Seattle Opera Young Artists present dreamy "Midsummer"

Opera Review |

Seattle Opera Young Artists artistic director Peter Kazaras has done it again — this time with "A Midsummer Night's Dream." At first I had my doubts, but his production convinced me that taking Benjamin Britten's most enchanting opera out of an Athenian forest and plunking it down in a classroom in a British boarding school was no self-indulgent exercise of directorial whimsy. As in last season's "L'Enfant et les sortilèges," which Kazaras set in a subway station, the physical environment was used as a blank slate, and the enchantment was in the mind, and in the music.

Casting "Midsummer" is a tall order to start with: You need a team of children for Shakespeare's fairies and two adult singers — one of them a countertenor — to play their king and queen; another dozen grown-ups to represent both the polished Athenian nobles of the plot and the "rude mechanicals" who so gauchely yet endearingly try to entertain them with a play-within-the-play; and a fleet-footed young actor to play Puck, the mischievous imp whose carelessness sets the story on its accident-prone course.

Still, the Young Artists program succeeded in filling all those diverse categories convincingly. In Heidi Ganser's colorful costumes, on Donald Eastman's purely functional set, an accomplished cast including a chorus of charming children enjoyed the support of some brilliant orchestral playing under Brian Garman's authoritative musical direction. Tytania was neatly played by Megan Hart (alternating with Emily Hindrichs), whose agile soprano line coped skillfully with Britten's occasionally stratospheric writing. Opposite her as Oberon was Anthony Roth Costanzo, a young countertenor of rare musicality. His voice commands all the requisite colors throughout the range, and he projected it with tellingly nuanced dynamics and insinuating dramatic insight.

Leading the uproarious sextet of "mechanicals," baritone Jeffrey Madison seized every opportunity the plum role of Bottom offered him and ran with it to hilarious effect, while his colleagues Jonathan Silvia, Thomas Forde, Marc-Antoine d'Aragon, Alex Mansoori and Marcus Shelton played their serio-comic roles to the hilt. Bray Wilkins, Elizabeth Pojanowski, Michael Krzankowski and Vira Slywotzky (who alternates with Michelle Trovato) made two attractive pairs of lovers, properly reunited and married at the end alongside Jeffrey Beruan's Theseus and Margaret Gawrysiak's (Rose Beattie, alternate) Hippolyta, and David S. Hogan combined the quicksilver side of Puck with a nicely proletarian dialect touch.

It might seem perverse to take the magic out of an opera only to put it all back in. But Kazaras loves to challenge us, and himself. Whatever he touches, he touches with genius, and he has created a "Dream" not to be missed.

Bernard Jacobson: bernardijacobson@comcast.net