by Daniel Hathaway
Baldwin Wallace Opera Theater became only the fourth company — and the first collegiate one — to stage Kamala Sankaram and Jerre Dye’s provocative Taking Up Serpents when the show opened at the Kleist Center for Theater and Drama in Berea on February 2.
Masterfully directed by Scott Skiba with a talented student cast and a 13-piece professional chamber ensemble tightly conducted by Dean Buck, the one-act, 80-minute piece commissioned by Washington National Opera centers around 25-year-old Kayla, the daughter of a Holiness preacher in the Deep South.
A “lost soul and a wanderer,” Kayla’s on a quest to establish her own relationship with God outside the smothering confines of a patriarchal church that handles snakes, speaks in tongues, and indulges in other questionable practices invented by Christian charismatics. [Read more…]
Puccini’s 
After losing its previous performing venue — the Masonic Auditorium having been sold — Cleveland Opera Theater has found a new home in the Maltz Performing Arts Center at CWRU. On Friday, April 27, stage director Scott Skiba and conductor Domenico Boyagian brought the tragedy of Cio Cio San, alias Madama Butterfly, to life in an elegantly simple production on the wide stage of the former temple.
With characters like Stanley Kowalski and Blanche Dubois, its setting in the French Quarter of New Orleans in the 1940s, and its subplots of sensuality, delusion, and madness, Tennessee Williams’s play A Streetcar Named Desire makes it a shoo-in for operatic treatment. Composer André Previn and librettist Philip Littell took that task on in 1995, and Cleveland Opera Theater chose their adaptation of Streetcar for its second show at the Masonic Performing Arts Center, mounting a production that was admirable for its ambition and impressive in its results. 
Steeped in desire, passion, and deceit, it’s no wonder that Tennessee Williams’ Pulitzer Prize-winning play A Streetcar Named Desire eventually found its place on the opera stage. On Friday, December 4 at 7:30 pm in Masonic Auditorium, Cleveland Opera Theater will present the Ohio premiere of composer André Previn’s and librettist Philip Littell’s 1995 opera based on Williams’ iconic play. The production will be repeated on Sunday, December 6 at 3:00 pm. (Left, Previn conducting the L.A. Philharmonic in 1986).