At West Edge Opera:
Rinaldo as Comic-book Hero

SAN FRANCISCO—Director Keturah Stickann’s delightfully entertaining new production of Handel’s Rinaldo for West Edge Opera turns on a simple but probing observation. The opera’s libretto, drawn like so many Baroque plots from the epic poetry of Torquato Tasso, features opposing teams of Good Guys (Crusaders) and Bad Guys (Saracens). The title character is a heroic lunkhead, his opposite number is a nefarious creep, and there’s a bunch of fighting and witchcraft and babes-in-chains.

What we’ve got here, in other words, is a superhero comic-book story.

Kyle Tingzon in the title role of Handel’s Rinaldo at West Edge Opera

Armed with that basic premise, Stickann and a top-notch cast under the deft musical leadership of conductor Emily Senturia have gone to work to turn Handel’s opera into both a musical and comedic feast. The singing is splendid from top to bottom, and Senturia gives the score plenty of stateliness and vigor. There’s nothing here that would allow skeptics to start getting shirty on Handel’s behalf; the entire production is done with a palpable love for its source.

But irreverent? Absolutely. Designer Yuki Izumihara’s production is a feast of Ben Day dots and cotton candy colors, for both the costumes and the backdrops. Video projections are splattered with word balloons proclaiming “Pow!” and “Wham!,” as if the pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, like his colleague David Hockney, had taken up a sideline in operatic stage design. The words of the libretto remain intact but the supertitles have a field day; the aria “Abbrugio, avampo e fremo” (“I burn, I blaze, and I tremble”) to take just one example, is rendered as “I’m freaking out.”

Most beguiling, perhaps, is the dexterity with which Stickann matches the characters and situations to their pop-culture archetypes. Rinaldo (countertenor Kyle Tingzon, in sleek and resplendent voice) is a superhero in mask and cape, his physical heroism accompanied by a blend of cheery good will and near-complete cluelessness (in her program note, Stickann cites The Tick as the chief model, and it’s a perfect choice). As Goffredo, the Crusade leader, contralto Sara Couden is our old friend Commissioner Gordon in all but name, while baritone Efraín Solís revels in the vocal rumblings of Argante, the Saracen chieftain — which is to say, the supervillain. The fact that Almirena, the principal female love interest, is the daughter of the Commissioner Gordon figure even in the original libretto feels like a stroke of serendipity. Soprano Shawnette Sulker brought her trademark vocal incisiveness to the role, and soprano Nikki Einfeld contributed a gloriously robust and insinuating turn as the sorceress Armida.

The parallelisms go beyond individual characters, though, to embrace the entire dramatic situation. The forces of Good and Evil are equally cartoonish in both versions of the story, and the premise of Rinaldo’s military prowess isn’t far from a superhero’s physical invincibility; he spends a lot of time flexing and smooching his biceps, and there’s a funny running gag about how even the mildest physical interaction with Goffredo is painful for the older man. In the opening scene, a trio of sinuous bank robbers try to pull off a heist, only to be thwarted — first ineffectually by members of the city’s bumbling force, then decisively by Rinaldo himself. Whatever the historical realities of the Crusades may have been, this production captures perfectly the way those narratives were put to use in Baroque opera.

The other offering in West Edge’s opening weekend at the Scottish Rite Temple in Oakland was Britten’s wonderfully elusive chamber opera The Turn of the Screw. (American Apollo, Demian Geter and Lila Palmer’s opera about the painter John Singer Sargent and his model Thomas McKeller, opens Saturday to complete the company’s summer schedule.) Like the Henry James novella that serves at its source, this is a piece steeped in ambiguity and uncertainty. Are there ghosts? Are children truly innocent, or is that a fiction that adults impose? How much does anyone know about what has and hasn’t transpired in the lives of others? James, and Britten after him, refuse to answer any questions.

Rinaldo's bumbling cops:  Max van der Sterre, Devon Martirez y McFarland, and Christopher Nachtrab

The West Edge production, directed by the company’s General Director Mark Streshinsky and conducted by Music Director Jonathan Khuner, takes these themes and runs with them to a self-defeating extent. The shadows are everywhere: in Izumihara’s production design, which is all scrims and flickery projections and low-wattage lighting; in the evasive physical action devised for the characters; and even in the grayish musical atmosphere, through which only an occasional burst of instrumental color or vocal clarity can be detected.

As I say, these are more or less the colorations the opera calls for, and sometimes the effect is bracing. When Peter Quint, the demonic former valet who seems to have fatally corrupted the two young children being looked over by a new governess, first appears, tenor Alex Boyer sings from a mysterious offstage location while his face is projected on stage—a brilliantly eerie effect that makes his presence seem all the more spectral.

But too much of the action is simply steeped in obscurity, creating questions as basic as Wait, who was that? and What is she actually doing back there? The cast, led by soprano Laura Bohn in a vividly etched performance as the Governess, does what it can to shed just the right amount of light on the proceedings, but it’s hard going.

Middle photo: Nikki Einfeld as Armida; Efraín Solís as Argante

_{All photos by Cory Weaver}

Joshua Kosman is the former classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle. He writes about music and the performing arts at On a Pacific Aisle.