Chas Adams

Total Post: 83

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.

Saint Louis Dance Theatre’s ‘Fall Series’ Finds Harmony in the Mix

Saint Louis Dance Theatre’s ‘Fall Series’ Finds Harmony in the Mix

By CB Adams

Harmony is a slippery thing. It can emerge from two bodies moving together, a dozen moving in apparent opposition, or a piece of music that seems determined to drive everyone onstage mad. Kirven Douthit-Boyd explored all three possibilities in Saint Louis Dance Theatre’s “Fall Series” at the Touhill, assembling five works, including two world premieres, into an evening whose pleasures extended well beyond the individual dances. The choreography had its own rhythms, and so did the programming.

“Elements of Harmony” is the company’s 2026–27 season theme, and Douthit-Boyd has taken it somewhere more interesting than the title might suggest. The evening moved from the tangled emotions of boyhood to an operatic expression of erotic bliss, from Kandinsky’s abstractions to dancers circulating like the jeweled innards of an expensive watch, before ending in a peculiar world where Ravel, Magritte and human folly kept one another company.

A curious assortment on paper. Onstage, an exceptionally well-judged conversation, given eloquence by dancers whose versatility is one of Saint Louis Dance Theatre’s considerable assets.

Keerati Jinakunwiphat’s world premiere “Sands of Time” was the stronger of the two new works, exploiting the Touhill’s expansive stage and the company’s athletic resources. Soft pastel lighting lent the space a beachy atmosphere, while dancers passed through shifting arrangements that occasionally recalled the promenading figures of “Sunday in the Park With George.”

Keenan Fletcher at the Touhill.

Then the formations tightened, loosened and recombined, the dancers moving like the jeweled workings of an elaborate watch. Jinakunwiphat worked them hard, with intricate partnering and intersecting trajectories demanding split-second coordination. Yet one of the work’s boldest moments came when both music and movement ceased for an extended interval.

The stillness seemed to suspend time itself. In a dance devoted to time’s passage, Jinakunwiphat understood the expressive possibilities of stopping the clock.

Robert Battle’s “Unfold” approached harmony from the opposite direction, finding its expressive power in the smallest gestures. Two dancers, their movements tightly held and unfolding with almost excruciating deliberation, seemed to inhabit a different measure of time from Leontyne Price’s soaring rendition of “Depuis le jour” from Gustave Charpentier’s opera “Louise.”

Price’s voice filled the theater while the dancers expressed volumes through a shift of weight, the slow extension of a limb, the space maintained between two bodies. Physical intimacy and longing coexisted in a choreography whose economy made every gesture count. Saint Louis Dance Theatre has performed this five-minute pas de deux before, and I never tire of watching its dancers inhabit it.

Spencer Everett.

Douthit-Boyd’s own “Kandinsky (Picture Studies Excerpt)” took harmony into another artistic dimension. Ekphrasis in motion, it began with Wassily Kandinsky’s painting “Rose with Gray,” continued through Adam Schoenberg’s orchestral composition and arrived at choreography for three dancers wearing tops suggestive of modernist canvases.

The score’s angularity found expression in shifting geometries and sharply articulated gestures. Painting, music and movement made agreeable companions, although the choreography occasionally wandered into familiar contemporary-dance territory. Perhaps the complete work offers more surprises. The excerpt made its point and departed at about the right moment.

Rena Butler’s world premiere “BOYS” took on the formidable task of translating Rick Moody’s short story, which packs something approaching a novel’s worth of life into the experiences of twin boys, into dance. Butler widened the lens to examine masculinity, intimacy and identity, tracing the passage from boyhood to manhood through tenderness, conflict and the weight of societal expectations.

The choreography pursued the story’s compression of time and experience, though its episodes lacked the connective tissue that gives Moody’s prose its cumulative emotional force.

Molly Rapp and Sergio Comacho.

Muffled narration compounded the problem. Much of the spoken text disappeared into the soundscape, and the British accent seemed an odd choice for such a distinctly American story. The dancers brought conviction to Butler’s exploration of synchronicity and dissonance, but the work’s narrative and theatrical elements struggled to cohere. An ambitious premise, still searching for its fullest expression.

Johan Inger’s “Walking Mad” offered perhaps the evening’s most exhilarating exploration of harmony and dissonance. Set initially to Ravel’s “Boléro,” it introduced nine dancers, a large movable wall and a world in which Magritte might have collaborated with a vaudeville troupe after a particularly strange evening out.

