Opera Saratoga wants you to have a good time. Why else would the company produce a season that consists of a musical comedy from Broadway (“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder”) and an opera buffa in the Italian tradition (Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale”)? There are also free performances of “The Selfish Giant,” a new family-friendly one-act based on an Oscar Wilde story. Besides the accessible and lighthearted material, audiences will likely get a feeling of intimacy with the singers who will be performing on a thrust stage at Universal Preservation Hall, a new venue for the company located in downtown Saratoga.
Things get started on Friday, June 30 with the first of four performances of “A Gentleman’s Guide,” starring the 30-year old baritone Eric J. McConnell as Monty Navarro, a working class nobody who learns that he was actually born of an aristocratic lineage and is the ninth in line to be the Earl of Highhurst. Not to be denied a grand inheritance, Monty makes it his mission to kill every member of the D’Ysquith family who comes before him in the line of succession. He’s efficient in the task, which is largely completed during the first act.
Opera Saratoga presents
“A Gentleman’s Guide to Love and Murder” (June 30, July 2, 6, 8)
Donizetti’s “Don Pasquale” (July 1, 7, 9)
Where: Universal Preservation Hall, 25 Washington Street, Saratoga Springs
Tickets: $27.50-$102.50 . Call (518) 346-6204. Or visit: OperaSaratoga.org
Also: Free performances of “The Selfish Giant” are at 11 a.m. Saturday, July 1 and Saturday, July 8 at UPH and Wednesday, July 5 at Pitney Meadows Farm.
“They all die in increasingly grizzly ways, some onstage, some implied offstage. Everyone of them is so power hungry and narcissistic that you have to be routing against these people who think they are invincible,” says McConnell. “Monty’s also extremely flawed,…
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