Like many good cartoons, West Edge Opera’s Rinaldo gets off to a boffo start.
“Smack!” “Pow!” ”Whoosh!” The starburst words explode on large projection screens as a trio of thieves does battle with three tumbling Keystone-style cops. But never fear, Rinaldo (the ingratiating countertenor Kyle Tingzon) is here to save the day. Bounding onstage in a royal blue suit and cape, complete with black eye mask, his biceps are flexed for all to admire. He’s the superhero this 1711 opera by George Frideric Handel has been waiting for.
Or so it goes in a witty and wonderfully entertaining production that opened Sunday, Aug. 2, at the Oakland Scottish Rite Center.
While Baroque operas have long been fertile ground for high-concept stagings, this one by director and choreographer Keturah Stickann is choice. Not only does she mine her superhero-versus-supervillain storyboard for both comic and moving effects, Stickann also uses it to grin at the whipsaw plotting. Nothing is impossible, including instant love affairs, a conniving witch who can change her identity, and a bike-riding siren.
Handel purists with an open mind will see that Stickann and her collaborators aren’t just wringing laughs out of the opera — although there are plenty of them, by turns broad, subtle and sexy. Through elaborately ornamented da capo arias and boisterous chase scenes, love duets and fierce face-offs, the director and cast fill these cartoon figures with human dimension.
The villain Argante (baritone Efraín Solís, in burly, burr-edged voice) is both suavely sinister and cringingly stricken with lovelorn vulnerability. Tingzon’s warm, firm and agile voice projects heroic self-assurance that abandons his character when a few harmless songbirds come too close. “I’m, freaking out,” goes one of several apt liberties taken in the otherwise strict supertitle translations from the Italian libretto.
Tingzon’s heartsick Rinaldo is also achingly eloquent, bereft and alone when the sky darkens and it begins to snow.
In a deftly realized trouser role, contralto Sara Couden plays the gruff but long-suffering police chief Goffredo, a career cop with a sensitive side. Every time Rinaldo shakes his hand, the chief silently suffers the superhero’s iron grip. Couden remains a team builder to the end, her voice tenderly blooming in the closing group-hug ensemble scene.
In the role of Almirena, the chief’s daughter and Rinaldo’s love interest, soprano Shawnette Sulker is good, but her voice comes across weakly in the Scottish Rite’s cavernous space.
Nikki Einfeld’s keenly focused soprano adds a menacing edge to the evil Armida. She also wears costume designer Bethany Deal’s single most outrageous concoction, which combines the purple feathered legs of an exotic bird, knife-point Prada shoulders and a black wig (by Roxie Johnson) as high as Marge Simpson’s hair.
All the show’s designers capture the director’s aims with amplitude. Liliana Duque-Piñero’s set, which places the action inside two bright yellow frames, reads as adjacent cartoon panels. Michael Oesch lights the stage with calibrated effects, from full-on brightness to murkiness. Yuki Izumihara’s dynamic projections vary from a stippled Roy Lichtenstein look to a witch’s lava lamp spells.
Equally essential to the texture and glow are the six smartly choreographed dancers, who play cops and robbers at the outset and co-conspirator Furies later on, switching sides as easily as the partner-trading lovers.
In the pit, Emily Senturia led an opening performance more notable for some standout solos, by the woodwinds and harpsichordist Julian Garvue, than by the perfunctory playing of the ensemble as a whole.
This delightful Rinaldo confirms what West Edge audiences have known for years: In the company’s imaginative stagings, the unexpected is expected.
This story was first published in Datebook in partnership with the San Francisco Chronicle.