The wall became an endlessly adaptable partner. Dancers climbed it, leaned against it and maneuvered around it as comedy shaded into aggression, flirtation into something more troubling. Inger’s choreography made apparent disorder look spontaneous, though its precision was evident in every carefully calibrated encounter.

And then, just as Ravel’s “Boléro” approaches its familiar orchestral explosion, Inger pulls the plug. Silence. The dancers’ frantic activity stops, leaving the audience suspended between the climax it anticipated and the stillness it receives. From that rupture emerges a quiet, melancholy epilogue set to Arvo Pärt’s minimalist piano composition “Für Alina.”

Angel Khaytyan

The theatrical commotion gives way to an intimate encounter in which tenderness and vulnerability emerge from the absurdity. The dancers navigate the change with an expressive control equal to their earlier exuberance.

Twice during the evening, music and movement came to a halt. Two choreographers, two silences, each making its own point. Douthit-Boyd’s programming gave those moments an unexpected kinship, just as his dancers found common ground among five disparate choreographic languages. Harmony, it turns out, sometimes depends on knowing when to stop.

Saint Louis Dance Theatre presented “Fall Series,” part of its 2026–27 “Elements of Harmony” season, Oct. 24–25 at the Blanche M. Touhill Performing Arts Center on the University of Missouri–St. Louis campus.

Photo Credit Pratt & Kreidich

Young Voices, Seasoned Hands in ‘Joshua’s Boots’ from Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and COCA

Young Voices, Seasoned Hands in ‘Joshua’s Boots’ from Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and COCA

By CB Adams

There’s swagger aplenty in “Joshua’s Boots,” along with a cattle stampede, a lynching and the complicated business of growing up Black in the American West of 1878. After a white mob murders his father in Tennessee, young Joshua heads west, hoping to make a life among the cowboys.

Director Adam Flores knows the size of these ingredients and, more importantly, their proportions. Working with Adolphus Hailstork’s music and Susan Kander’s deft libretto, he gives this hourlong opera its humor, heartbreak and historical weight, all governed by an admirable sense of restraint.

Michael Breaux plays Joshua with unwavering conviction, giving the young man’s journey a believable emotional center. His singing and acting possess an assurance that makes Joshua’s determination palpable.

Angel Love is a heartbreaker as Joshua’s Mama, then gives Sally Fingers a knowing blend of Miss Kitty from “Gunsmoke” and Joanie Stubbs from HBO’s “Deadwood.” She has the former’s poise, the latter’s worldly edge and the good sense to know what sort of men she’s dealing with.

Joshua (Michael Breaux) meets tavern keeper Sally (Angel Love) in Dodge City. Photo by Eric Woolsey

Sam Hawkins plays Frederick, the prejudiced trail boss who hires Joshua and treats him with open contempt. Hawkins makes that prejudice so convincing, so deeply ingrained in the man, that Frederick’s eventual change of heart after Joshua saves his life during a stampede strains credibility. Hawkins may have done his job a little too well for the libretto’s own good.

James Stevens handles four roles—Geezer, Frank, Captain Pershing and Cookie—with the unruffled ease of a man changing hats. Ricco Martin Jr. gives Natty Green, a cowboy Joshua encounters on his journey, his full allotment of swagger, then reins it in enough to reveal the man beneath the mannerisms.

One of the opera’s loveliest moments comes beside a campfire, where a solitary figure listens as Kayden Brooks sings from offstage. His voice meets Hailstork’s music and Kander’s words at precisely the right emotional temperature. A lovely bit of theatrical alchemy.

There are more performers onstage than musicians in the pit, though you’d never know it from the sound. Stephen Mager draws a remarkably full-bodied performance from his chamber orchestra, seemingly anticipating the singers’ every move. One hopes the young artists appreciate just how good they’ve got it.

Lucinda (Anna Edwards) complains to Cooke (James Stevens) that girls aren’t allowed to become cowboys, too. Photo by Eric Woolsey

Can a puff of smoke in a projected Tennessee holler be fraught with meaning? It can in the hands of video designers David Sajewich and Kylee Loera. That ominous detail signals Joshua’s father’s lynching.

Elsewhere, their projections establish the changing landscape of Joshua’s journey and, during the cattle stampede, join Giac Noelle’s choreography in sending bodies and images into convincing commotion. Suggestion and spectacle, each in its proper place.

