Gounod's Romeo Et Juliette at San Diego Opera (13 March 2010)

Twelve years is a long time to wait between stagings of Romeo et Juliette, Charles Gounod's melodically gorgeous operatic setting of that most famous of Shakespeare play. Nevertheless the San Diego Opera's 4 performances run of this show kicked off to a mostly good start on Saturday night at the San Diego Civic Theater, where it was extremely warmly received by the opera audiences.

The story, of course, concerns the ill-fated forbidden love between the young heir and heiress of adversarial Montague and Capulet clans of Verona. Romeo Montague (Stephen Costello) crashes the Capulets' masked ball where he meets Juliette Capulet (Costello's real life wife, Ailyn Perez). They immediately falls mutually in love. The couple, with the aid of her nurse maid Gertrude (Susanna Guzman) and friar Laurence (Kevin Langan), secretly marry, though their marital bliss proves short lived when Romeo's imprudent young page, Stephano (Sarah Castle) starts a fight with the Capulets with his silly and decidedly unneighborly provocative song. Tybalt (Joel Sorensen) of the Capulet scores a duel with Mercutio (David Adam Moore), Romeo's best friend, and the blood letting started in the scene doesn't end until the final note of the opera.

This staging is traditionally set using the beautiful and functional set and costumes from Utah Opera. It provides ample room for the characters to move around while nicely fit the big-ish Civic Theater stage. The cast, chorus, and supernumeraries were aptly placed and directed. Everybody showed up on opening night looking at home on the stage, which surely bodes well for Cynthia Stokes' directorial debut at the San Diego Opera. I thought Costello's big-voiced Romeo could afford to not face the stage front so much so that his Romeo would be searching for Juliette somewhere on the balcony during his Act II romance, Ah! leve-toi, soliel!, though I'm not sure if that is Ms. Stokes' initiative.

The stars of this show were obviously the youthful Costello and Perez, though they were decidedly not perfect. Their onstage chemistry was palpable and very convincing and their duets were beautifully delivered. Mr. Costello's voice is one many tenors may be envious of; handsomely masculine in its timbre and beautifully controlled through out the range. His ruggedly choppy manhandling of the sung phrases would have been less unpleasing, however, had he not also overindulged on the habit of holding every held high notes for nearly a bar too long all night long. After the first indecently held high note I was dutifully impressed with his virulent voice. After the second one just a few minutes later, I was assured that high notes are slices of Black Forest cake for him... and hoped that he had now got the urge to show off out of his system. After the third overly extended held high note, what admiration I had for his vocal artistry was rapidly turning into irritation. After the fourth 'watch me!' held high note, I no longer had any trace of sympathy left for his 'Romeo'. After the fifth one, I was actually miffed that Mercutio had bitten the dust instead of this @!#$@! (excuse my French)... You get the picture... It was especially maddening considering how the man had shown that he could do lyrically beautiful soft singing when he wanted to (in the 2nd act scene after the big balcony air).

Quite on the opposite end of the spectrum was Ailyn Perez's character-first theatrical and musical portrayal of young Juliette. She really is a beautiful singing actress to watch, though she had quite a problem controlling her dynamic. Whenever she ventured to the top of the staff and higher the voice became overly loud to the point of stridency, and her piano singing was at times underprojected nearly to the point of becoming inaudible (and I was sitting at the center-back of the orchestra section!). When she got to sing for extended stretches in the middle register, though, the voice was quite pleasant and delightfully artistically used. Her Juliette actually shows maturation as the night rolled on and it was very easy to empathize with her shock at the demise of her lover.

The supporting cast ranged from fine to very good. Joel Sorensen was a bit tentative as Tybalt, but then it would be hard to not vocally suffer a bit when one has to sing while also convincingly fences with two much bigger men on the stage. Susanna Guzman proves herself again as a versatile actress, though her voice was not very pleasant to hear. Kevin Langan had the right pleasingly authoritative vocal gravitas as Friar Laurence while David Adam Moore was superbly dashing and fittingly mercurial as Mercutio. New Zealander Sarah Castle made more than the most of her short role as the delightfully boyish Stephano.

From the pit Karen Keltner and the San Diego Symphony started off a bit slow (they weren't quite in sync with the singers) but were fully warmed up into a gorgeously French mood painter by the start of Act I Juliet's Waltz, and kept on getting better from there. The San Diego Opera Chorus sang (and acted) well as usual and are now sufficiently taken for granted by yours truly, who is content to leave well enough alone so that I can now wrap this review up while many of my readers are still awake.

But, but, before I go I really must leave a note here for those who may show up to enjoy the remaining performances of the opera at Civic Theater. Please wait until the music has stopped before applauding. This is not a through-composed work and there will be enough of a pause between the arias and the connecting sung dialogs for you to loudly appreciate the artists. It really won't kill (or even maim) to wait a few more second before letting loose with your handmade thunders. The artists won't appreciate that any less and you'll brighten the sound engineer who is trying to record these shows to broadcast on radio (104.9FM at 7PM on March 28th)'s day quite a bit.

Remaining performances of Gounod's Romeo et Juliette at the San Diego Opera:
March 16, 19, 21 (m)