Chas Adams

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CB Adams is an award-winning fiction writer and photographer based in the Greater St. Louis area. A former music/arts editor and feature writer for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, his non-fiction has been published in local, regional and national publications. His literary short stories have been published in more than a dozen literary journals and his fine art photography has been exhibited in more than 40 galley shows nationwide. Adams is the recipient of the Missouri Arts Council’s highest writing awards: the Writers’ Biennial and Missouri Writing!. The Riverfront Times named him, “St. Louis’ Most Under-Appreciated Writer” in 1996.

OTSL’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Finds the Emotional Truth in a Familiar Story

OTSL’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Finds the Emotional Truth in a Familiar Story

By CB Adams

Opera Theatre of Saint Louis closes its 2026 festival season with a production of Charles Gounod’s “Romeo and Juliet” that understands exactly what makes the opera work.

Director Keturah Stickann, conductor Ramón Tebar and a superb cast place the relationship between the young lovers at the center of the evening. Every scene, every duet and nearly every design choice serves that relationship, allowing the opera’s final moments to land with uncommon emotional force.

Emma Marhefka and Leonardo Sánchez establish that foundation from their first encounter at the Capulet ball. Over the course of four duets, attraction deepens into devotion, devotion deepens into intimacy and intimacy collides with tragedy. By the opera’s final moments, the fate of Romeo and Juliet feels like a personal loss.

Although the opera bears the lovers’ names, this production finds its emotional center in Juliet. Marhefka charts the evening’s most significant journey, carrying Juliet from youthful exuberance and certainty toward hard-won understanding. Her buoyant “Je veux vivre” captures a young woman delighted by life’s possibilities and confident in her place within them.

Romeo (Leonardo Sánchez) and Juliet (Emma Marhefka) in “Romeo and Juliet.” Photo © Eric Woolsey

Marhefka uses the aria to establish the emotional ground beneath the entire performance. Experience, loss and consequence gradually reshape that confidence, and Marhefka traces every step of the transformation.

Sánchez proves an ideal partner in that journey. His clear, ardent tenor and openhearted stage presence ground Romeo’s devotion in genuine feeling. He also captures the impulsiveness that repeatedly transforms emotion into action and action into consequence. Together, Marhefka and Sánchez accomplish the production’s central task. They make the relationship real.

Stickann follows the emotional architecture that Gounod built into the score. The four great duets become milestones in the relationship’s evolution. At the ball, attraction arrives with the force of discovery.

At the balcony, discovery deepens into commitment. In the bedroom, longing yields to intimacy. In the tomb, intimacy confronts consequence. Marhefka and Sánchez make each stage feel earned, allowing the relationship to grow before our eyes rather than simply advancing it from one familiar scene to the next.

Mercutio (Benjamin Taylor, center left) and Romeo (Leonardo Sánchez, center right) spy on the Capulet ball, accompanied by other Montagues. Photo © Eric Woolsey, 2026

The masked ball pulses with youthful energy. Seán Curran’s choreography fills the stage with movement while Marhefka and Sánchez create an immediate connection that feels spontaneous and authentic.

The balcony scene narrows the world around them. Family loyalties, social obligations and old grievances lose their hold as the lovers construct a private universe of their own making. They move forward with complete certainty. They trust feeling to overcome circumstance.

The bedroom scene reveals the relationship at its fullest expression. The lovers move beyond longing and into intimacy. Reality waits outside the room. Neither lover recognizes how quickly it will arrive.

By the tomb scene, reality has arrived in full. The final duet devastates because the production earns it. Marhefka and Sánchez carry the emotional weight of everything that came before. The audience mourns two people rather than two symbols.

Juliet (Emma Marhefka) and Romeo (Leonardo Sánchez) celebrate their wedding night. Photo © Eric Woolsey

The supporting cast defines the forces pressing against that increasingly fragile private world. Benjamin Taylor’s Mercutio embodies the exuberance the production spends its first act celebrating and its remaining acts dismantling.

His Queen Mab scene sparkles with wit, confidence and youthful vitality. His death shifts the emotional temperature of the evening and signals that the world surrounding the lovers has begun to harden.

Micah Perry’s Tybalt burns hot and fast. His bright tenor matches a temperament that seems incapable of imagining a future beyond the next insult, challenge or grievance. The emotions arrive with the same force as his blade. Perry captures the moment when youthful certainty hardens into catastrophe.

Romeo (Leonardo Sánchez, left) is banished by the Duke of Verona (Jason Edelstein, center) for the murder of Tybalt (Micah Perry). Lord Capulet (Vinicius Costa) and Lady Capulet (Julia Maria Johnson) mourn the death of their nephew. Photo © Eric Woolsey

Nicholas Newton gives Friar Laurence the confidence of a man who believes wisdom and planning can master events. The opera steadily exposes the limits of that confidence.

Vinicius Costa commands the stage as Lord Capulet, embodying the expectations and obligations that increasingly constrain Juliet’s choices. The certainty of the older generation proves no more reliable than the certainty of the younger one.

Edmond Rodrigues brings quiet steadiness to Benvolio, while Veronica Siebert’s spirited Stephano, Imara Ashton’s warm Gertrude, Jason Edelstein’s authoritative Duke of Verona, Cole Bellamy’s Paris, Julia Mariah Johnson’s Lady Capulet and Kevin Douglas Jasaitis’ Gregorio give shape and texture to the world surrounding the lovers.

Tebar understands that Gounod often advances the drama by suspending it. Again and again, the orchestra creates moments in which time seems briefly to stop and attention narrows to the emotional lives of the lovers. Tebar draws feeling from melody, phrasing and texture rather than sheer volume. The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra illuminates the drama without overwhelming it.

Romeo (Leonardo Sánchez) and Juliet (Emma Marhefka) are married in secret by Friar Laurence (Nicholas Newton), as Juliet’s nurse (Imara Ashton) looks on. Photo © Eric Woolsey

Stickann’s collaborators reinforce the production’s focus on emotional clarity. Scenic designer Liliana Duque Piñeiro embraces fluidity and metaphor. At first glance, the set’s broad expanse of masonry and geometric forms resembles a public swimming pool emptied of water.