The partnership among Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, COCA and its Artists in Training program gives emerging performers the opportunity to work alongside seasoned professionals, with the same artistic expectations. “Joshua’s Boots” makes a persuasive case for that collaboration and for the future of opera in St. Louis.

“Joshua’s Boots” was presented October 21–24 at COCA’s Catherine B. Berges Theatre.

(L to R) Kayden Brooks, Thomas Chatman, Ricco Martin Jr., Éamon Ewing, Cameron Hadley, and Kameron Henry as cowboys in “Joshua’s Boots.” Photo by Eric Woolsey

Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis Lets the Secrets Speak in ‘Appropriate’

Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis Lets the Secrets Speak in ‘Appropriate’

By CB Adams

Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis has lavished Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Appropriate” with an extraordinary amount of artistry, care and, yes, love. Director Benny Sato Ambush and company expend all three in service to the script, then leave it to the audience to decide what to carry away. A production this accomplished leaves the play nowhere to hide.

What emerges is a play about the corrosive nature of secrets and what happens when excavation produces more questions than certainty. The horrifying photographs discovered among a dead father’s possessions provide the catalyst, while foreshadowing something still more disturbing and revelatory. What they unleash within his surviving family becomes the play.

The Lafayettes, a white Southern family, have gathered at their late father’s crumbling Arkansas plantation house to empty it, sell it and presumably get on with their lives. Scenic and lighting designer Matthew McCarthy’s cluttered house looks in need of repair—hell, beyond repair—much like the family temporarily occupying it. The place is simultaneously familiar and foreign to them, an ambiguity Ambush mines throughout.

So does his exceptional ensemble. This is a family of old wounds and long memories of psychic bruises, and Jacobs-Jenkins knows where to press. Eventually everyone presses back. Fights are notoriously difficult to stage convincingly, and fight choreographer Shaun Sheley engineers this one so that accumulating hostility makes violence feel inevitable even as its eruption arrives as a shock. Bodies collide, years of grievance turn physical, and the production lands one of its most difficult moments.

Jilanne Marie Klaus makes Toni’s anger intelligible while allowing its ugliness full rein. Her grievances have calcified into an understanding of sacrifice, loyalty and what she believes she is owed. By Toni’s climactic declaration, Klaus has made clear how she arrived there, even as Toni reveals how far those grievances have carried her.

Joel Moses spends significant stage time bare-chested as Franz attempts to lay bare the man he believes he has become. Moses turns a faux-baptism and Franz’s pleas for understanding into blistering acts of self-revelation. Then Frank’s past resurfaces, forcing the family to contend with the man he was and the man claiming to stand before them now.

Michael James Reed begins with Bo’s recognizable silhouette—the tightly wound New Yorker juggling a threatened career, wife and children while hoping to dispatch his family obligations—and gradually opens him to something more vulnerable. In the aftermath of the violence, Reed brings Bo both home and not-home, allowing believable tears to reveal another dimension of a man whose competence has carried him only so far.

The women reveal different constructions of womanhood as the house strips away first impressions. Lizi Watt tightly unwinds Rachael scene by scene, moving the exasperated wife and in-law toward grievances and moral claims she fully earns. Maggie Newstead-Adams lets River arrive in full crunchy-granola, woo-woo New Age space-cadet mode, then deftly reveals deeper waters beneath the family’s assumptions about softness, youth and femininity.

The next generation is already carrying things forward. Braden Phillips makes Rhys a kind of put-upon horny Boo Radley opposite Ainsley Hammond’s naive teenage-rager Cassidy, while the youngest child innocently supplies one of the evening’s consequential revelations about the grandfather none of them fully knew.

Then there is the album.

It looks almost like a revered family Bible, a hefty, timeworn volume expected to preserve births, deaths and generations of Lafayette history. Instead, its pages contain photographs documenting horrific racial violence against Black Americans. Ambush stages this grotesque inversion of a family keepsake almost as another character, introducing the book with a held moment in a spotlight. It passes from revulsion to fascination and something more uncomfortable: prurience, that human impulse to gawk, the same one that slows traffic as drivers looky-loo through their windows at a fatal crash.

The album gets deliberately submerged in an attempt at erasure, then returns waterlogged to center stage as the family contemplates what it might fetch. The progression grows more grotesque: horror becomes curiosity, human suffering becomes collectible, and finally someone puts a price on it.

