Review: L'Elisir d'Amore"L’Elisir d’Amore: Village comedy updated"Trenton Times (Anita Donovan) New Jersey Opera Theater continues its summer comic opera series, Opera Fest 2006, with an updated version of Gaetano Donizetti’s delightfully silly L’Elisir d’Amore (The Elixir of Love) at McCarter’s Berlind Theatre in Princeton.... Adina, a village heiress now transformed to business mogul, is in love with love, and longs to be in a dramatic relationship like Tristan and Isolde. Alas, she asks her friends, where can that magical elixir that makes one fall helplessly in love be found. She sings “Delle crudele Isotta,” the story of Tristan and Isolde’s “love potion.” Local lad Nemorino is panting after her and sings "Quanto e bella” (“How beautiful she is”), but his sweet, honest nature is not what Adina is looking for. When Sgt. Belcore, an arrogant military officer, comes to town with his recruiters, she catches his eye and he soon proposes. Nemorino, desperate to forestall Adina’s marriage to Belcore, resorts to buying a love potion from a snake-oil salesman, Dulcamara, and waits for the magic liquor to make him irresistible to Adina. Unfortunately, the potion is wine and merely makes him very drunk. Dulcamara, sympathetic to the young suitor, circulates a rumor about Nemorino that works better than the potion; he lets it be know that the young man’s uncle has left him a fortune. Soon al the village girls are flocking around Nemorino, and Adina is stunned to find he appears to have forgotten her. Once she is no longer the object of his desire, she realizes she loves him. All turns out well, of course, or it wouldn’t be a comedy. Corinne Brier is a charming Adina, with an elegant lyric soprano.... Michael Fabiano, a veteran of several roles at Philadelphia’s Academy of Vocal Arts, is a fine lyric tenor.... Best of the cast is Stephanos Tsirakoglou as Dulcamara, who somehow manages to project the original intention of this tongue-in-cheek romance and send us off with village wisdom that is as good today as it was in 1832. |
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