As the evening unfolds, however, its logic reveals itself. Steps, balconies, platforms and even convenient toe holds for Romeo gradually emerge from the design, creating a flexible environment for the opera’s succession of intimate encounters. Large movable columns continually reshape the playing space, suggesting both a divided society and shifting emotional terrain.

Their movement occasionally draws attention to the mechanics of the staging, but never enough to pull the audience from the drama. The architecture rarely competes for attention. Instead, the eye naturally returns to the performers and Robert Perdziola’s richly colored costumes.

Costume designer Robert Perdziola externalizes the feud through color. The Montagues inhabit a world of blue while the Capulets move through shades of red, rose and violet. The visual contrast immediately clarifies the barriers the lovers spend the evening attempting to cross.

The Capulets and Montagues erupt into a street fight, led by Tybalt (Micah Perry, center left) and Mercutio (Benjamin Taylor, center right), as Romeo (Leonardo Sánchez, center background) attempts to stop the violence. Photo © Eric Woolsey,

Eric Southern shapes mood and focus through light, while Andrew Whitfield’s chorus establishes the conflict that shadows the lovers from the opening moments.

The achievement of OTSL’s “Romeo and Juliet” lies in how completely it earns its emotional ending. By the time the lovers reach the tomb, the exuberance that animated the ball has collided with the realities waiting outside the lovers’ private world. The story remains familiar. The ending still hurts.

“Romeo and Juliet” runs June 7-26 at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. The production concludes OTSL’s 2026 festival season, which features all four productions in rotating repertory at the Loretto-Hilton Center on the campus of Webster University. For tickets and additional information, visit Opera Theatre of Saint Louis at opera-stl.org.

Romeo (Leonardo Sánchez) mourns over Juliet’s lifeless body in the Capulet crypt. Photo © Eric Woolsey

OTSL’s ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ Matches Tennessee Williams Note for Note

OTSL’s ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ Matches Tennessee Williams Note for Note

Patricia Racette’s production finds operatic scale, emotional truth and remarkable balance in Williams’s enduring tragedy.

By CB Adams

Andrew Boyce’s scenic design announces Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’s intentions before a note is sung. Towering walls of weathered white shutters dominate the stage, instantly evoking New Orleans while suggesting something more confining.

Projected across those walls, a black-and-white montage culminates in a huge streetcar lumbering toward the audience with the slow, inexorable force of a locomotive.

It is a striking image and an honest one. We know where this story is headed. Racette and Boyce embrace that inevitability from the outset. There is no attempt to disguise the destination. Some productions try to improve the classics. This one trusts one.

André Previn’s opera, with a libretto by Philip Littell, remains remarkably faithful to Williams’s play. Racette embraces that faithfulness as an artistic choice. She trusts Williams’s characters, conflicts and hard-earned understanding of human weakness. The result never feels preserved under glass.

Blanche DuBois (Sara Gartland) arrives in New Orleans. Photo by Eric Woolsey.

Daniela Candillari leads the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with equal command. Previn’s score moves beneath the action like an unseen current, deepening tension and longing without overwhelming the drama unfolding onstage. Candillari maintains an ideal balance between pit and stage. The orchestra remains firmly in service to the story.

The production’s dramatic engine is the ongoing contest between Sara Gartland’s Blanche DuBois and David Adam Moore’s Stanley Kowalski. They spar like star pugilists across Williams’s language and Previn’s score, each encounter carrying as much psychological force as vocal power.

Gartland captures Blanche’s contradictions without simplifying them. Under Racette’s careful guidance, her Blanche remains vain, vulnerable, manipulative, frightened, self-aware and self-deluding, often simultaneously.

Moore faces the equally difficult task of making Stanley more than a brute. He succeeds. Stanley’s eventual victory remains disturbing, but Moore preserves enough magnetism and humanity to make it believable.

(L to R) David Adam Moore as Stanley, Lauren Snouffer as Stella, and Sara Gartland as Blanche in “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Photo by Eric Woolsey.

Racette allows Stanley’s appeal to remain visible even when his behavior becomes reprehensible. His spoken dialogue, used sparingly throughout the opera, sharpens the realism of the surrounding music rather than interrupting it.

Just as important is Lauren Snouffer’s Stella. More than a participant in Blanche and Stanley’s struggle, she becomes the emotional fulcrum of the evening, giving equal weight to Stella’s love for Blanche, desire for Stanley and determination to survive the impossible position in which she finds herself.

The relationship between the sisters is rendered with uncommon care, while Stella’s marriage to Stanley remains equally persuasive. Those relationships feel lived-in rather than merely dramatic.

Boyce’s towering shutter walls evoke New Orleans architecture while functioning as a kind of emotional enclosure. At times they resemble prison bars, at others the walls of memory closing around Blanche. Their scale is distinctly operatic, creating a world far larger than the cast occupying it.

Blanche (Sara Gartland) flirts with the smitten Harold “Mitch” Mitchell. Photoby Eric Woolsey.

Yet Gartland, Moore, Snouffer and their colleagues fill that space through voice, presence and sharply defined characterizations. They do not merely survive the set. They complete it. In a production with relatively few principals, there is nowhere to hide. Every performer must command the space. They do.

The supporting cast contributes significantly to that achievement. Bille Bruley’s Harold Mitchell brings warmth and humanity to the role, while Ashlyn Brown’s Eunice provides an earthy, clear-eyed counterpoint to Blanche’s unraveling. Her nurturing support of Stella reinforces one of the production’s central relationships and helps ground the emotional reality of Elysian Fields.

The ensemble consistently strengthens Williams’s world. Kim Stanish is especially memorable as the Nurse in the final scene. Her prolonged struggle to restrain Blanche avoids melodrama and instead underscores the heartbreaking finality of the character’s collapse, a moment Racette allows to linger rather than rush past.

Blanche (Sara Gartland) begins to unravel under Stanley’s (David Adam Moore) menacing presence. Photo by Eric Woolsey.