There is something here of Tim O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried,” his collection of linked stories about the physical and emotional burdens carried by soldiers in Vietnam. Call these the things they inherited: the Lafayettes return carrying old grievances and discover their dead father has left them much more to carry.

That inheritance also explains why “Appropriate” belongs at a Tennessee Williams festival. Jacobs-Jenkins has acknowledged borrowing from Williams and other American dramatists. That is the Tennessee Effect at work: inheritance put back to work, absorbed, altered and extended. “Appropriate” might be what happens when Big Daddy from “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” is already dead and buried—or is he? The patriarch is gone, but the house, the inheritance, the secrets and the damage remain.

Sound designer Mary Robinson’s insistent cicadas and ghostly whispers make the world beyond the house almost another presence. Ambush opens that world further in his culminating historical montage, where Robinson’s sound carries us from the secrets of one Southern family into the larger history of racial violence in America. Different people in the audience inevitably receive that history from different starting points. The production can put the same history before everyone. It cannot make that history equally remote—or equally revelatory—to everyone.

Walking toward the parking lot afterward, one woman supplied perhaps the most appropriate curtain line:

“I feel like we need a debrief.”

Tennessee Williams Festival St. Louis’s production of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “Appropriate” runs through Sept. 27 at the Catherine B. Berges Theatre at COCA, with remaining performances Sept. 25–27. For tickets and more information, visit twstl.org.

UAO’s Beautifully Sung ‘Samson et Dalila’ Struggles to Cohere

UAO’s Beautifully Sung ‘Samson et Dalila’ Struggles to Cohere

By CB Adams

There is a particular sadness when the pieces of an opera production, many of them individually accomplished, never quite cohere. Union Avenue Opera’s decision to close its 32nd Festival Season with Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Samson et Dalila” is ambitious.

Taking it on means wrestling with a work whose substantial oratorio DNA—formal choral writing, sumptuous vocal set pieces and orchestral architecture—can make it glorious to hear and stubbornly resistant to theater.

Under Scott Schoonover’s direction, Saint-Saëns’ gorgeous score makes the strongest case for the evening. The orchestra provides much of the production’s emotional life, supporting impressive voices whose differences sometimes make its mismatched power dynamics audible.

Jonny Kaufman’s clear, penetrating tenor finds Samson most persuasively in extremis, whether appealing to God or surrendering to Dalila. As the strongman weakens, Kaufman grows more compelling, turning desire into the vulnerability that undoes him. Bass-baritone Eliam Ramos brings resonant warmth and commanding authority to the High Priest of Dagon.

Melody Wilson as Dalila and Jonny Kaufman as Samson. Photo by Dan Donovan.

Melody Wilson’s warm, richly timbred mezzo creates an intriguing mismatch with her cool, regal Dalila, though that reserve eventually becomes a remoteness that keeps the character’s emotional depths beyond reach.

That distance matters because Samson and Dalila’s relationship is the hinge upon which everything turns. The opera asks us to believe in a complicated history that happened before we arrived.

Director Kathryn Frady’s intricate, tango-like Act II encounter is well sung and carefully staged, yet cannot make that unseen past feel lived. Even Samson’s blinding becomes a prolonged tableau of soldiers poised above his eyes, a theatrical device that exposes itself.

The sumptuous fabric-draped set impresses initially but evolves mostly through colored light, its palatial luxury tonally disconnected from the oppressed Israelites of Act I.

Eliam Ramos as High Priest, Fitzgerald St Louis as Abimelech. Photo by Dan Donovan.

Teresa Doggett’s costumes fare better, especially Dalila’s gleaming gold Bacchanale gown—she definitely said yes to the dress—and the High Priest’s finery.

When Saint-Saëns finally demands theatrical abandon, the Bacchanale remains curiously contained. Its awkward dance reenactment of Samson and Dalila muddles rather than intensifies the cruelty. After Kaufman makes Samson’s brokenness convincing, his sudden restored strength feels unearned, while the palace’s destruction registers as cheesy stagecraft rather than inevitable catastrophe.

At curtain call, the cast’s response to the applause felt different: relief at completing this difficult undertaking, perhaps, coupled with an almost urgent hope that the audience embraced what they had created. After so much beautiful singing and committed work that never fully cohered, the moment carried its own sadness.

Samson et Dalila ensemble. Photo by Dan Donovan.

