Longtime Center Stage star Gil Lipaz, who has performed Lucia’’s Raimondo with Center Stage Opera, as well as directing their wonderful Cosi fan tutte last year, is perfect as Dulcamara, the mountebank/dealer. His tongue out-chews either Figaro or the Modern Major-General as he sells ice to the Eskimos—that is, the “Love Elixir” (aka beer) to the love-smitten teenagers under his substitute tutelage. And while one applauds his fate (in the 1980s version, anyway), one also suspects that he’ll have talked his way out of it before the squad car reaches the precinct office.

Christina Marie Linton plays Adina’s confidante Gianetta, sort of a Madonna to Thomas’ Cyndi, with a terrific set of serpentine eighties dance moves, expressing both her music and her manipulating intentions in her second act showstopper, giving us the personification of the gossip-based control-artist. Her voice also shimmers and stalks as it guides the women’s chorus through one of the best ensemble pieces I’ve ever seen.

And while the individuals all deserve the highest praise we can heap on them, I will close this review repeating what I have insisted all along about Center Stage Opera. Their strength, from the maestro at the podium to the ushers taking tickets, is their belief in what they do. When they can come together and create the world of Donizetti for us, uniting all of their talents and intelligences and hearts, pouring the results of their hard-earned labor into this great art, there is no higher aspiration to which art can aspire than the glory and wonder of what they bring before us. We are very lucky indeed to be witness to their work.



Dr. Jim Lundstrom is a lifelong opera reviewer who wrote his doctoral dissertation on the work and theory of Richard Wagner. At age thirty he calculated that he had seen more live productions of Pucinni’s “La boheme” than he was years-old. Now approaching his sixth decade, he says keeping count has become both impossible and fortunately, irrelevant.

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Review, Page 2