The production’s scenes of violence and sexual assault are staged with careful restraint. Racette, intimacy coordinator Delaney Piggins and fight choreographer Shaun Sheley convey the ugliness of Stanley’s actions with just enough physical detail to communicate their impact without lapsing into sensationalism.

The projections prove equally effective throughout the evening. Most haunting is the appearance of Blanche’s young husband, whose portrait looms over the stage just as relentlessly as his memory looms over her life.

Throughout the evening, projections become another actor in the drama, carrying memory and desire across Boyce’s towering walls. By the time Blanche reaches her final music, Gartland and the production have earned every note of it.

“A Streetcar Named Desire” continues at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis through June 26 at the Loretto-Hilton Center on the Webster University campus as part of OTSL’s 2026 Festival Season. Ticket information, performance schedules and additional production details are available on the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis website.

A shattered Blanche (Sara Gartland) is gently led away by a doctor (Erik DeMario). Photo by Eric Wooley.

Voices and Visual Elegance Carry OTSL’s ‘The Light in the Piazza’

Voices and Visual Elegance Carry OTSL’s ‘The Light in the Piazza’

by CB Adams

Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ production of “The Light in the Piazza” consistently achieves the atmosphere of operatic emotional depth, even if it reaches true operatic emotional danger less often.

Through soaring vocal performances, elegant visual storytelling and sustained tonal sophistication, OTSL delivers a production enveloped in cultivated romanticism and musical yearning.

Cameron Anderson’s striking set design establishes that atmosphere immediately. Sweeping stone arches dominate the stage, carrying the accumulated emotional history of Florence itself.

The arches become emotional architecture — thresholds, passages and reminders that these characters are visitors twice over: tourists moving through Italy and emotional travelers moving toward unfamiliar versions of themselves.

Kate Baldwin as Margaret Johnson. Photo by Eric Woolsey.

Eric Southern’s lighting deepens that visual language beautifully. A stark shaft of light isolates Clara at both the opening and near the production’s conclusion, quietly framing her as emotionally exposed and suspended between dependence and adulthood, innocence and self-determination.

Southern’s lighting and Anderson’s arches together create a visual vocabulary of passage, vulnerability and emotional crossing.

Crystal Manich directs with clarity and tonal confidence. Scene transitions flow with dreamlike fluidity, and the production sustains a remarkably cohesive emotional vocabulary from beginning to end.

The production ultimately belongs to Kate Baldwin’s Margaret Johnson.

Kate Baldwin and Paolo Szot in “The Light at the Piazza.” Photo by Eric Woolsey.

Baldwin gives the evening its mature emotional intelligence, shaping Margaret as a woman who understands that love offers no guarantees, safeguards or reliable maps. Warmth, wit, restraint and quiet exhaustion coexist seamlessly in her performance.

Her richly controlled vocals navigate Adam Guettel’s harmonically restless score with remarkable ease, while her acting continually reveals the emotional calculations unfolding beneath Margaret’s composed exterior.

Though Clara’s romance initiates the story, OTSL’s production increasingly reveals itself as Margaret’s drama — a mature reckoning with love, uncertainty and the frightening necessity of release.

Roy Hage’s Fabrizio proves equally essential to the production’s success. Hage brings lyrical warmth, sincerity and earnest emotional transparency to the role, grounding the production’s refined theatricality in genuine feeling.

Kate Baldwin, Katrina Galka and Roy Hage in “The Light at the Piazza.” Photo by Eric Woolsey.

His chemistry with Katrina Galka’s Clara gives the romance persuasive emotional momentum even when the show’s idealism threatens to outrun practical realism.

Hage’s tenor remains consistently expressive and inviting, and his openness sustains much of the production’s emotional accessibility.

Galka delivers a thoughtful and sympathetic Clara, particularly in the later scenes where the character’s frustration with her constrained life emerges more forcefully.

The Naccarelli family in “The Light at the Piazza.” Photo by Eric Woolsey.

Even so, the production’s emotional center of gravity gradually shifts toward Baldwin and Hage, whose performances carry greater theatrical and vocal authority.

That contrast between youthful emotional openness and the erosion of adult certainty gives the production much of its emotional texture. Clara and Fabrizio move toward love with instinctive urgency, while Margaret and Roy inhabit the lingering emotional afterlife of a marriage whose passion has cooled into habit and caution.

Under Rob Berman’s direction, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra fully embraces Guettel’s lush, classically inflected score. The music unfolds less as a sequence of distinct songs and more as a continuous emotional current built from soaring phrases, suspended harmonies and yearning orchestral textures.

The museums of Florence. Photo by Eric Woolsey.

At times, however, that richness works against dramatic immediacy. The orchestra occasionally overwhelms dialogue, and extended untranslated passages in Italian force audiences to work harder than necessary to remain textually connected.

Those passages clearly reinforce Margaret’s outsider status within Florence’s emotional and linguistic landscape. Still, the cumulative effect creates more distance than intimacy.

Perhaps it is unfair to apply operatic standards of clarity and accessibility to a musical deliberately straddling both worlds. Yet when an opera company stages “The Light in the Piazza” with such unapologetically operatic ambition, those comparisons become inevitable.

What ultimately lingers after OTSL’s “The Light in the Piazza” is less any individual song or dramatic revelation than the production’s carefully sustained emotional and visual atmosphere. The voices, the arches, the light and the cultivated romanticism remain vividly intact —  a performance more immersive than transformative, though consistently elegant and theatrically persuasive throughout.

Michael James Reed and Kate Baldwin as The Johnsons in “The Light in the Piazza.” Photo by Eric Woolsey.

“The Light in the Piazza” continues through June 28 at the Loretto-Hilton Center on the Webster University campus, presented in rotating repertory as part of Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ 2026 festival season. Ticket information, dining options and additional production details are available through the OTSL website.

At Human Scale, Winter Opera’s ‘Roméo et Juliette’ Finds Its Emotional Power

At Human Scale, Winter Opera’s ‘Roméo et Juliette’ Finds Its Emotional Power

By CB Adams

Opera succeeds when theater, singing, and orchestra move together. Winter Opera St. Louis brought those forces into satisfying alignment with Charles Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette,” closing its season with a production that carried Shakespeare’s familiar tragedy with immediacy and emotional force.

