in 1961. And with the Kennedy era just dawning (brief as that dawn turned out to be), the McCarthy era was still fresh in the national memory.
The Dicapo Opera Theater’s spare but powerful revival of Mr. Ward’s score, which opened on Thursday evening, was enough to make you nostalgic for that fleeting moment when new theater and new opera were socially relevant and could make common cause. It remains a powerful work. The McCarthy hearings may be nearly six decades behind us, but orthodoxies of all kinds continue to be corrosive.
Mr. Ward’s work, with a libretto by Bernard Stambler, requires a large cast of townswomen, their husbands, a couple of preachers, a slave and a judge, as well as the young girls who, with a variety of unhealthy motives, denounce the women as witches. It is, mostly, an ensemble opera: the real beauty, tension and drama are found in crowded scenes, where characters with conflicting agendas create a rich, fast-moving vocal fabric. Even in the second act, a long confrontation between John Proctor and Abigail Williams, his former mistress and his wife’s accuser, the solo writing for the characters is more like an expansive duet than a series of arias.
Throughout, Mr. Ward’s orchestration is vivid, rhythmically vital and melodically eclectic, with folkish vocal settings intertwined with a gently angular modernism. Pacien Mazzagatti’s conducting mined these characteristics astutely.
Robert Alfoldi’s production, with its minimal sets by John Farrell and Puritanically colorless costumes by Sandor Daroczi, accomplishes much with little. The symbolism of the shallow pits in which much of the action takes place is clear enough, and white face paint gives the townspeople a ghoulish look: the accusers, the accused and the judges are all spiritually dead.
The singing was uniformly strong, with Zeffin Quinn Hollis and Lisa Chavez working in tandem as a pained, sympathetic John and Elizabeth Proctor; Marie-Adeline Henry as a strikingly powerful Abigail, more misguided than malevolent; and Katherine Keyes as a rich-voiced Rebecca Nurse, the moral pillar of the piece.
Michael Bracegirdle was a magnificently imperious Judge Danforth, and in smaller roles, Lynne Abeles (as Mary Warren), Matthew Lau (Rev. Hale), Nicole Farbes-Lyons (Tituba) and David Gagnon (Rev. Parris) contributed ably to Mr. Ward’s intense mosaic.