Tosca, Santa Fe Opera, August 8 2012

The third opera in our five-operas-in-five-days marathon in Santa Fe was Puccini’s “shabby little shocker,” Tosca. The production was, unfortunately, the least successful of the five. The theory was, presumably, that the Santa Fe Opera stage didn’t have the height required to include the dome of the church of Sant’Andrea della Valle, so instead when the audience looked at the stage, we were actually looking up at the dome: the dome was tilted way back, with its peak pointing toward the landscape behind the opera house. This meant that we were also looking up to the dome from a vantage point close to the bottom of the wall on which Cavaradossi was painting the portrait of Mary Magdalene. So the wall with the portrait was about 5° off of level, and those of us in the orchestra couldn’t see the portrait very well. But we could see it, and since the wall formed a major part of the stage, people walked on the portrait. Especially in the Te Deum that concludes the first act. The remainder of the set for the first act was conventional: the chapels to the sides of the nave were marked off by black iron bars with gold tips.

The second act, in the Palazzo Farnese, used only the front part of the stage. About 15 feet back from the edge of the stage was the wall of Scarpia’s office, dominated by a huge painting of what I was told was “The Rape of Persephone.” In front of the painting was Scarpia’s dinner table, and the door to the torture chamber was off to the right. In a bit of directorial license, Tosca did not place a crucifix on Scarpia’s body and place two candles by his head. Instead she dragged the body into the torture chamber and shut the door.

In the third act the wall of the first act church had become the top of the Castel Sant'Angelo, a structure so high that we looked down on the domes of the surrounding churches. On the left and right sides of the stage were simple brick walls. What would have been an arched window in a vertical wall served as the top of the stairway to the lower floors of the Castel. Continuing the theme of the end of the second act, in which Tosca dragged Scarpia’s body into the torture chamber, the shepherd boy who has the first words wandered into Scarpia’s office halfway through his song. He was now a janitor’s assistant, sweeping the floor. He found a drop of blood on the floor and followed the trail of blood to the torture chamber, where he found the body. He rushed off to tell an adult, and at that point the scene change to act 3 was effected by lowering the painting, again hinged at the bottom like a piano lid, to reveal the top of the Castel.

Our cast:
Floria Tosca: Amanda Echalaz
Mario Cavaradossi: Brian Jagde
Scarpia: Raymond Aceto
Spoletta: Dennis Petersen
A Sacristan: Dale Travis
Conductor: Frédéric Chaslin
Director: Stephen Barlow

Raymond Aceto’s Scarpia was the star of this show, with just about everything you could want in a Scarpia, though he lacked the concentration of pure evil so dramatically displayed in Lado Atanelli’s performance in San Francisco in 2009. His Spoletta, Dennis Petersen (our fabulous Mime in Seattle in 2009), was a bit part, but it was the finest Spoletta I’ve seen. Amanda Echalaz’s Tosca would be worth seeing again. Brian Jagde must have had an off night as Cavaradossi; a tweet from Leah Crocetto implied that he was in fine form a few days later. Not quite a beta.