Gounod’s 1867 opera, with a libretto by Jules Barbier and Michel Carré, keeps its focus firmly on the young lovers rather than the feud that surrounds them. That emphasis places unusual weight on the title roles, and Winter Opera delivered with a compelling pair.

Tenor Taylor Comstock sang Roméo with youthful ardor and a clear, lyrical tenor that expanded in power as the music climbed into the upper register. Opposite him, soprano Megan Barrera offered a Juliette of brightness, agility, and growing emotional depth.

Her “Je veux vivre” waltz sparkled with buoyant phrasing and easy coloratura, and she navigated the role’s demanding succession of arias and duets with clarity of tone and precise French diction.

Taylor-Comstock-Nathan-Whitson-Megan-Barrera. Photo by Dan Donovan.

Together they projected the impulsive youth at the heart of the story, allowing Gounod’s long love duets to unfold with warmth and urgency.

Director John Stephens guided the drama with clarity and focus. The turning point arrived in the duel between Mercutio and Tybalt, staged with sharp dramatic energy as Roméo’s intervention sealed the opera’s tragic course.

The final scene, shaped with intimate restraint, carried the emotional weight of the evening.

The supporting cast added vivid character and vocal strength. Baritone Kenneth Stavert filled Mercutio with swagger, wit, and striking physical vitality, relishing the playful brilliance of the Queen Mab scene.

Marc Schapman’s Tybalt burned with fierce intensity, while Jacob Lassetter brought warmth and authority to Capulet. Raphaella Medina charmed as Stéphano, and Emily Moore animated the role of Gertrude with lively presence. The ensemble throughout sang and acted with admirable cohesion.

In the pit, conductor Edward Benyas shaped the score with sensitivity to its lyrical sweep, balancing orchestra and voices so that Gounod’s melodic lines could bloom freely.

The chorus, prepared by Scott Schoonover, sang with clarity and strength, particularly in the somber lament that follows the duel.

Taylor Comstock and Marc Schapman as Romeo and Tybalt. Dan Donovan photo.

Scott Loebl’s flexible scenic design and Jen Blum-Tatara’s richly colored costumes reinforced the divided world of the rival houses while allowing the drama to move fluidly from celebration to tragedy.

The result proved deeply affecting and a fitting close to Winter Opera’s season. Performances at this level make a persuasive case for opera at an intimate scale, where music, voices, and story meet the audience directly.

Winter Opera’s “Roméo et Juliette” was performed on Feb. 27 and March 1 at the Kirkwood Performing Arts Center.

Megan Barrera as Juliette and Emily Moore as Gertrude. Photo by Dan Donovan.

Winter Opera Builds Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” with Discipline and Grace

Winter Opera Builds Verdi’s “Un Ballo in Maschera” with Discipline and Grace

By CB Adams

Winter Opera St. Louis’ “Un Ballo in Maschera” succeeds through design. Dianna Higbee approaches Verdi’s tragedy as an architectural problem — how to assemble inevitability — and solves it with patience, proportion, and a clear understanding of where the drama must turn.

The result is an evening of quiet authority, its pressure accumulating through the deliberate arrival and consequence of Verdi’s great confessional arias, and supported by three solid, intelligent performances at its core.

This is Verdi at the height of his dramatic powers, writing in liberated form, where arias reorganize the action and reshape the moral terrain. Higbee honors that maturity by spacing those moments as structural pillars, allowing each confession to alter the dramatic balance. Tragedy unfolds by design, threshold by threshold, until the final masked ball arrives as the natural release of long preparation.

Beneath that design, the orchestra, under Andy Anderson’s direction, sustains the evening with clarity and proportion. Anderson shapes Verdi’s score with rhythmic lift and supple balance, allowing the architecture of the arias to emerge with natural ease rather than orchestral insistence.

Photo by Dan Donovan.

Owing to the postponed performance and inclement weather, the harp part was realized at the piano and a bass was absent from the ensemble, adjustments that passed almost unnoticed in playing of such refinement.

Textures remained transparent, transitions breathed freely, and climaxes rose from accumulated pressure rather than display. The result gave Higbee’s pacing its continuous pulse while leaving the psychological weight squarely with the singers.

At the foundation of that design stands Isaac Hurtado’s Riccardo, the lighthearted governor whose charm quietly initiates the ruin to come. Hurtado sings “La rivedrò nell’estasi” with easy lyric brightness, establishing authority and allure without courting display.

Desire enters the drama gently here, almost casually, and that very ease becomes dangerous. Hurtado’s Riccardo remains humane throughout, a leader whose discipline delays catastrophe without preventing it.

Photo by Dan Donovan.

Liz Baldwin’s Amelia forms the opera’s moral center, and her performance anchors the evening with a rare balance of power and vulnerability. In “Morro, ma prima in grazia,” Baldwin shapes the line as an interior reckoning, the voice carrying fear, longing, and resolve in equal measure. This becomes the threshold where tragedy turns irreversible. After her confession, the emotional landscape shifts, and the opera’s remaining possibilities quietly contract.

The final structural pillar arrives with Joseph Gansert’s Renato. His transformation from loyal secretary to assassin unfolds with grim clarity, and in “Eri tu” Gansert delivers the evening’s defining rupture.

The aria rises as psychological collapse rather than bravura, the baritone’s force shaped by anguish rather than fury. Here the architecture locks into place. After this moment, the opera contains no alternatives, only ritual.

Verdi’s tragedy rests on the slow destruction of three people who love one another, and Higbee allows that triangle to emerge with uncommon coherence. Riccardo’s charm, Amelia’s conscience, and Renato’s wounded loyalty form a geometry that builds its own ruin, confession by confession, until fate requires only a public stage.

Photo by Dan Donovan

Around that core, the production finds its colors with intelligence. Ola Rafalo’s Ulrica delivers prophecy with impassive authority, her restraint giving fate the calm weight of certainty — a discipline owed as much to Higbee’s direction as to the mezzo’s control.

