For its 2026 season, Spoleto Festival USA cracked its two operatic offerings differently than in seasons past. It was a tactic that clearly resonated with audiences: By opening weekend, there were only a few scattered seats remaining.
Each hovered around an hourlong running. Each promised an inventive twist on operatic works. And each mined the psyche of a lovelorn woman, whether as epic downfall or delicious sendup. Moreover, the festival curation of the two as complementary works posed questions, and asserted answers, on the ways in which opera can reach new audiences without compromising the work.
Operatic leap
First, we’ll take on the tragic.
Spoleto presents the U.S. premiere of an irresistible, crowd-pleasing production of Dido and Aeneas, with its original premiere presented by Opera Queensland and Australian circus company Circa in Brisbane, Australia, in 2024. English composer Henry Purcell’s Baroque opera in three acts tells the story of the ill-fated love of Dido, the Queen of Carthage, and the Trojan hero Aeneas.
It is the voice of Dido that carries the mournful tale, embodied exquisitely by mezzo-soprano Megan Moore, bearing the clarity of a queen, then mining the sorrow of a shattered woman. Decked out mainly in a neon orange bob and black sequins, part of the monochromatic costumes on a darkened set frequently bathed in glowing red light, a ticker of text scrolling at times. Moore also plays the role of the Sorceress, chucking the wig and summoning witches with imperious menace.
She finds a fitting counterpart in the warm strength of baritone Leroy Yoshuro Davis as Aeneas, a plausibly magnetic center of gravity on which Dido fixes her ardor. Also integral was the ever-excellent, crisp Spoleto Festival USA Orchestra, conducted by Patrick Duprey Quigley, and the sublime Spoleto Festival USA Choir, led by new chorus director Amanda Quist.
The production literally and prominently gets lift from Circa. With the opera’s direction and stage design by Circa artistic director Yaron Lifschitz, the work features 10 of its artists, continuously forming gorgeous tableaux of the human form, as if they were breathing Roman sculptures, while engaging in feats of aerial athleticism sure to make a Roman pause. The work’s visual splendour is primarily manmade: the constant reconfiguring of the human body.
As the opera begins with a new preamble, during which two Circa performers, a man and a woman, intertwine, alternately bearing the weight of one another. Later, women surf masterfully on men’s backs, then sets of two men toss a woman around like supplicant rag dolls. The stakes rise as the plot advances, by way of trapeze, poles, ropes, hammocks and death-defying challenges.
These often ingeniously integrate into the story. When the artists nimbly navigate a gauntlet of crossed lines, lit red, it reads like soldiers eluding perilous laser triggers. In the woods, they ascend two tree-like poles, as if on the lookout or perhaps as the limbs themselves.
On the docks, a rope becomes a ship’s mainsheet, from which swaggering sailors display their derring-do. On occasion, it could feel like a feat too far, detracting from the gravity that is the work’s core (Translate: Perhaps a little less acrobatic cowbell).
All in all, this Circa-centric work, elegantly choreographed to Purcell’s composition, expands the work by illuminating through mesmerizing physicality the weight of the human condition–how precariously we lean and fall, prop up and carry one another, twisting with life’s vicissitudes, perilously close to crashing down.
By its culmination, Moore asserted Dido’s plight in all its bereft vulnerability, her heart laid bare, the reigning Queen of Carthage reduced to an everywoman, undone.
Menotti in the house
Before you cry in your beer, consider The Old Maid and the Thief, written in 1939 for radio by festival founder Gian Carlo Menotti when he was in his twenties.
For the festival production directed by Daisy Evans, it was reconceived for the stage – and not just any stage. It was purpose-built for the Dock Street Theatre, incorporating its historic, brown-furniture-adjacent look and also placing upstage the Spoleto Festival Orchestra, conducted by Timothy Myers.
Sound, after all, is a character unto itself in the work, as evidenced by an onstage Foley sound booth capably operated by Amelia Hawke. While the set dressings are slim, they are phenomenally clever, with door knocks and thunder and birds and such originating from the booth, while actors become a part of the sounds and scenery, too.
The main event is the stellar cast: mezzo-soprano Katharine Goeldner as the titular “old maid,” aka Miss Todd; soprano Rachel Blaustein her equally man-hungry maid Laetitia; mezzo-soprano Chrystal E. Williams as the gossip Mrs. Pinkerton; and baritone Efrain Solis as Bob, whose identity shall neither be confirmed nor denied to sidestep a spoiler.
Oh, and let’s not forget the host: Patti O’Furniture, the heralded Charleston female impersonator whose presence sets a tone of delightfully insouciant “go figure” curing quite a figure in a smart 1930s suit, lending magnetic presence to the slap-happy, melodramatic swirl of mayhem, murder and moral degradation that is now in play at Miss Todd’s direly quiet abode.
In this production, these top-tier operatic artists are not training their expert voices on abject heartbreak, though their characters may want you to feel their pain. Instead, the performers are having one hell of a laugh, though never at the cost of their serious artistic chops. Sizable comedic talents each, they camp and trill and beam and scurry and mug, at one minute holding banisters to form a staircase and at another belting out world-class notes.
The premise is this: the love-starved Miss Todd and Laetitia have discovered a man at their house, and have as quickly conspired to keep him – and by any means necessary. With scant direction from said man, Bob, they begin raiding committee coffers and compromising Miss Todd’s previously sanctimonious m.o. with the hopes of keeping him around. When Mrs. Pinkerton alerts them to an escaped thief and murderer in the vicinity, it at once rattles their nerves and stirs their loins.
The production is a master class of “less is more.” Opera is a famously exorbitant undertaking and this one trades mainly in thrift and wit and skill to deliver ample spectacle, much at the hands of set and costume designer Walt Spangler, who can make merry chaos from a door frame or banister, and sound and Foley designer Max Poppenheim, who brings similarly inspired glee from the likes of crinkled paper for rain.
Those on the stage aren’t the only ones who have had a laugh. The young Menotti must have relished taking a therapeutic swipe at the high opera punch list, leaving all those lugubrious lovelorn heroines with a starchy, plotting Miss Todd.
And in this year’s festival, it serves as a pitch-perfect foil for Dido and Aeneas, demonstrating that on either side of the canon, invention is indeed the mother of necessity. Whether excavating the deep recesses of a woman’s longing through boundary-leaping collaborations, or sending it up in sparkling satire, it’s packing them and prompting raucous applause at Spoleto this year.
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