In Central City, Colorado, Puccini’s Gold Rush Opera Finds an Ideal Venue
/By Truman C. Wang
7/21/2024
Photo credit: Amanda Tipton Photography
Kara Shay Thomson as minnie
At 8,691 feet above sea level, the summer opera festival in Central City, Colorado is America’s highest and possibly least-known classical music festival. Higher than Aspen and Vail, higher than Verbier in the Swiss Alps, Central City will literally take your breath away with its thin air, and its charming Victorian downtown shops and casinos. The average summer temperature is a pleasant 80 degrees Fahrenheit, with occasional showers. The scenic drive from Denver to Central City, by way of Lookout Mountain, is spectacular.
What drew me to this revitalized old mining town in the Rocky Mountains, 40 miles west of Denver, was the staging of Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West (La Fanciulla del West), also set in a Gold Rush mining town (but in California’s Sierra Mountains), by the Central City Opera. This historic opera house, built in 1878, is small jewel box – only 550 seats and two levels decorated in ornate Victorian and European styles. I attended the Sunday, July 12 performance and thought it every bit as compelling musically and visually as another Puccini opera, Turandot, I had seen a month earlier at the Met in New York, with 3,800 seats and a stage seven times wider.
In the Central City Opera staging, directed by Fenlon Lamb, the High Sierras become the Rockies, and Wowkle, the Indian maidservant, gets a Caucasian lover – not a big deal. More importantly, the director brings out the tensions and emotions in the crowd scenes as expertly as she does in the intimate scenes. The nostalgic chorus of homesick miners was movingly sung from stage front and center. Never did one sense overcrowding or clutter on the small stage. The imaginative lighting and video projection that add wood pillars and a mining shaft onto the wide proscenium, a snowy sky outside Minnie’s cabin, a hangman’s gallows protruding from the stage in act three – all work together to create an illusion of the stage being much larger than it is. The handsome, traditional sets for the Polka salon, mountain cabin and the forest reminded me of the Wild West décor I saw the day before at the Buffalo Bill Museum in the nearby city of Golden.
The performance by a young cast was sensitive and powerfully moving, as well sung and acted as any I have heard in a bigger house with a more famous cast. Kara Shay Thomson was a fierce, unflinching Minnie; she was well-matched vocally by Jonathan Burton’s ardent Dick Johnson, who delivered a ringing “Chi’ella mi creda” in act three (the only big aria in the opera.) Their scenes together in act one and act two (love duet) were as memorable for their vocal chemistry as their physical chemistry. Grant Youngblood, whose suave and noble singing as sheriff Jack Rance, portrayed an atypical Puccini villain with a secret heart of gold (unlike Scarpia who is a villain through and through.) Other fine young artists in the cast were Matthew Cossack as Sonora, and Christopher Job as Ashby. Half the chorus wore face masks as a safety precaution on account of their ailing colleages (who were not performing in the show), and they sounded fabulous.
Andrew Bisantz’s conducting was eloquent and sure in its musical and dramatic pacing. The orchestra, almost entirely hidden from view below the stage, sounded full and detailed from the softest passages (harp and strings in Minnie-Johnson’s act one duet) to the climaxes (act two love duet with deep, long yearnings in the strings), thanks to the opera house’s excellent acoustics, where instrumental sounds seemed to emanate out of the floors, walls, and ceilings and resonated in perfect balance with the voices throughout the small auditorium.
With the aforementioned Met Turandot still fresh in my ears, I noticed two musical motifs from that opera in Girl of the Golden West: the music that accompanies Dick Johnson’s line “I’ve got to leave now” in act one, and the moment in act two when the angry Minnie drags the wounded Johnson out of hiding – both showing traces of the famous “Nessun dorma” theme, 14 years before the famous aria was written!
An interesting historical tidbit about the Central City Opera Company, it commissioned “The Ballad of Baby Doe” in 1956, its libretto based on the lives of Central City’s richest residents Horace Tabor and his wife Elizabeth ‘Baby Doe’.
Five more performances of The Girl of the Golden West remain, on July 23, 25, 27, 31, and August 3. Other shows in the 2024 summer season are The Pirates of Penzance and Kurt Weill’s Street Scene. Purchase tickets here.
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.