OPERA REVIEW: 'Acis and Galatea'
Bold staging supported with beautiful music

by Peter Jacobi
H-T reviewer
February 9, 2007

One had to buy into the concept that G. F. Handel’s little pastoral opera or masque, “Acis and Galatea,” works as fodder for a make-believe circus. From the reaction of the audience Wednesday evening in the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, a slew of people did, including at least some of the children in attendance that I could see from my vantage point.

The Bloomington-based young director, Tim Nelson, had brought his suburban Washington, D.C., based American Opera Theater to exhibit what he promoted as “the world’s first circus opera,” a production that reportedly gained great favor during a six-performance run in Baltimore and that travels on to Indianapolis, Chicago and Milwaukee.

It was designed, he said, to be family friendly. And that, on experiencing, it seemed to be, with the musical aspects done in admirable early music fashion, potentially satisfying for any serious devotee of Handel, but with the busy staging experimentally quite a bit more out there. The approach is debatable and yet most likely attractive to a novice listener.

The original story, based on Greek mythology, was sustained: of the budding love between the shepherd Acis and the sea nymph Galatea and of the monster Polyphemus, whose jealousy causes him to slay Acis. Abiding love comes to a partial rescue, empowering Galatea to transform her dear shepherd into an eternal fountain.

All this has been recast into a circus milieu. Acis is a mime, silent in speech but plenty vocal when singing, beautifully so, thanks to a fine, IU-trained tenor, Aaron Sheehan. Galatea becomes a trapeze artist, which agile soprano Rebecca Duren most assuredly turned out to be, swinging about on bright red cloth streamers serving as ropes and performing one of her arias in part upside down.

Polyphemus is the sad faced clown, here the sumptuously bass-voiced Sumner Thompson. Two other shepherds fill out the cast, but one as ringmaster in director Nelson’s theatrical invention (tenor Tony Boutte), the other masquerading as a dancing bear (mezzo Kristen Dubenion-Smith).

As often done traditionally, the five soloists doubled as the chorus, a tad strangely so in one case, when Sheehan as the corpse Acis continued to warble away. But all that helped to lighten the spirit of things. The pace of the action throughout the evening was swift, occasionally frantic, at times — for this reviewer — distracting. But one could always, as he then did, close eyes and simply listen to the lovely music, enhanced by an excellent eight-member instrumental ensemble.

Appropriately, when death and transfiguration occur in the opera, the circus antics slowed and stopped, giving those moments their due.

Nelson and harpsichordist Adam Pearl shared the musical direction. The costumes were elaborate; the set, little more than props and yet effective; the lighting, evocative.

I can’t honestly say I accepted all the dramatic choices, but when the evening was done, I walked away contentedly, fully aware also that the audience had cheered this small-scaled yet bold “Acis and Galatea.”