'L'Elisir d'Amore' is a potent mix of musical and theatrical delights
PITTSFIELD -- Donizetti's ''L'Elisir d'Amore" (''The Elixir of Love") may present a dubious moral: All you have to do to make a woman fall for you is join the army and get drunk. Nevertheless, Donizetti's prodigiously melodious comedy has been entertaining operagoers for 173 years, and Berkshire Opera Company's production Thursday night was a delight. For 14 seasons, artistic director Joel Revzen has maintained a high musical standard, but the theatrical dimension has often been compromised by low budgets and inferior imagination. This ''L'Elisir" is very likely the best-balanced production in the company's history.
Director Sam Helfrich sets the story in America's heartland some time ago. Andromache Chalfant's charming primary-color set could easily serve for ''Oklahoma!": The barn is red, the hay yellow, the silo blue. The wealthy Adina owns a chicken farm; a huge painting of a rooster adorns her silo. Jennifer R. Halpern's amusing costumes and the witty lighting of Thom Weaver pick up on these colors and motifs. The men wear brown Carhartt coveralls until they become soldiers dressed in camouflage; Adina's spectacular wedding dress is the color of her silo, and it has the same rooster emblazoned on it.
Adina is soprano Sari Gruber, who sang with the company at the start of her career and now is its first lady; her husband is Berkshire Opera's new executive director, and Massachusetts is the home base for her wide-ranging career. She's still young enough to look good in tight riding pants and high boots, and once she got past one early high note that didn't come out the way she wanted it to, she delivered the coloratura flourishes with accuracy, musicality, and spirit, if not invariably with the sweetest tone. She has a warm and playful stage presence, too.
Tenor John Bellemer entered into playing the lovelorn Nemorino, the poor village nincompoop, with relish, but he was also touching in his singleminded devotion to Adina. His voice is agile, and he sang the opera's hit tune, ''Una furtiva lagrima," securely and sensitively, if loudly. When Nemorino becomes a rich man after his sick uncle dies, he sports a Texas-size belt buckle with a chicken on it.
Dulcamara, the quack doctor who sells poor Nemorino the elixir of love (Bordeaux), is played by bass baritone Steven Condy, costumed as a television evangelist working out of a lavender funeral parlor. He was glibly fluent in all the patter and threw in a high B-flat, something you will never hear another Dulcamara do. Baritone Troy Cook came close to stealing the show as the fatuous Sergeant Belcore, who's as much in love with himself in uniform as he is with Adina, and he lobbed an impressive string of ringing high notes into the auditorium. Boston soprano Laura Choi Stuart sang her few lines pertly.
The chorus had fun, and the excellent little orchestra played well for conductor Kathleen Kelly, an assistant conductor, coach, and prompter for the Metropolitan Opera. It was reportedly announced at a pre-performance dinner honoring Revzen that she will be his successor. She's a good musician who knows every note and word and commands the style. She worked more effectively as an accompanist than as a leader, especially in the languid first act, but she perked up in the second act, and ''L'Elisir d'Amore" turned into as much fun as it's supposed to be.
