One wonders how many words have been written about Giuseppe Verdi’s La Traviata since its premiere in 1853.  A disaster at its opening, it quickly became one of the most appreciated masterpieces in the canon and the anchor to the composer’s rich middle period along with Il Travatore and Rigoletto.  In many years it has been the most performed opera worldwide, and why not?  With end-to-end luscious music, gaiety, romance, drama, exoticism, dance, and tragedy, all in a believable (fictionalized) storyline, what’s not to like?  And remarkably, this stunningly beautiful opera was written in record time.

What made the source material, the roman à clef La Dame aux Camélias, au courant and what set salon society atwitter was that with little concealed, it tells of the recent sad existence of Parisian courtesan Marie Duplessis and her relationship with none other than the novel’s author, Alexandre Dumas fils.

The opera appeared shortly after the novel with the basic facts intact, wherein Alfredo Germont falls in love with Violetta.  Unbeknownst to Alfredo, his father Georgio successfully implores her to abandon her love for the sake of Alfredo’s sister and the family honor – notwithstanding that Violetta is dying of consumption and is now without means of support.  An atoned father and son come separately to Violetta’s tattered lodgings and deathbed just before she expires.  The real-life Marie was 23 years old.

There is a reason that the plot of this opera is important to summarize.  Francesco Maria Piave’s libretto offers social commentary, noting that the Germonts were in the highly prosperous merchant class where social mores were quite strict. The nobility that Violetta normally hung with could give a damn about the propriety of the masses.

Also, it would be difficult to find many operas in which three main characters reveal such poignant evolution in three acts.  As a courtesan of the highest order, Violetta should be totally amoral, yet she falls in love with a commoner, and her caring for Alfredo and his family lead to her isolation, impoverishment, and death.  Alfredo goes from being an ardent puppy dog to a petulant spurned paramour to a regretful true lover.  Giorgio was driven only by the needs of his family to maintain its social position. This blinded him to the goodness of Violetta and the love that she and Alfredo shared. Too late he realizes how complete her sacrifice has been, and he becomes racked with earnest grief and guilt.  This is real tear-jerking stuff.

Opera San Jose takes on this war horse once more, insightfully directed by Tara Branham who has an interesting backstage history with the opera.  She takes a more literal and expressive approach than many productions, while introducing some new twists that work well, like kathak (Indian) dancing in the party scene and an amusing gender transformation.  Further, Alfredo is portrayed very much as an outsider lacking the largesse of the noble class. The outcome is all you could ask for from the company, equally comfortable with the grand party scenes that fix in the memory and the intimate chamber scenes that better reveal character traits.  The staging and singing are thoughtful and beautiful throughout.

Overture themes signal the wonderful music to come, and its somber opening motif foretells and bookends the closing sadness.  The remainder of Act 1 contains a wealth of memorable arias and ensembles that few other operas can claim.  The whole work resonates with instrumental music delivered by Conductor Johannes Löhner’s well-honed orchestra.

Violetta is regarded as a great challenge for any soprano, demanding vocal and acting versatility, reflecting the character’s many shifts in mood and physical strength.  Mikayla Sager in a role debut delivers the receipts, as her dark spinto voice suits the part of a doleful and dying heroine.  She commands the coloratura runs and flourishes with ease along with the emotional rollercoaster that the character suffers from the bright “Sempre libera” (“Always free”) to the gut-wrenching finale “Gran Dio!…morir sì giovane” (“Great God!…to die so young”).

Her counterpart, WooYoung Yoon as Alfredo exhibits a strong, clarion tenor voice that rings clear to the very end.  It did seem that he needed a warmup at opening.  Perhaps it’s unfair to have a highlight such as the lively brindisi “Libiamo ne’ lieti calici” (“Let’s drink from the joyful cups”) almost out of the gate before the singer hits stride.  In a couple of places in that toasting song, Yoon seemed to get caught between major and minor intervals, but beyond that, he was on pitch and powerful.

The third major player is Giorgio Germont, performed by bass Kidon Choi who produces a big, round, warm sound backed with emotion.  A fitting Giorgio, his voice, however, is a bit cloaked, and he does have a tendency to drag to dirge speed, as noted in his signature aria “Di Provenza il mar” (“Who erased the sea and the land of Provence from your heart?”

