Simon Godwin’s visually arresting production shines with a cast including soprano Rosa Feola and tenor Adam Smith.
The Washington National Opera’s opened its new production of Gounod’s “Romeo and Juliet” on Saturday – a visually arresting, theatrically sound showcase of splendid singing and musicianship.
This variety of spirit is most immediately evident in Loren Shaw’s costumes, which deliver a dreamlike blur of uncannily compatible anachronism — part masquerade ball, part circus; part “Moulin Rouge,” part “West Side Story”; part Versailles, part Studio 54. The simple, sturdy bridges and arches of set designer Daniel Soule’s Verona felt like a stone hearth for Shaw’s fiery palette of turquoise, fuchsia and glimmering gold.
On that note, it was a terrific night for the Kennedy Center Opera House orchestra and conductor Evan Rogister, who made something of a furnace out of the orchestra pit. In the first act, the strings beautifully modeled the cat-and-mouse feinting of the lovers’ first encounter; in the fifth, they perfectly channeled the rough grain of grief. They sounded downright heavenly in the instrumental preludes to the acts .
But the main attraction here is the singing, delivered by a smartly cast ensemble that seemed precision picked to highlight the natural tonal chemistry of soprano Rosa Feola’s Juliet and tenor Adam Smith’s Romeo. With her signature celebratory waltz Feola crafted a Juliet with more than a splash of Carmen to her.
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