At the opposite pole, Leann Schuering’s Oscar, one of opera’s classic “pants” roles, emerges as sprightly, puckish, almost Chaplinesque, her physical wit and bright tone preserving humanity inside gathering darkness.

The visual world reinforces that architecture with quiet intelligence. Drawing on the Boston setting and the approaching 250th anniversary of the American Revolution, Higbee frames the drama in a clear chromatic language, Americans in blue set against the red of their British adversaries, the evening moving steadily toward a Fourth of July finale shadowed by catastrophe.

Jen Blum-Tatara’s costumes clarify status and psychology while lending the masked ball its necessary ceremony, sharpening the sense of ritual that governs the final act.

Photo by Dan Donovan.

Dennis Milam Bensie’s wigs, exuberant and faintly surreal, introduce flashes of visual fantasy — a hint of Oz in their theatrical whimsy, a touch of “Barry Lyndon” in their powdered hauteur, and the occasional echo of Lynch’s “Dune” in their ceremonial strangeness — reminding us that disguise here belongs as much to dream and ritual as to history.

This “Ballo” makes its case through proportion rather than display. Higbee’s design vindicates Verdi’s mature craftsmanship, allowing voices, confession, and consequence to assemble a tragedy that unfolds with discipline and grace. The memory it leaves is not of a single high note, but of a long arc patiently carried, voice by voice, into ruin.

Winter Opera St. Louis presented “Un Ballo in Maschera” at the Kirkwood Performing Arts Center. The production originally ran Jan. 23–26, 2026.

Photo by Dan Donovan.

Bach Society’s Candlelight Concert Finds Its Radiance in Rutter — and in Emily Birsan’s Voice

Bach Society’s Candlelight Concert Finds Its Radiance in Rutter — and in Emily Birsan’s Voice

By CB Adams

The Bach Society of Saint Louis’ Christmas Candlelight Concert begins where it should: in sound. Before tradition, before ritual, before the familiar glow of candles, there is the resonance of Powell Hall answering the first choral surge. The room settles, the ear sharpens and the evening declares its priorities. This is a concert shaped by listening and care.

At the center stands John Rutter’s “Magnificat,” performed here with buoyancy, clarity and an instinctive sense of proportion. Rutter’s gift for celebration can be mistaken for easy charm, yet this music asks for discipline to keep its radiance airborne. Under A. Dennis Sparger’s steady direction, the Bach Society Chorus and Orchestra delivered exactly that: rhythmic lift without haste, color without excess and an architectural arc that allowed the work’s alternating exuberance and inwardness to register fully.

The score’s brilliance, especially in its percussion and brass writing, came across with vivid impact, while strings and winds shaped the quieter pages with warmth and transparency. Sparger paced the work so contrasts felt earned rather than imposed, allowing the music to breathe while sustaining forward motion. The result trusted Rutter’s craftsmanship and resisted the temptation to oversell it.

Soprano Emily Birsan sings John Rutter’s “Magnificat.” Photo by Katie Pinkston.

At the heart of the performance was soprano Emily Birsan, whose singing gave the “Magnificat” its center of gravity. Her voice is luminous and richly focused, marked by fine control and a natural inwardness that draws the hall closer rather than pushing sound outward. In reflective passages, her phrasing and breath transformed large-scale celebration into something intimate and human-scaled.

Even in moments of radiance, there was restraint and poise, a sense that clarity mattered more than display. It was singing of interpretive authority, grounded in trust and simplicity.

The remainder of the program functioned as a thoughtful frame rather than a diversion. Seasonal carols and arrangements extended the sound world established by the “Magnificat,” offering familiarity refreshed through color and rhythmic lift.

A Mozart excerpt, the “Laudamus Te” from the Mass in C minor, provided a moment of classical contrast and further showcased Birsan’s musical intelligence, reinforcing her versatility without disrupting the evening’s flow.

The Bach Society of St. Louis’ annual Christmas Concert. Photo by Katie Pinkston.

The concert closed with Craig Courtney’s “A Musicological Journey Through the 12 Days of Christmas,” a piece that wears its learning lightly. Each verse refracts the familiar tune through a different stylistic lens, creating a playful tour of musical history that rewards both ear and intellect. The Bach Society dispatched it with precision and obvious delight, capturing its wit and rhythmic verve. As a finale, it proved supremely engaging, leaving the audience buoyed rather than merely amused.

Candlelight, procession and communal song emerged organically from the musical argument rather than sitting beside it. Back in Powell Hall, the fit felt restored. This concert endures not because it repeats itself, but because it listens, to the music, to the room and to the moment.

The Bach Society of Saint Louis’ Christmas Candlelight Concert was performed at Powell Hall on December 23.

Powell Hall. Photo by Katie Pinkston.

ABT Studio Company Brings Risk and Reach to Dance St. Louis

ABT Studio Company Brings Risk and Reach to Dance St. Louis

By CB Adams

There is a particular clarity that comes from watching dancers at the moment their stage identities begin to take shape. Dance St. Louis opened its 60th anniversary season with that sense of emergence fully present, offering an evening with the ABT Studio Company that placed the focus not on promise alone but on preparedness, discipline and artistic intent. This may be the “junior” company of American Ballet Theatre, yet nothing about the performance suggested a diminutive form. These were young dancers stepping forward with conviction.

ABT Studio Company functions as the bridge between advanced training and the demands of a professional career. Its dancers, typically between 17 and 21, rehearse and tour as a unified ensemble, moving through a repertory that spans classical, neoclassical and contemporary work. The result is a rare opportunity for audiences to see dancers becoming themselves in real time — the mind, ear and body aligning in ways that cannot be rehearsed into existence.

Sascha Radetsky, former ABT soloist and the Studio Company’s artistic director, shaped the evening with an eye toward what this roster could carry. His own background, which blends Bolshoi training, long service with ABT and Dutch National Ballet, and the pop-cultural recognizability of “Center Stage” and “Flesh and Bone,” gives him a wide-angle understanding of what young artists require and what audiences intuitively absorb.