Even for those who feel they’ve seen enough of La Traviata (my tenth), this one is a joy.

La Traviata, with music by Giuseppe Verdi and libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, based on the novel La Dame aux Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils, is produced by Opera San José and plays at California Theatre, 345 South First Street, San Jose, CA through May 3, 2026.

As the world’s most noted playwright, it should be no surprise that William Shakespeare’s works have provided the basis for some of opera’s most enduring classics.  Giuseppe Verdi was a particular admirer and sourced Otello, Falstaff, and Macbeth from the Bard’s work.  Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet and Thomas’s Hamlet are other examples.  But though Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears condensed the beloved A Midsummer Night’s Dream (AMND), unlike other adaptations from Shakespeare, they preserved his language in an eloquent if archaic libretto.

Pocket Opera offers a spectacular rendering of Britten’s music in a world premiere chamber orchestra adaptation of the instrumental music by its orchestrator Liam Daly, authorized by the Britten-Pears Estate.  The score feels absolutely perfect in the chamber form as well executed under the leadership of Music Director and Conductor David Drummond.

As Shakespeare’s foremost comedy, AMND possesses all of the trappings of the genre – non-human fairies, supernatural intervention, sleeping potions, crossed lovers, mistaken identities, a play-within-a-play, the human Bottom in a pun-worthy act turned into an ass (the animal, that is), and general frivolity throughout.  All of this plays to the most lilting, delightful music in Britten’s canon.

For the greater part, the orchestral music seems almost detached from the sung, but each appeals, and somehow they work together.  Leitmotifs abound, and the score is bouncy, often with lush, quavering strings supported by a raft of pizzicato elements from plucks to clinks coming from virtually all of the instruments.  There are discrete if unmemorable arias in the score, while the most distinctive true ensemble is the interesting high wire screaming quartet by the young Athenian lovers in Act 2.

The score is generally in the post-Romantic, modernist idiom, with the exception of the rustic actors’ performance of the play-within-a-play.  In this case, the orchestra very much complements the singing, and the idiom is a melodic throwback to the likes of Puccini and Verdi.  To top it off, bits include humorous parodies of Romeo and Juliet’s death scene as well as Lucia’s mad scene.

Bringing off this somewhat overstuffed narrative that may be hard for the uninitiated to follow, is an absolutely marvelous, well-selected cast.  With twentyish named principal roles, filling the parts would seem a monumental challenge, but each voice is remarkably skilled and suited to the role.  In a sense, it’s unfair to highlight some and not others, but we all have our favorites.

As the mischief-making protagonist Oberon, the King of the Fairies, Kyle Tingson displays a rare, honey-like, easy-sounding countertenor voice that sets the standard and tone for the other artists.  Another standout is tenor Kevin Gino as Lysander who not only displays a wide vocal range but best exemplifies the other compelling aspect of all of the performances, and that is fine acting.  Gino visually and emotionally expresses with the fine detail expected from a straight actor.

The other male voice of note is a local favorite with a strong North American resumé, and that is bass Kirk Eichelberger as Bottom.  His powerful, mellifluous voice is a house filler under normal circumstances, but in the intimate surroundings of this production, there’s no challenge.  This intimacy, performed on a front-row-level thrust stage and only several rows of seats on each side offers an immediacy that makes for a very involving personal experience.

While male voices dominate AMND, female voices in the production are equally strong, but only one major principal female part stands out, the role of Tytania, Queen of the Fairies.  With the originally-cast Tytania falling sick early in the week, cover Ash Hurtado filled the role without missing a beat.  Hurtado’s heavily tremoloed coloratura soprano soars to the heights with arpeggios and leaps, both in terms of range and volume, standing out above a chorus of others.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is full of humorous possibilities that rely on interpretation and fulfillment.  Here we must shed light on multi-talented factotum (borrowing from Figaro) Nicolas Garcia, the general director of the company. He stage directs this production, extracting wonderfully expressive and nuanced performances from the cast and guiding the complex movement.  He also designed the lively costumes from the pastel jump-suit-like outfits of the soprano-driven fairy chorus to the gaudy plaid suits of the rustic actors.

