A dark, delicious take on Elizabeth Cree at Glimmerglass Festival

The Glimmerglass Festival recommitted to its mission of championing recent and contemporary operas by anchoring its season with a new production of Elizabeth Cree. Composed by Kevin Puts to a libretto by Mark Campbell, the work premiered during Opera Philadelphia’s inaugural Festival O17 in 2017 and has received a handful of regional stagings around the United States since then, though it has yet to be recorded. I saw the initial staging and found it ambitious but tonally unbalanced, leaning too heavily into the piece's darker storyline at the expense of its comic elements, which provide a necessary contrast and disarm the audience to the gruesome details that gradually emerge throughout. Alison Moritz’s fluid and visually appealing rendering for Glimmerglass corrects this unevenness, allowing the work to revel in its own ironic, messy duality. The end result is a penny dreadful that’s worth much more than a farthing.

Adapted from Peter Ackroyd’s novel Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, the opera follows the title character from a hardscrabble childhood to the heights of music hall stardom, which she cannily renounces in favor of an advantageous marriage. Although the former “Lambeth Marsh Lizzie” becomes easily accustomed to the trappings of affluent life, she soon finds herself standing trial for her husband’s murder – an accusation that leads her to the scaffold. (No spoilers: this is all revealed within the first five minutes.) Her descent runs parallel to a series of murders that rock London to its core, with the suggestion that her personal troubles and the societal ills bear some relation.

Lizzie fills the audience in on her own rise and fall, proving the quintessential unreliable narrator along the way. The one-act bursts at the seams with vivid characters, from Lizzie’s cohort in musical comedy to historical figures like Karl Marx and George Gissing. One could not accuse Puts and Campbell of being unambitious.

Moritz as a director understands that Lizzie views the world as her stage – those who orbit her are merely supporting characters. The handsome scenic design by Edward T Morris revolves around a raised platform that triples as vaudeville arena, Victorian hearth and witness stand, collapsing the various strands of the story into one unavoidable, intersecting sphere. Kate Ashton’s lighting shifts from garish gels for dainty music-hall numbers and moody chiaroscuro for Lizzie’s haunted, shadowy life offstage. The costumes by Amanda Seymour similarly communicate subtle differences in class and station. Through Emma Sucato’s choreography and Moritz’s smart use of the ensemble as supernumeraries, there is always a sense of constant surveillance, suggesting from the beginning that Lizzie’s devious plans to get ahead in life will eventually crash down.

Puts’ score sounds more distinctive and memorable in the pastiche numbers than elsewhere, but the overall effect makes clear his talent for sweeping melodies and, when called for, melodramatic excess. Conductor Kelly Kuo handled the fast-moving action well, crafting a sense of ever-mounting forward momentum. Among the orchestra, the woodwinds played with gleaming tone and precise intonation, and several extended passages for harp emerged with studded beauty. Pianist Christopher Devlin dispatched his instrument’s unusual prominence within the orchestration with great style, especially in sections where the scoring seemed to reflect the troubled waters of Lizzie’s soul.

Tara Erraught, this season’s artist-in-residence, brought a sly edge to the title role. From her first entrance to final bow, she presented a character who sought always to be in control of her circumstances, whatever the cost to herself or others. The score contains much florid passagework that Erraught delivered with practiced ease. Coloratura has always been a valuable tool in her arsenal, and effortless high notes suggested that recent ventures into the soprano repertoire are justified. Her core sound has grayed somewhat overall with that move, and she tended to lose her support prematurely in extended legato passages sung in the middle register. From a vocal standpoint, the role really calls for a singer with more oomph down below. Taken in total, though, she crafted a complete performance that riveted the viewer and made clear exactly who this woman was, for good and for evil.

John Chest brought a burnished baritone and dashing stage presence to John Cree, Lizzie’s doomed husband. Tenor Christian Mark Gibbs was impish as the vaudevillian Dan Leno in his performative guise and compassionate as an offstage figure. Elizabeth Sutphen sent high notes shooting toward the stratosphere as Aveline Mortimer, a stage songbird who moonlights as a lady of the night. Other roles in the troupe were taken primarily by members of the Glimmerglass Young Artists Program, with tenor Seiyoung Kim especially endearing as Little Victor Farrell. Carly Rae Carillo, a member of the Youth Ensemble, strikingly plays Young Lizzie as a silent witness to her adult self’s subsequent misdeeds.