The program he assembled reflected that breadth: classical cornerstones that test line and placement, contemporary pieces that ask for nuance and stamina, and neoclassical works built for speed, musicality and ensemble cohesion. With the company currently weighted toward men, the selections were matched to the dancers’ strengths while still nudging them toward new edges.

Radetsky also situated the company within a longer tradition of generational transmission. Dance history is threaded with these handovers — Balanchine shaping dancers like Farrell and Villella, Martha Graham passing her technique through artists such as Terese Capucilli — moments when one generation prepares the next. By programming classical foundations, neoclassical challenges and contemporary commissions, Radetsky placed these dancers not simply as inheritors but as active participants in that lineage.

The evening opened with “La Bayadère (Pas d’Action),” after Marius Petipa, danced by Delfina Nelson-Todd, Audrey Tovar-Dunster, Matteo Curley Bynoe and Younjae ParkThe dancers approached the choreography with respect for its precision: Nelson-Todd shaped her épaulement with quiet assurance, and Tovar-Dunster’s port de bras carried rhythmic confidence.

Curley Bynoe brought crisp batterie and clean landings, while Park partnered with an unforced steadiness that allowed the phrases to expand. Their collective unison — sharp, clear, centered — set an early tone of readiness.

“Cornbread,” by Twyla Tharp and danced by Kayla Mak and Elijah Geolina, supplied one of the evening’s most engaging and warmly alive moments. Mak, shaped by Juilliard training and Princess Grace recognition, moved with a grounded musicality that met Tharp’s rhythmic intricacies head-on. Geolina, whose background includes competitive ballroom and television appearances, brought buoyant elevation and unerring rhythmic instinct. The Carolina Chocolate Drops score amplified the work’s earthy humor and drive. Together they created a performance that felt fully inhabited.

“Beyond Silence,” choreographed by Brady Farrar and danced by YeonSeo Choi and Maximilian Catazaro, offered a shift inward. Choi’s long, patient phrasing and Catazaro’s measured partnering gave the duet a contemplative stillness. Their suspended lines and cleanly delivered shapes created a center of quiet in a varied program.

In “Variations for Three,” by Tiler Peck, Geonhee Park, Younjae Park and Xavier Xué handled the brisk tempo and bright neoclassical coloration with an easy assurance. Geonhee articulated with precision, Younjae found lift in his jumps and Xué provided the stabilizing presence needed to keep the trio’s exchanges aligned. The result was a compact, clearly drawn demonstration of musical and technical rapport.

Xavier Xué returned to the stage for “Saudade,” by Katie Currier — one of the evening’s standout works. Commissioned by ABT Studio Company, the piece asks for a kind of emotional translucence rather than overt display, and Xué delivered. His phrasing moved with quiet elasticity, and the upper-body expressiveness — a soft back ripple, suspended arms, a held inhale before release — gave the work its atmospheric charge. It landed with a lingering gravity.

“Grand Pas Classique,” after Victor Gsovsky, brought Sooha Park and Daniel Guzmán together in a test of clarity, balance and poise. Park’s technique was finely calibrated, with balances that arrived without strain and unfolded with calm intention. Guzmán met the variation’s demands with strong elevation and steady landings. In partnering, he provided the clean frame that allowed Park’s line to extend without interruption. Their performance gave the work its intended sheen.

The evening closed with Jerome Robbins’ “Interplay,” shaped as a four-part suite — Free Play, Horseplay, Byplay and Team Play — performed by the full ensemble in various configurations: Maximilian Catazaro, YeonSeo Choi, Ptolemy Gidney, Paloma Livellara, Delfina Nelson-Todd, Geonhee Park, Younjae Park and Audrey Tovar-Dunster among them.

Robbins draws dancers into a buoyant mix of classical line and Broadway-inflected rhythm, and the company leaned into the blend. Free Play moved with bright rhythmic exchanges and quick-snap timing; Horseplay gave Geonhee Park room to show easy lift; Byplay found relaxed rapport among Choi, Catazaro and the company; and Team Play brought the full ensemble forward in a playful, confident finish.

The repertory itself carried notable stakes. In the pre-performance Q&A, Radetsky mentioned that Tharp had long resisted releasing “Cornbread” to dancers this young, believing the piece too demanding. Her eventual agreement, and the way the dancers met the challenge, spoke to the company’s current level.

Throughout the evening, small traces of effort surfaced — a pirouette that adjusted before settling, a landing that softened into place, an arabesque that breathed once before arriving, an ensemble line that wavered before finding its symmetry, a partnering exchange approached with a hint of caution. These were not shortcomings but moments where the dancers’ reach became visible, the line between training and profession momentarily illuminated.

Presenting the Studio Company also reaffirmed the legacy of Dance St. Louis itself — a cultural institution now in its sixth decade. Since its founding in 1966, it has brought more than 30,000 artists, 500 companies and over 150 world premieres to local audiences. As one of only four nonprofit organizations in the United States devoted solely to presenting dance, it stands as a rare survivor and a vital part of the city’s artistic landscape. Evenings like this underscore its role not simply as a presenter of great works but as a home where dance lives, evolves and continues to matter.

Dance St. Louis presented ABT Studio Company November 14-15 at the Touhill Performing Arts Center.

SLSO’s Live at the Pulitzer Brings ‘Color Into Form Into Sound’ to Life

SLSO’s Live at the Pulitzer Brings ‘Color Into Form Into Sound’ to Life

By CB Adams

To appreciate the exceptional experience of “Color Into Form Into Sound” — the clarity, intimacy and high-caliber artistry within the Pulitzer Arts Foundation’s concrete calm — it helps to understand the why behind the evening.

Curated by Christopher Stark, composer and professor at Washington University in St. Louis, the program invited listeners to consider how music, space and visual art illuminate one another. Inside Tadao Ando’s serene geometry, four musicians from the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra shaped an evening where sound behaved like form, breath became structure and attention felt like devotion.