Union Avenue Opera’s “Samson et Dalila” continues Aug. 21 and 22 at 8 p.m. at Union Avenue Christian Church, 733 N. Union Blvd., St. Louis.

Photo by Dan Donovan.

Union Avenue Opera’s ‘L’elisir d’amore’ Finds the Real Magic

Union Avenue Opera’s ‘L’elisir d’amore’ Finds the Real Magic

By CB Adams

Gaetano Donizetti’s “L’elisir d’amore” (“The Elixir of Love”) has delighted audiences for nearly two centuries. Union Avenue Opera’s current production, directed by Jon Truitt, captures the qualities that have given the opera its enduring appeal, never letting the comedy outrun the romance while unfolding the story in a warmly inhabited world where laughter and love spring from the same shared ground.

The story follows the shy Nemorino as he turns to a fake love potion in hopes of winning the independent Adina. Truitt never loses sight of the relationship at the story’s center, allowing it to deepen patiently until its conclusion feels earned.

Laura Skroska’s scenic design gives the Basque village the patina of a place where life has been unfolding long before the audience arrived. Patrick Huber’s lighting, Teresa Doggett’s costumes and Truitt’s fluid staging become the visual equivalent of bel canto itself. Nothing calls attention to itself because everything belongs.

Union Avenue Opera cast. Dan Donovan Photography.

Charles Calotta gives Nemorino an unaffected sincerity that makes his innocence touching rather than naïve. Kyaunnee Richardson preserves Adina’s independence, allowing confidence to yield gradually to recognition. Their relationship emerges through accumulated moments rather than grand declarations.

That sense of place extends beyond the scenery. The chorus never fades into the background. It remains part of the village’s daily life, so the world Truitt creates continues even when the audience’s attention belongs elsewhere.

Then there are the voices.

One of the evening’s pleasures comes from hearing Charles Calotta, John Robert Green and Junhan Choi let their unamplified voices bloom. From Union Avenue Opera’s relatively small stage, those voices seem to take on a life of their own as they move through the theater, creating the exhilarating illusion that they are still expanding long after they leave the singers.

 John Robert Green as Dulcamara and Charles Calotta as Nemorino in UAO’s L’elsir d’amore. Dan Donovan Photography.

Just as impressive, Kyaunnee Richardson belongs in that company. As Adina, she matches their warmth, assurance and presence while remaining unmistakably herself.

Calotta’s unaffected sincerity culminates in a beautifully judged “Una furtiva lagrima,” sung with warmth, restraint and quiet wonder as Nemorino realizes Adina has loved him all along. Green’s Doctor Dulcamara arrives knowing every crowd wants to believe the impossible.

Truitt occasionally nudges the comedy toward “The Pirates of Penzance,” though Green’s confidence is so complete that believing him almost seems reasonable. Choi gives Sergeant Belcore enough swagger and vocal authority to become a genuine rival rather than merely a comic obstacle, while Leann Schuering’s bright, observant Giannetta quietly binds the principals to the life of the village around them.

Charles Calotta as Nemorino and Junhan Choi as Belcore in UAO’s L’elsir d’amore. Dan Donovan Photography.

Music director and conductor Cara Chowning shapes Donizetti’s score with an unforced sense of flow, allowing it to sparkle without rushing its quieter moments. Throughout the evening, orchestra and stage breathe together, sustaining the warmth and humanity that make Union Avenue Opera’s “L’elisir d’amore” so satisfying.

Union Avenue Opera’s production of “L’elisir d’amore” was performed July 24-26, and July 31, Aug. 1, 2026, at Union Avenue Christian Church in St. Louis.

 Leann Schuering as Giannetta in UAO’s L’elsir d’amore. Dan Donovan Photography.

Union Avenue Opera Finds the Operatic Voice of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’

Union Avenue Opera Finds the Operatic Voice of ‘Fiddler on the Roof’

By CB Adams

Union Avenue Opera’s “Fiddler on the Roof” returns to the artistic conversation from which the musical emerged. Stage director Kasey Cox reunites the humanity of Sholem Aleichem’s original Tevye stories, Marc Chagall’s symbolic visual imagination, Joseph Stein’s theatrical adaptation and Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s beloved score in a production that speaks confidently in the company’s own operatic voice.

Judged on those terms, it succeeds as a cohesive interpretation that lets each artistic voice strengthen the others.

