Center Stage Opera brought its recent season to a triumphant conclusion Saturday evening, June 23, 2007, with a moving, lyrical production of Gounod's Romeo et Juliette at Canoga Park's Madrid Theatre. All of the company's strengths, and they are plentiful, were on display for the virtually
sold-out crowd.

In choosing to move this season to the larger professional theatre from the intimate home they lived in for their first years, CSO was taking quite a risk. Most importantly, they risked losing the wonderful organic bond that they'd built between the ensemble, the singers, the orchestra and the staging, which allowed them to bring works as complex and varied as Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor and Mozart's Cosi fan tutte to brilliant, vivid life.

But Maestro Brian Onderdonk, Music Director, together with Artistic Director Dylan F. Thomas (who provides both Set Design and Stage Direction) and especially with diva Shira Renee Thomas, used the challenges of Gounod's Shakespeare-based classic to quell any fears their loyal audience might have had. Under Onderdonk's consciously sensitive hand, the CSO Orchestra filled the Madrid with all the sound Gounod could have wished for, from the rapturous love duets of the balcony through the fatal battles in the streets to the celestial, fate-filled moments in the tomb. This was a production that gave us French romantic music at its best -- full of detailed emotion, heart-filled and never less than crystalline in its clarity.

Dylan Thomas' staging remained true to the highest Shakespearean principles, providing an Elizabethan "universal stage" which let the action leap from the violence of the duels and the pomp of the formal processions through the softest sighs of young love and the deepest heart-beats of young death with cinematic energy and alacrity.

Working together, Onderdonk and Thomas brought dramatic fire to moments like the death of the hothead Tybalt, providing a staggering beat of motionless silence as the entire on-stage ensemble and the entire orchestra literally froze, registering in horror what had happened, giving vista-like, truly tragic dimension to the inevitable consequences (the rest of the opera).

And in elucidating the nuances of Juliette's monologue/aria as she desperately prepares to take the Friar's potion (intended to save her from her father's forced marriage), as the young woman's imagination drags her from the heaven of her marriage night with Romeo through the hell of the catacombs.... Gounod's music takes full advantage of the greatest range to which a singing actress can aspire. Shira Renee Thomas and Maestro Onderdonk conspire (the word literally means "to breathe together") with both the minds of Shakespeare and Gounod to create a wonder of dramatic and lyric intensity, in which a young woman's very heart, even her soul, is bared to the audience. Bravissima indeed.

The supporting cast is as perfect as anyone could hope for. Matthew Edwardsen's Romeo is dashing and attractive, and sung with real passion and fervor. Bruce Wright brings real authority to his Capulet, while Terry Welborn finds a kind of sympathetic halo to Friar Laurent, a man at once amiable and manipulative. Both Abdiel Gonzalez and Matthew King strike strong poses of testosterone-fed swagger, pride, and anger in their respective roles as Mercutio and Tybalt, while Kimberly Sogioka, in the "trouser-role" of Romeo's young page, Stephano, almost stopped the show with her lovely vocal charms.

The company has taken advantage of this final production to announce their next season: Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore in September; a January 2008 concert of highlights from Bizet's Carmen; and Verdi's Rigoletto next June. Opera has finally arrived in the Valley and all of Southern California can rejoice.

 

-- 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.