As Stark shared in his opening remarks, the program grew directly from Jennie C. Jones’ listening life. Jones lives with contemporary classical music in her studio, especially works by pioneering Black composers who bridge classical lineage with improvisational energy, and she offered Stark the pieces and voices that inform her world. He spoke with admiration for how intuitively her surfaces and these sonic landscapes connect — tone, texture and resonance moving easily between gallery and score.

He also noted acoustic affinities between Jones’ layered materials, which recall studio treatments designed to address sound, and the Pulitzer’s concrete hush. A quiet echo of Miles Davis hovered in that framing — his belief that “a painting is music you can see, and music is a painting you can hear” felt beautifully at home. With that sensibility, Stark curated solo and small-ensemble works that met the room, the art and our listening with clarity and presence.

Jones’ exhibition and the Pulitzer’s tranquil architecture created a receptive space where breath and resonance felt almost architectural. Against this backdrop, the program brought together four groundbreaking voices — Carlos Simon, Alvin Singleton, George Lewis and Pauline Oliveros — each offering a distinct approach to line, rhythm and listening. Simon, Singleton and Lewis stand among the pioneering Black composers who have shaped contemporary classical and improvisational music, and Oliveros offered a complementary Deep Listening dimension rooted in awareness and breath. Heard inside Jones’ world of tuned surfaces and charged quiet, the works formed a sonic exhibition, each piece focused and individually framed, inviting the audience to lean in and listen with care.

Simon’s “Silence,” performed by cellist Bjorn Ranheim, and “Move It,” played by flutist Andrea Kaplan on alto flute, revealed the physical and expressive demands of his writing. The musicians approached these works like elite athletes at peak form, shaping tone and breath with clarity and vigor. Kaplan drove through “Move It” with a stamina that felt architectural in its discipline, while Ranheim revealed taut strength beneath “Silence,” each bow stroke carrying sculptural intention. In “Between Worlds,” double bassist David DeRiso extended Simon’s sense of grounded lyricism, giving the instrument weight, lift and presence.

Singleton’s “In My Own Skin,” performed by Peter Henderson, offered a vivid demonstration of musical command — a flourishing traversal through a score that carried the room with it, idea by idea. Kaplan returned for Singleton’s “Argoru III,” shaping sound and silence with poised clarity, each gesture finely articulated.

In Lewis’ “Endless Shout,” Henderson again proved a compelling guide, allowing musical thought to move with conversational ease, alert to both structure and spontaneous color.

Oliveros’ “Horse Sings From Cloud,” performed by Kaplan, Ranheim, DeRiso and Henderson, asked performers and listeners to treat tone, breath, silence and space as equal materials. This performance felt quietly luminous, meditative and humming, the result of disciplined listening and collective trust. Silence breathed differently here, less like absence than a living medium in which sound appeared and receded. The effect was gently sublime, delivering a moment of stillness that settled the room into a deeper register of experience.

The connection between Jones’ work and these sounds lived in sensibility rather than illustration. Stark’s framing centered Jones’ listening — an invitation to imagine her in the studio with these composers sounding around her, much as one imagines Basquiat painting with Parker or Gillespie in the air. Music and art infused, each informing the other as parallel commitments to color, energy and imagination.

The gallery was full, and the audience listened with a calm, steady attentiveness that felt in tune with the room and the music — a presence that reflected both the strength of the SLSO community and St. Louis enthusiasm for programs where contemporary music and visual art meet in shared focus. Cross-disciplinary evenings like this affirm how vividly the arts speak to one another when we move among galleries, stages and concert halls, embracing perspectives shaped by diverse voices and modern compositional language.

The evening also affirmed the value of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra’s Live at the Pulitzer series, which brings adventurous programming into conversation with contemporary art and architecture. As the final tones settled, the space held a gentle afterglow, as though the music had entered the walls as quietly and surely as Jones’ works inhabit them.

Her pieces remain on view, and the evening’s sounds may still hover in the gallery air — a testament to curation grounded in discernment and performances shaped by devotion, the kind of experience that lingers and encourages us toward the fullness of artistic experience across forms.

St. Louis Symphony Orchestra: Live at the Pulitzer performed “Color Into Form Into Sound” on Nov. 4 at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Pulitzer Arts Foundation. Photography by Chris Bauer.

Union Avenue Opera’s One-Act Fest Finds Big Truths in Small Forms

Union Avenue Opera’s One-Act Fest Finds Big Truths in Small Forms

By CB Adams

Union Avenue Opera’s inaugural One-Act Festival is intimate in scale and ambitious in reach, a chamber-sized gesture that embraces the big questions shaping our moment — race, gender, justice, identity.

By pairing “dwb (driving while black)” and “As One,” the company affirmed opera’s ability to thrive in spectacle and in distillation, to fill a grand hall and also to transform a close space into a forum for empathy.

Marsha Thompson in “dwb (driving while black)

“dwb (driving while black)” — Urgency in Compression

“dwb (driving while black),” composed by Susan Kander with words by Roberta Gumbel, follows a Black mother from the moment of birth through the long arc of raising a son. The opera charts a continuum of love, vigilance and reluctant instruction in how to survive, compressing years into a concentrated meditation.

Soprano Marsha Thompson brought to the role a warm, agile soprano with strength and flexibility. She carries emotional nuance through her upper and middle registers and meets its dramatic demands with secure technique — qualities evident in her performances elsewhere in roles such as Violetta, Aïda and Tosca.

Her familiarity with the part, including past performances with Fort Worth Opera, lent her assurance and depth. She moved from tenderness to unease with natural poise, always anchoring the story in a mother’s love.

Director Ivan Griffin staged the work with economy, allowing the smallest gestures to resonate. The motif of shoes — baby shoes, boyhood sneakers, grown-up lace-ups — provided a visual shorthand eloquent in its simplicity.

In a festival devoted to brevity, this staging showed how objects can tell stories and how music can give them voice.

“As One” — Duality and Discovery

“As One,” by Laura Kaminsky with Mark Campbell and Kimberly Reed, is the most performed contemporary opera in North America, and Union Avenue’s staging marked its first appearance in St. Louis. The milestone carried weight, and the company embraced it fully.