Tevye is one of those rare roles that every audience has already cast before the actor walks onstage. E. Scott Levin wisely avoids competing with the ghosts of Zero Mostel, Topol and others who have shaped the character’s legacy.

Arielle Pedersen as Chava, Brianna Murray as Tzeitel. Vianca Alejandra as Hodel. Fiddler on the Roof at Union Avenue Opera/ Dan Donovan Photography.

Instead, his resonant bass-baritone opens another path into Tevye, revealing the milkman’s negotiations with God, his family and himself through the expressive power of the voice.

Kate Tombaugh’s Golde finds her greatest authority in song, while Brianna Murray and Eric Botto as Tzeitel and Motel, Vianca Alejandra and John Tibbetts as Hodel and Perchik, and Arielle Pedersen and James Stevens as Chava and Fyedka allow the musical’s three courtships to unfold with steadily increasing emotional weight.

Amy Maude Helfer gives Yente warmth beyond comic obligation, and Spencer Reichman brings both strength and vulnerability to Lazar Wolf.

Dan Donovan Photography.

Conductor Scott Schoonover draws warmth, clarity and balance from orchestra and cast, allowing Bock’s score to bloom without overwhelming the unamplified voices. The great ensemble numbers—especially “Tradition,” “Sabbath Prayer” and the wedding sequence—rise, swell and wash over the audience like a warm, powerful wave.

They become the sound of Anatevka itself, voices rising from individual characters into a shared expression of faith, celebration and endurance.

Patrick Huber’s scenic design speaks Chagall’s symbolic visual language rather than literal realism, its fragmented imagery gaining meaning as the evening unfolds before culminating in a quietly moving final image.

Dan Donovan Photography.

Andrea Reed adapts Jerome Robbins’ iconic choreography with intelligence and economy to Union Avenue Opera’s intimate stage, while Teresa Doggett’s costumes and Zak Metalsky’s lighting complete a visual world rooted in memory, tradition and community.

Cox directs with confidence in the material itself, trusting the performances, voices and score to carry the storytelling. The result is a thoughtful, integrated production that honors the musical’s deepest artistic roots while making full use of Union Avenue Opera’s greatest strength: the expressive power of the human voice.

Union Avenue Opera presented “Fiddler On the Roof” on July 3, 5, 10 and 11 2026 at Union Avenue Christian Church.

E Scott Levin as Tevye. Kate Tombaugh as Golde.Fiddler on the Roof at Union Avenue Opera. Dan Donovan Photography.

Center Stage Delivers a Winning Showcase for OTSL’s Young Artists

Center Stage Delivers a Winning Showcase for OTSL’s Young Artists

By CB Adams

Concert presenters have a name for performers and composers who reliably fill seats: bankers. Beethoven is a banker. Wagner is a banker. Debussy is a banker. Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ annual Center Stage concert has become a banker of a different sort.

The evidence could be heard in the departing crowd following Tuesday’s performance. Audience members traded variations on the same thought: Center Stage just keeps getting better. The buoyancy was palpable.

This year’s concert featured 28 Richard Gaddes Festival Artists and Gerdine Young Artists, selected from more than 1,100 applicants. Accompanied onstage by select musicians of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, the singers performed a thoughtfully curated program of opera and Broadway selections, all sung in their original languages.

Artistic Director Patricia Racette has shaped Center Stage into an evening of theater. Semi-staged scenes and ensembles dominate, with minimal props and plenty of dramatic intensity. Heavy on the Italian seasoning this year, the program moved confidently through the operatic repertoire before folding in selections from “Chicago,” “West Side Story” and “Carousel.” The arc gave individual singers their moments while sustaining the momentum of a complete evening.

Vinicius Costa as Mephistopheles and Landry Allen as Faust performing “A mois les plaisirs” from Faust. Photo © Eric Woolsey, 2026

The performers attacked their opportunities with the unmistakable energy of young artists who know a few minutes onstage can make an impression. One of the evening’s pleasures came in watching the instant transformation after a scene ended: the final note, a flicker of silence, then the character disappeared and the young artist emerged to receive the applause.

That dramatic commitment surfaced throughout the program. Gaddes Festival Artist Vinicius Costa showed impressive range, bringing swagger and menace to Mephistopheles in Gounod’s “Faust,” then pivoting to deft comic timing as Don Basilio in Rossini’s “The Barber of Seville.” The six “merry murderesses” of “Cell Block Tango” from “Chicago,” meanwhile, attacked Kander and Ebb’s number with individually etched characters and a collective ferocity that made the stage feel suddenly crowded with dangerous women.