Because of Pocket Opera’s unique operational mode, offering one performance of a production in three different venues, staging must be easily portable.  Though Daniel Yelen’s set and props are fairly rudimentary, they work beautifully in this compact arena and with the other elements of the production.

Similar to other Pocket Opera productions that I’ve reviewed, I have not been favorably disposed going in.  However, they’ve proven once again how professionally they produce and how entertaining their productions are.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a world-premiere orchestration by Liam Daly, is composed by Benjamin Britten with libretto by the composer and Peter Pears, based on the play of the same name by William Shakespeare, and was performed at Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts with remaining performances on April 19 at Hillside Club, 2286 Cedar Street, Berkeley, CA, and on April 26 at Legion of Honor, 100 34^th Avenue, San Francisco, CA.

We want to believe that the arc of our lives is driven by our own agency.  But at least in its embellishments, life is full of random occurrences that color our existence.  As a small example, recently on a flight from Paris to Cotonou, Benin, my wife Karin engaged in conversation with another passenger.  Though working for Google in Silicon Valley, it turns out he was from Benin and visiting home.  The next day he hosted us to visit attractions, restaurants, and events that we would never have experienced as normal tourists, and it left a wonderful impression with us that we would have otherwise missed.

How often have we all been on planes or trains or elsewhere and observed the people around us?  Perhaps by their appearance; what they are reading or watching; and the food and drink they order, we may even concoct backstories in our mind about them.  Yet, for the greater part, we never talk to them.  Such is the premise of Keith Bunin’s The Coast Starlight, named for the Amtrak itinerary between Los Angeles and Seattle.  But this 36-hour gabfest is a grand “What if?”  The exchanges that we will witness between the passengers do not happen, but they are their thoughts of what might have been if they’d actually had the interest or courage to meet and interact with these strangers.

The Rebecca Haley Clark directed production by San Jose’s The Stage captivates from beginning to end.  Six passengers trickle onto a train car between Los Angeles and Oakland and disembark between Dunsmuir, CA and the end of the line.  The ensemble is exceptionally powerful, giving life and gravity to their portrayals; the characters are sharply drawn with stories that are compelling; and though the action occurs in a train car, the scenic design by Giulio Cesare Perrone makes the field of play larger and more dynamic.

As each character enters the carriage, we quickly learn what challenge they confront – love relationship, family, or job.  But the central figure who has the most challenging decision is T.J., portrayed with great magnetism by Braeden Harris, whose anxiety shows with his thoughtful expression emanating from his gestures, his eyes, and brows.  A Navy medic who is going AWOL over orders to deploy to Afghanistan, T.J. has already pulled a tour of duty there and sees the futility of risking his life in a conflict that seems to have no purpose and no end.

T.J. and Jane (Storm White), an animation artist who is going to Seattle with the expectation that a romance will end, are the first on the train.  Seated across from each other, like most people in real life, they steal glances at one another but fail to connect.

Along the way, Noah (Terrance Austin Smith) will board.  He had served in Afghanistan ten years before and represents a class of individuals who put a cause above their own needs.  He got nothing from serving and has led an aimless existence since mustering out, yet he believes in the greater good and fears the deaths that will occur in T.J.’s absence.  Noah can be viewed as an unquestioning patriot, whether his position is right or wrong.

T.J. will have to weigh the arguments as the clock ticks.  Should he concoct a story for his reporting late for duty and accept some punishment for his imprudence, or will he spend the rest of his life looking over his shoulder in the country he loves or live in exile, never to come home again?

One minor flaw in the conceit that interactions are in the minds of the passengers is when they have soliloquies.  As Liz, Charlotte Boyce Munson arrives having abandoned her boyfriend at a couples retreat at Esalen.  She strikes a vein as either the oblivious or self-obsessed person who exposes all sorts of personal information by yakking on a cell phone at a volume that fills the room.  Did that really happen?  What about the entrance of Ed (Joel Roster) who has failed his way down the employment and family ladders and boards the train in a blithering, inebriated fog.  And finally, there’s Anna (Rinabeth Apostol), who has identified her dead brother and carries his ashes.  Does she really offer her sleeping berth to T.J., or is that her (or his) fantasy?

