Menotti’s ‘The Medium’ @ Fort Worth Opera
—Wayne Lee Gay
Fort Worth Opera's sometimes tortured journey through the decades—searching for a reliable niche and recognizable identity—leads this weekend to the Rose Marine Theater, a hundred-year-old, 250-seat converted movie venue in the heart of the traditionally Latino-dominated Northside neighborhood.
A one-act opera, dwb (driving while black), is on the company’s schedule for February at the Kimbell Art Museum, with Puccini's La Bohème set for next spring at Bass Performance Hall. But for now, the company opens its 2023-24 season with an intimate production of Italian-American composer Gian Carlo Menotti's classic operatic ghost story, La Médium (The Medium). Composed in 1946, with a successful run on Broadway shortly thereafter, La Médium offers a great payoff for a company on a tight budget, giving an ensemble cast of five singers (with one silent role) plenty of opportunity to show off dramatic and vocal skills, accompanied by a chamber orchestra of fourteen.
In this production, the work also makes a timely bow to Fort Worth's Latino community, with the original English text translated smoothly and efficiently by Alejandro Magallòn and sung in Spanish. (The text is presented in surtitles in both Spanish and English during the performance.)
The plot, pure Twilight Zone, features a meaty principal role for dramatic mezzo-soprano Janara Kellerman as Madame Flora, a con artist medium who is also the abusive, alcoholic mother to Monica (soprano Cristina María Castro) and foster-parent for the mute Toby (Patrick Bilbow). Kellerman commandingly navigates the role of the ultimately vulnerable anti-heroine as she descends into paranoid madness with a combination of frightening rage and gorgeously rich tone. Likewise, soprano Castro delivers the opera's showstopper aria, "Monica's Waltz," with a clear but substantial timbre while conveying her complex situation as Flora's exploited daughter. Bilbow presents a calm pathos as the helpless target of Flora's suspicion.
In the comprimario (supporting) roles of Flora's eagerly bamboozled clients, mezzo-soprano Kaswanna Kanyinda, soprano Su Hyeon Park, and baritone Sergio Manzo successfully convey the pathos of unrelieved grief while gliding through Menotti's skillfully written and always graceful vocal lines.
Conductor David Rosenmeyer shepherds the superbly balanced orchestra neatly through the lyrical but pungent score; under director Malena Dayen, the singer-actors pick up all of Menotti's carefully laid cues. The action plays out in scene designer David McQuillen Robertson's adamantly respectable early twentieth-century parlor; Colleen Power Griffin's costumes present blandly ordinary people, except in the case of Flora, who wears hints of exotic mystery. The overall stolid bourgeois aura subtly underlines the gradually intensifying darkness and deadly psychosis of this American verismo drama.
WHEN: October 20; repeated October 21 & 22, 2023
WHERE: Rose Marine Theater, 1440 N. Main Street, Fort Worth TX
WEB: fwopera.org
