Article: Summer Season 2008"Filling Up the House"Asbury Park Press (Carlton Wilkinson) ONE OF THE advantages of smaller opera companies is having full-scale works and professionally huge voices performing in halls small enough to feel the sound rumble in your breastbone no matter were you're sitting. The catch is, such performances are typically — well, But with Princeton-based Opera New Jersey, we can welcome without reservation. There's no catch. The company presents what amounts to mini-Met performances in a comfortably cute doll house of a theater small enough to be nearly filled by an average-sized wedding. Performers, conductors, set designers are all drawn from the best of the new breed of professionals. Succeed or fail, these performances will never be judged amateurish. The hall itself is the relatively new Berlind Theatre in the basement of Princeton's McCarter Theatre. The seats are standard theater style, but the row letters only go to up to Q. Seventeen rows total. All the seats would fit into a standard theater's orchestra seating. Opera New Jersey's 2008 summer season — the centerpiece of its year-round and statewide schedule of events — begins July 11 and continues through the next three weeks, cramming in more than a dozen performances of three classic works, Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata, Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow and Rossini's Cinderella. Each of these operas has sellout potential, and Opera New Jersey did sell out its summer performances last year. Performing the lead roles in La Traviata will be the fiery Cuba-born soprano Elizabeth Caballero as Violetta and Michael Fabiano opposite her as Alfredo. Leah Wool, a mezzo-soprano with the Metropolitan Opera, performs as Angelina with Puerto Rican tenor Javier Abreu as Ramiro in Cinderella. In The Merry Widow, Jennifer Aylmer, another Met alum, stars as Hanna opposite Brian Jagde as Count Danilo Danilovitch. |
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