Shiyu Zhuo as Sophie and Ashlyn Brown as Octavian performing “Mir ist die ehre widerfahren” from Der Rosenkavalier. Photo © Eric Woolsey, 2026

In previous years, Center Stage often produced a handful of performances that left one thinking, “That one’s going somewhere.” This year, the remarkable depth of the roster became the story. Memorable individual performances emerged across a field operating at a strikingly high level. The growing strength of the applicant pool — and the precious few who earn places in these programs — has raised the level of the entire enterprise.

That consistency explains why Center Stage has become such a reliable draw. Racette and her team have created an evening built around discovery, theatrical immediacy and the infectious intensity of artists eager to show what they can do. That’s a banker worth betting on.

Opera Theatre of Saint Louis presented Center Stage on June 23 at the Loretto-Hilton Center.

(L to R) Rosaria Armas, Cristina Escobedo, Kim Stanish, Shyheim Selvan Hinnant, Julia Maria Johnson, Joel Clemens, Paige Michels, Lazuli Bruno Clark, Edmond Rodriguez, and Anthony Voiers in the Act IV finale from Le nozze di Figaro. Photo © Eric Woolsey, 2026
Emily Kondrat, Audrianna Hughes, Kaya Giroux, Julia Maria Johnson, Veronica Siebert, and Imara Ashton as the Six Merry Murderesses in “Cell Block Tango” from Chicago. Photo © Eric Woolsey, 2026

OTSL’s ‘The Pirates of Penzance’ Sails On Music, Wit and Comic Precision

OTSL’s ‘The Pirates of Penzance’ Sails On Music, Wit and Comic Precision

By CB Adams

The performing arts do love a new label, especially for an old idea. Take “poperetta,” a recent coinage for musical theater that mixes high and low, sophistication and popular appeal. Gilbert and Sullivan might reasonably ask what took us so long. Nearly 150 years after “The Pirates of Penzance” first set sail, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ exuberant revival finds this Victorian confection still afloat, still tuneful and still very funny. Apparently, nobody told it that it was old.

Director and choreographer Seán Curran knows precisely what keeps this gloriously improbable work moving. His production, first staged at OTSL in 2013, has since been mounted by opera companies across the country. Back where it began, the production remains fresh and remarkably sure of itself. The stage is rarely still. Gesture, rhythm and split-second timing accumulate into comedy, grounded by characters who treat every ridiculous circumstance with complete seriousness.

James Schuette’s sets and costumes announce the game before Sullivan’s score gets underway. A grand gilt Victorian proscenium, crowned by a skull and crossed swords, frames the thrust stage. Red curtains, vivid painted backdrops and a pirate ship cheerfully wheeled into place suggest a pop-up book sprung to life. The machinery shows. That’s part of the point.

Daniel Luis Espinal gives Frederic a bright, ardent tenor and a winning innocence. Jana McIntyre’s Mabel brings character and wit to the role’s coloratura demands. Their romantic sincerity gives the surrounding lunacy something firm to bounce against.

Jana McIntyre and Daniel Luis Espinal, Photo by Eric Woolsey.

The production has comic talent to spare. William Socolof’s Pirate King swaggers and blusters with comic authority, while Meredith Arwady brings a formidable contralto and deft comic timing to Ruth. Robert Mellon makes Major-General Stanley a beaming monument to cheerful foolishness, dispatching the famous patter song with impressive clarity. Shyheim Selvan Hinnant makes the Sergeant of Police one of the evening’s comic highlights, leading his hapless constables through some of Curran’s funniest physical comedy.

George Manahan conducts members of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with equal attention to Sullivan’s melodic beauty and the propulsion that keeps Curran’s production moving. The chorus, prepared by Andrew Whitfield, contributes power, verbal clarity and distinct comic character.

After nearly 150 years, “The Pirates of Penzance” has nothing to prove. Curran and company trust the music, sharpen the comedy and keep the whole improbable contraption moving. The old thing sails beautifully.

Opera Theatre of Saint Louis’ production of “The Pirates of Penzance” was performed May 23 through June 27 as part of the company’s 2026 Festival Season.

Robert Mellon as the Major General. Photo by Eric Woolsey.

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.