If the above seems to expose a lot of plot line, wait, there’s much more, and it’s highly enticing. In any case, the interactions are lively, and sometimes blistering, with poignant portraits of decent people fighting through lonely interludes yet not reaching out except in their imaginations.  Though the events could play in a claustrophobic setting, two devices open up the staging.  End-to-end projections (Erik Scanlon) on the back wall depict the California terrain as the train passes by.  Also, pairs of passenger seats are joined and on rollers, so they can be scooted around, which they often are, and at times playfully or joyously.

The people and situations that they face on the Coast Starlight resonate in an extremely clever script executed with excellence.

The Coast Starlight, written by Keith Bunin, is produced by The Stage and plays at its home at 490 South 1^st Street, San Jose, CA through April 26, 2026.

Dribble between your legs.  Talk trash.  Push and cheat as much as possible without getting called for a foul.  Such were among the things taught to Starra by her mother, who preceded her by a generation on the Plainole (Arkansas) girls’ basketball team.

While her mother was the main attraction, intense and scrappy Starra has been reduced to second fiddle with the arrival of super-scorer Sidney.  But maybe with her addition, the team can make it to the state championship rounds, and catch the eyes of college recruiters.  The hitch is that the other key player on the team, April, is pregnant, and Coach Francine Page has a strict rule that pregnant girls can’t play.  The members of the team had made a pact that there would be no smoking, no drinking, and no sex until the season was over.  April broke that vow.

The team tries all manner of trickery to get the coach to relent, even wearing pregnancy prosthetics to show that they can all perform with a belly bump.  What else to do?  Of course, one alternative is for April to get an abortion, and since she’s seen the future for teen mothers, she has the will but not the money.

Meanwhile, Starra’s resentment of Sidney reaches the point that she is willing to undermine her.  This fixation on punishing a rival, despite the probable consequences to the team and to herself, is a sad reflection of the human condition that resonates with truth.

Flex is a play that centers on basketball, with plenty of one-on-ones, scrimmaging, and simulated games.  Even though the ball playing is far from realistic, the opening night audience still became frenzied during a “game” as if its cheering for a real team in a real competition.

But despite the overarching focus on basketball which can seem superficial, the play can also be seen through a line in the dialog – “Basketball isn’t a game.  It’s a war zone.”  Indeed, thematic issues emerge with the rat-a-tat of a machine gun – competition, abortion, sacrifice, keeping secrets intending to protect others, imposition of will, commitment, friendship, coming-of-age, young love, agency, separation, trust, betrayal, redemption, faith, sexual abuse, and more.  Yet, for the abundance of issues that arise, they almost all seem organic to the story line, and they are certainly all relevant to growing up hard-scrapple, female, and black in the South, or anywhere else.

Playwright Candrice Jones knows these girls.  She has created an ensemble of characters with distinct personalities and traits from the religious Cherise (Emma Gardner) to the independent April (Camille Collaço) and the conciliator Donna (Courtney Gabrielle Williams).  Under Margo Hall’s direction, each actor attacks her part with conviction.

Starra, performed by a form-fit Santeon Brown, is the captain of the team and the anchor of the cast.  She is the only one who displays notable basketball skills, but she also has the grit and the strutting panache to talk the talk and walk the walk.  But Starra also has a loving side as she often has soliloquies to share with her presumably deceased mother. Her nemesis, Sidney (Page Mayes), is also cocky, but with more convincing and less boisterous confidence.

The adult in the room is the driven but empathetic Coach Francine Pace, portrayed wonderfully by Halili Knox.  She disciplines as should be expected, but she cares about her charges and can also mother them and provide support when needed.  She also possesses the classic former athlete’s characteristic of living in the past by repeating the same stories over and again to groans by the listeners.

The overall production is powerful, with the actors creating three-dimensional characters who often face conundrums with no simple solutions, like April’s pregnancy and Starra’s deception.  But as individuals, they draw attention and sympathy.