The opera follows Hannah, a transgender woman, through two voices — lyric baritone Evan Bravos as “Hannah Before” and lyric mezzo-soprano Emma Dickens, a St. Louis artist, as “Hannah After.”

Bravos, with his impressive range, has performed the role with Opera Santa Barbara and other companies, and his experience gave him a confident presence that anchored the evening.

Emma Dickens and Evan Bravos.

Dickens sang with warmth, flexibility and a rich middle voice, her local presence giving the work an added resonance. Together they created a dialogue of memory and emergence that edged, with beauty and persuasion, toward unity.

The production of “As One” also included a visual narrative of still photographs and video to illustrate Hannah’s journey. These images complemented the action thoughtfully, and yet the magnetism of Bravos and Dickens drew attention primarily to their interplay. I

n a larger space, projected more expansively, the visuals could carry greater weight; in the gallery setting, the storytelling was carried most powerfully by the singers themselves.

Director Joan Lipkin, in her opera debut, emphasized resilience and humor, qualities underscored by Scott Schoonover’s musical direction. Kaminsky’s score is rhythmic and lyrical, and Reed’s lived experience infused the libretto with authenticity. Together the creative team shaped a work of immediacy and poignancy.

Scott Schoonover, Nikki Glenn, Stephen Luehrman, Marie Brown, and Manuela Topalbegovic. 

The Music and the Musicians

Both operas gained strength from committed playing and Schoonover’s clear leadership. In “dwb,” the pairing of cello and percussion created a spare frame that heightened the impact of Thompson’s performance.

In “As One,” Kaminsky’s writing unfolded with beauty and urgency, performed with conviction by Bravos and Dickens and balanced with clarity by the ensemble. The result was music-making that embraced intimacy and carried emotional sweep.

Union Avenue’s One-Act Festival ran Oct. 10–12 in the gallery of Union Avenue Christian Church.

Marsha Erwin, Marsha Thompson, and Sebastian Buhts.

Union Avenue Opera’s ‘Salome’ Delivers Power and Uneven Spectacle

Union Avenue Opera’s ‘Salome’ Delivers Power and Uneven Spectacle

By CB Adams
It is a rare pleasure to encounter “Salome,” Richard Strauss’s 1905 masterpiece (after Oscar Wilde’s scandalous play), on a St. Louis stage. Union Avenue Opera’s production reminds us that even in a modest house, this one-act psychodrama retains its power to disturb.

The evening offered superlative singing across the board, a moody if sometimes murky staging and Strauss’s extraordinary score rendered with clarity and bite by a chamber-sized orchestra that, under Scott Schoonover, sounded far larger than its 23 players.

The vocal achievement was formidable. St. Louis’s own Kelly Slawson brought fearlessness and stamina to the punishing title role, her dramatic soprano slicing cleanly through Strauss’s post-Wagnerian textures. The part notoriously demands everything from flights of coloratura to plunges into the contralto register along with sheer brute endurance.

Slawson met those challenges with assurance, shaping a Salome who was as predatory as she was magnetic. She infused the role with a heavy-metal intensity — thrilling, unsettling and never bland.

Opposite her, baritone Daniel Scofield supplied a commanding Jochanaan, his resonant timbre and prophetic fire holding the line against Salome’s obsessive advances.

Daniel Scofield, Kelly Slawson. Photo by Dan Donovan.

Will Upham’s Herod was appropriately febrile, a portrait of jittery decadence, while Joanna Ehlers’s Herodias offered caustic bite and a Wildean cynicism delivered with relish.

Brian Skoog (Narraboth) brought pathos to his brief trajectory, Emily Geller (the Page) added androgynous ambiguity and the quintet of Jews (Zachary Devin, Thomas M. Taylor IV, David Morgans, James Stevens, Fitzgerald St Louis) bickered with crisp ensemble precision. It was a cast without weak voices.

For all its musical strengths, the staging stumbled at two moments of dramatic consequence. The first misstep came early in the opera with Narraboth’s suicide. Poorly blocked, the scene left the audience’s eye on Salome rather than the lovesick captain.

His awkward, almost perfunctory thrust of the sword could have been missed entirely, thereby diluting Herod’s subsequent questions about the bloodied corpse. What should resonate as the opera’s first shocking rupture barely registered.

Will Upham and Joanna Ehlers. Photo by Dan Donovan.

The Dance of the Seven Veils, the opera’s centerpiece, likewise faltered. Slawson committed herself wholly, but the choreography lurched from abrupt pivots to ground- wriggling, from a parody of Norma Desmond to burlesque flourishes, all without discernible logic. A needless ascent and descent of the steps only deepened the sense of randomness.

At one point she barked toward the chorus; at another, the sequence spun into manic incoherence. The result brought to mind Brad Pitt’s turn in “12 Monkeys” — all nervous tics, sudden lunges and wide-eyed mania, as though every acting exercise had been flung on stage at once.

In a film, that kind of method-to-madness can be riveting; in this opera, it scattered the focus of a moment that should be singularly hypnotic. As a seduction meant to clinch the opera’s fatal bargain, the dance distracted rather than compelled — a pity, given the strength of the surrounding production.

Kelly Slawson as Salome. Photo by Dan Donovan.

Schoonover drew exceptional results from the orchestra. Strauss scored “Salome” for more than a hundred musicians, but Union Avenue performed it using Francis Griffin’s reduced orchestration for 23 players. In Schoonover’s hands, the ensemble produced a luminous, incisive sound that never swamped the singers while still carrying the music’s unsettling erotic charge.

Union Avenue’s “Salome” deserves praise as a rare and rewarding opportunity (despite its missteps) to encounter Strauss’s modernist milestone. Vocally and musically, it was a triumph; dramatically, it remained absorbing despite missteps. For audiences willing to face opera at its most decadent and disturbing, this production more than justified the journey.

Union Avenue Opera’s production of “Salome” was performed Aug. 15, 16, 22 and 23 at the Union Avenue Christian Church

The cast of “Salome.” Photo by Dan Donovan.
Daniel Scofield. Photo by Dan Donovan.

Emily Geller, Brian Skoog. Photo by Dan Donovan