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.
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.
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.
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.