The action plays on Bill English’s well-appointed scenic design, a simple gym-like setting with baskets that sometimes seemed to have a lid on them, as many easy shots were missed.  A car makes appearances more than once, and there is also a baptismal pool (I won’t say why.) One weakness is sound.  The performers are not amplified, and occasionally voices fade.  But what is more challenging for the listener is when music is playing which competes with the dialog.  Background sound early in the piece is mostly just annoying, but in a scene in Donna’s car, the music overpowers the girls’ voices.

Nonetheless, the play is very watchable and the messages very important.

Flex, written by Candrice Jones, is produced by San Francisco Playhouse and is performed on its stage at 450 Post Street, San Francisco, CA through May 2, 2026.

No doubt, the whole world has drooled in speculation, wondering what would happen if Keith from The Partridge Family and Marcia from The Brady Bunch fell in love.  Totally Shakespearean – like the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet!   Well, if nobody else did, playwright Stephen Garvey did.

The outcome is a parody of the two squeaky-clean, oversized families from sit-com television in the first half of the ‘70s.  But instead of confronting the Brady’s trivial domestic problems or the Partridge’s performance issues, these clans in The Bardy Bunch enter a blood feud that starts with a clash of booking and ends with virtually everyone in both families slain.  And it’s all played to pop music from the original two TV series and with integration of situations and dialog from around a dozen of Shakespeare’s plays.  Do I hear a farce?

Jumping on the bandwagon is rife in the entertainment business, and these copycat cohorts ran in primetime both starting and ending within months of each other.  Both had loving parent or parents with an age-diverse five or six kids whose competition with one another became an issue.  And each had a dorky non-family member who was part of the mix – the maid Alice for the Bradys and the manager Reuben for the Partridges.

A lot of theatergoers grew up with these TV series, while others had not.  This production offers ticket upgrade options that include screenings of excerpts from the two shows, so that even those who are unfamiliar can get a flavor of the characters and then see their theatrical personas.  Probably the more familiar the viewer is, the more pumped they will get with the theatrical mash up.  Yet, even those who know nothing of the series’ background but know a little Shakespeare should find it a gas.  Of course, there is a lot of parody of Romeo and Juliet but also bits from Macbeth including Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalk; Hamlet, with a particular fractured line delivered by Bobby Brady as “To BB or not to BB” (get it?); The Merchant of Venice’s “pound of flesh;” and more.

Guggenheim Entertainment’s rowdy revival captures the ‘70s with silly characters clad in garish period costumery with an emphasis on comic/graphic flowers and orange color that look straight out of Rowan and Martin’s Laugh In. 

Dave Abrams as Keith and Sophie Schulman bring verve to their central roles.  On television, Keith was the most musical of the kids, so Abrams does the heavy lifting here.  The most famous song to come out of the shows was the Partridge’s “I Think I Love You,” a pop anthem that rose to number 1 on several charts.  With that as a benchmark, one might expect that the whole soundtrack would be bubble gum.

But with some solid tunes and arrangements and a heavier sound led by the energetic Abrams, much of the music rocks and even has a touch of soul.   Numbers like “I Woke Up This Morning” and “I Can Feel Your Heartbeat” hit the spot.  And while most of the lead singers deliver the goods, some underutilized voices are particularly powerful.  Stephen Guggenheim and Susan Gundunas as the Brady parents both have considerable opera resumés.  Meanwhile, between the chirpy interludes, intrigue and mayhem abound, but the dark side is delivered in such a goofy manner that you don’t even think of the body count.

Director Scott Evan Guggenheim keeps the action moving on a stage that divides the two families onto respective sides of the stage.  The staging cleverly serves many purposes, with the special visual attraction being the Partridge family’s bus in the style of a Mondrian painting.

The Bardy Bunch is for most but not for everyone.  It has no layers of meaning, thoughtful provocation, or ethereal performances.  But if you relish nostalgia, like pop music, enjoy identifying markers from Shakespeare plays, and are into cheesy camp and chaos, this one’s for you.

The Bardy Bunch, written by Stephen Garvey, with music from the original TV series and produced by Guggenheim Entertainment, plays at 3 Below Theaters, 288 South 2^nd Street, San Jose, CA through April 26, 2026.